Now that Mutt Cohen had opened the floodgates, requests were coming in for the Turtles’ recordings from all over the world. We were getting TV offers. And we were singing in the studio with the Knack at night. On the first of November, with volume four of the Rhythm Butchers in release and exhausted from our Halloween concert at the Greek Theater, Maggie called from Las Vegas, where she had just gotten married. Congratulations to the groom, baby.
I was back at the Gramercy Park on December 20 as we started to map out the TV pilot for George Honchar, our mentor and producer at Imero Fiorentino Associates. It was just another offer and just another meeting, but this one actually worked out. Our discussions led to three Flo and Eddie television specials (later edited down to two), which were syndicated by Metromedia and ran in New York City on CBS late Friday and Saturday night. We filmed street bits with the Guardian Angels and at the Fulton Fish Market at dawn. We interviewed Kiss and Mackenzie Phillips and introduced America to Twisted Sister and the Catholic Girls. We sat behind a desk. Our announcer was named Vince Manze: He went on to run the NBC Agency.
♦ ♦ ♦
As the year ended, we were onstage for the first of many years of sold-out holiday shows at the Bottom Line and I felt more New York than L.A. I was talking to Susan on the phone daily and waiting. Maggie would call in the middle of the night and I either indulged her briefly or ignored the incessant ringing. One night, someone shot the windshield out of my little car. You just gotta move on.
Sue came to live with me and my little cat, Ozzie, in the little Landale house in February 1982. Maggie kept calling and ruining the mood. Susan and I found solace, as a couple, with our NYC friends Steve Duboff (he of Soupy Sales fame) and his wife, Maureen. They had an amazing house on the beach at Malibu and enjoyed the same things that we did, which in 1982 meant cheesy horror movies and inhaling substances. After a few more movie nights, the Duboffs would volunteer their home for our upcoming nuptials.
In the real world, our third Strawberry Shortcake TV special was written and recorded, our fifth Rhythm Butchers EP was coming out, and Rhino had agreed to release a high-concept record that we hadn’t even recorded yet. On February 24, the two of us and Andy went into Sun Swept Studio in Studio City, armed with only our toy Casio keyboards, to record our album Checkpoint Charlie, an unabashed Kraftwerk spoof. Songs included “Show Me the Way to Go Ohm” and “Charlie Does Surf.” It took us six hours. Harold was so excited, he released the record on vinyl in a limited edition that only played from the inside out. That’s right. You put the needle down next to the label and the disc played out toward the record’s edge. It was hilarious. So were the graphics. Too bad the record wasn’t better. Still, since we had our greatest hits out on Sire, Harold was the only guy who wanted to release all of the individual albums on their own. And with advice from Mutt and Herb, we entered into our first real deal with Rhino Records.
Another Easter, another telethon. We wore bunny suits and got to guest host a segment. And from Team Strawberry, a great new animated project, Peter and the Magic Egg. Basically, the purpose of this one was to hawk Easter egg dye from the Paas Company. And their lead character was a rabbit named Peter Paas. I’m not proud of it, but the coolest part of this one was working and writing for the cartoon’s narrator, Ray Bolger, the scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz. The script was stupid, but we wrote a great song for Mr. Bolger, which he hated. Not bouncy enough. Give me a C—a bouncy C—for real. And he helped us rewrite the tune to fit his vaudevillian mentality. The script was still weak, but I got to sit on a piano bench next to the Scarecrow and teach him my little song, which he recorded. Nice.
Our TV shows aired in New York on April 9 and 10. We did great on Friday and of course got creamed by SNL the next night. Duh! I would never have predicted any other outcome. But it was going to be okay. Mutt and Herb were meeting with Harold about assigning the entire Turtles catalog to Rhino. We had a dozen offers. Big stuff. But Harold was hungry. Rhino had no real acts. We would become the first major act on the label and the first catalog act that would launch that label into the stratosphere as the premier classic rock label in the world.
♦ ♦ ♦
On April 18, Sue and I got married at Steve Duboff’s house on Pacific Coast Highway. My parents were there. Her mom was on the phone. I got rip-roaring drunk and began serenading the cars on the busy coastal thoroughfare till the CHiPS made me stop.
Back to Manhattan, and up to Todd Rundgren’s house to listen to his new project, the Psychedelic Furs from England. The infamous Butler brothers, Richard and Tim. We showed up at Todd’s home studio the next day. Who the hell are these fat guys and why are they here? We don’t want no poncey fairy voices! Even I could see their point. But they were wrong and Rundgren knew it. We sang on about half of Forever Now, even stayed a couple of nights in the guesthouse. We shook hands at the end and were about to fly home when Todd asked if we wanted to hear the Furs’ single. Then he played “Love My Way” and Mark and I knew that we had to be a part of that record. What we added made it even more mysterious and weird than it was without us, and I’d like to think it was one reason for the song’s international success. I’d like to think!
Things were popping now. Rhino released a turtle-shaped disc, we got copies of and a check from Strawberry, and we had taken a meeting with Westchester guy and fledgling director Allan Arkush, about his musical comedy spoof Get Crazy. Volman didn’t like his role—he was to play a drummer in the Stones-ish band fronted by Malcolm McDowell—while I read for the part of Captain Cloud, the bearded hippie leader of a pack of bus-riding flower people. Typecasting. The day before the movie began principal photography, Mark walked and was replaced by John Densmore of the Doors.
It was, actually, a wonderful experience. And it earned me my SAG card, a commodity not easy to come by as a novice actor. My trailer(!) was next to Malcolm’s. Daniel Stern was the romantic lead. Lou Reed was amazing. Ed Begley Jr. and Fabian and Bobby Rydell. Veteran Allen Goorwitz actually gave me notes. When I wasn’t just hanging out backstage holding court, I was watching Allen do the setups and make movie magic. My scenes were few and far between, but Allen was a huge fan and wanted me to experience the world of cinema firsthand. I loved it.
I leased a spiffy new car. Mistake. When the picture wrapped and the money ran out, the spiffy new car went back to the dealership and I swallowed my pride and my payments. The movie never really had a major release either, but if you’ve never seen it, I highly recommend it. It really is a hilarious and smart rock movie.
In 1983, we were back at Elektra Studios with Roy Thomas Baker and a British band called Espionage. These were just kids who had made a demo for Roy that he really liked. He recorded their tracks for them with his amazing, portable 64-track, the machine responsible for the multiple tracks on Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody”; took the band into the studio to do vocals; and then realized that they had recorded the entire project in a key far too high for the singer. In the olden times, before Pro Tools, when everything was recorded on wide strips of magnetic tape, there was no way to correct this error except to record all the tracks again. But the band was in England and Roy had no plans to return there in his foreseeable future. So Mark and I got to be Espionage and we sang the entire project. Gunslingers for hire.
And now we were making records for the Care Bears too, twelve fuzzy little fellas who lived in the clouds. They were all pastel colors and each wore their special emotions as symbols on their adorable tummies. American Greetings, the folks who gave us Strawberry Shortcake, were responsible for these guys too. There were no villains. There were no stories, just uplifting life lessons.
Wouldn’t you turn to me for uplifting life lessons? No?
♦ ♦ ♦
The little Landale house was just too small, and with the eventual winning of the White Whale lawsuit, all of their remaining unspent assets, of which there were precious few, reverted to me and Mark. But we also won the rights to the Turtles’ name and, perhaps mo
st important, the two of us were awarded all of the band’s master recordings and the rights to use our own names again. Check it out—you can count on one hand the number of bands from the ’60s, ’70s, or even now, who own their records. When you hear “Happy Together” used on The Simpsons, or in Shrek or Adaptation or the countless television commercials that have, thankfully, licensed our little master, remember that all of that booty is split between me and Mark.
Susan and I bought a house at the corner of Vantage and Hillslope in the Laurel Canyon foothills, with an Olympic pool and a badminton court. I was across the street from my Cheers friend, George Wendt, Ed Begley was three houses away, and Ed Asner often had to park in front of my place when his kids came to visit.
On Tuesday nights, at exactly midnight, George would sneak his old Beemer out of the garage, roll up to my house with his headlights off, and the two of us would get blotto on our way to this crowded little alt-rock club far to the east on Hollywood Boulevard. We’d stay until closing, around 3:30 or 4, and sneak back home with our wives never the wiser. I loved L.A. then. I was never going to leave.
THIRTY-THREE
Turtles Once Again
The drive from my Studio City home, over the Canyon, to our new office at Imero Fiorentino’s new L.A. headquarters, took about fifteen minutes; the return, during rush hour, was twice as long. Our New York producer, George Honchar, was in charge of the West Coast operation. He knew that we needed an office, took pity on us, and gave us a space there for “development.” The only caveat was that we were also to chaperone the young candidates for Miss USA, Miss Universe, and the Miss Teen pageants. Nice work if you can get it. We earned our keep. We were good boys too. We got very good at organizing large groups of young women. When we weren’t writing stuff or accompanying the ladies to Las Vegas, we would still do shows as Flo and Eddie with the band from New York. The rest of our time was spent trying to be creative. We nicknamed our little operation Alternative Vocations and did pretty much anything for a buck while listening to German techno and our beloved reggae.
Melita decided that Los Angeles wasn’t where she wanted to be, and with very little notice, she and Emily packed up and moved to Bellevue, Washington, a then-sleepy bedroom community less than ten miles from downtown Seattle. I wouldn’t be seeing them any time soon. Emily Not-a-Kaylan didn’t live here anymore.
The Turtles’ catalog was doing a lot of our work for us. Mutt was licensing our hits all over the world and was leasing the use of our master recordings for soft drinks and automobiles. Then, one little phone call and everything changed yet again. It was from the offices of a Manhattan-based lawyer and promoter named David Fishof. He had an idea. He wanted to package a good old-fashioned rock ’n’ roll tour, à la Dick Clark’s original Caravan of Stars, and our name came up. Would we be interested? Because if we were, he intended to call the show the Happy Together tour. Well, this sounded pretty good to us. If the tour worked, we might be able to tour with this name forever—Turtles once again. The powers that be certainly couldn’t do a tour called Happy Together without the Turtles.
It was a lucky day for all involved. We had tour buses and equipment trucks. There were light guys and sound guys and local radio tie-ins. As a band, we had decided that riding in the corporate tour bus was not for us, so we elected to get our own vehicle and follow behind.
The lineup was our old friends Spanky and Our Gang, who opened the concert, followed by Gary Puckett, who performed the entire tour in a red leather jumpsuit that he would air out on a hanger in the tour bus all night; then the Association, Laurel Canyon buddies; and we closed the show, followed by an all-hands-on-deck encore. It was great, and it worked. The following summer we did it all again with a slightly different lineup and this time, we were really organized and actually had a sponsor, Members Only. We all had matching black tour jackets with our names embroidered on the front.
Everyone was riding on the tour buses, but not us. We valued our privacy far too much. We found a big old RV that we could call our own. Stefko and I commandeered the back room, which sat directly over the rear tires, and turned it into Mary-Land with cutout photos of Mary Tyler Moore all over the walls and cabinets. We played obnoxiously loud classic oldies and bounced around so badly that my back still gives me grief. No one went back there but the two of us. And we worshipped Mary to an insane degree. It was mostly to keep our minds from the dreariness of travel, but we had a great time with our obsession.
♦ ♦ ♦
One night in Minneapolis, the two of us stole the motor home, grabbed a bunch of weed, and parked in front of the house that was used for the exteriors on the original Mary Tyler Moore Show. It took us hours to find it—the first time. We unfolded the tiny dining table and delicately separated the red and purple threads of the marijuana from the green ones. Then we would roll a joint of just the red ones. Then, just the green ones. It was stupid and it really didn’t work. But it was a ritual and we needed religion. Afterward, we silently stole rocks and pebbles from the garden and drove back to our hotel like the thieves that we were. I still have my “Mary rocks.” Years later, when we told this story to Mary, she looked rather disturbed but chalked it up to our being musicians. I think her response was, “Yeah, right.”
These tours were long and grueling affairs. In 1985, we started off rehearsing at the Abbey in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, on April 10 and stayed out on the road until the season ended in September. It was hard work: I figure that, when all is said and done, I get paid for all of the stupid travel associated with the road. That’s what kills ya. I swear, after all of the pent-up angst following an all-night drive, I’d do the damned shows for nothing. But man, you had better be prepared to pay me for my travel time. And with every season spent on tour, my mind and body crave their own bed and that warm body to curl up next to, more than they ever did as a kid. I’m not one of those guys who intends to give up the ghost in some cheesy motel room a million miles from home. But you, dear reader, will know if I ever made it. It’ll be too late for yours truly by then.
It was astounding to see the enormous and appreciative audiences that attended the first year of shows. There were the screaming girls again. Or their daughters. Or their granddaughters. We didn’t care. What mattered was that here, in these huge arenas and at state fairs, three generations of fans were all singing “Happy Together” as if one. It was an eye-opening and rewarding stage experience that continues to this day.
In ’86, Fishof brought us out again with another lineup of classic artists. This year, VH1 sponsored the tour, so the network covered the event daily in its news. A big-time Hollywood movie called Making Mr. Right used “Happy Together” as its theme, so the two of us did a new video for the film. VH1 put the video into rotation and Mark and I wound up hosting their Top Ten countdown for the week. TV again. We were almost relevant.
It was another high-paying, hardworking summer, and we all thought that these seasonal tours would last forever. But we were wrong. The following year, Fishof picked up the Monkees for management as well as Ringo Starr. Now he had bigger fish to fry than our little tour, so we were left on the sidelines, so to speak. Mark and I took a meeting with David to pitch our idea for a rock ’n’ roll fantasy camp. He was fascinated by the concept, which had never crossed his mind and would take a certain amount of cash to launch. He still runs the Rock ’n’ Roll Fantasy Camp. It’s made him many millions of dollars and is franchised all over the world, but we never got a dime or any credit. He remains high on my list of show-business bastards.
With the Monkees tour out during the summer of 1987, we were flung back into the world of one-nighters. Fishof’s partner in the tour operation, Howard Silverman, decided to leave his sleazy New York partner, moved west to Ojai, California, and started his own agency, Paradise Artists, with whom we still work today. In a world of dishonest creeps, we finally found a good guy. Based on the success of the Happy Together tours, it was decided that we would try to raise our concert price to
be competitive in the very crowded music marketplace. Which we did, by about 250 percent. Supply and demand. It worked. We would never be the Beach Boys, but we could certainly, and finally, command a pretty decent dollar when it came to concert appearances.
♦ ♦ ♦
And we worked a lot. No tour buses or RVs for us now. John Hoier, our L.A. engineer, found an old Bluebird school bus that we painted white and nicknamed the Gullfire. It was old and had no shock absorbers to speak of. It broke down constantly and we finally gave up on it when we had to push it into the hotel parking lot in Minneapolis.
We were back to station wagons and a roadie or two in a Hertz truck. There were many lonely hours out there, and Joe and I decided to fill them by collecting fine, first-edition books. Most of these were by popular contemporary horror and fantasy authors such as Stephen King and Harlan Ellison. We spent thousands on books in an era when our peers were collecting drugs. We started attending conventions where these extraordinary people gathered. We attended the World Fantasy Convention in Providence, Rhode Island, and we were hooked. I began to explore the idea of writing fiction, and when the brilliant author Tim Powers attended one of our California shows, Joe asked him if he would be interested in releasing a limited edition of his latest volume called The Stress of Her Regard. It was an amazingly beautiful handmade volume that sold for hundreds of dollars and launched Joe’s career as a publisher of fine and rare books. Powers would soon write On Stranger Tides, which was made into a Disney pirate movie twenty years later. And Joe continues his other job as the owner of the Charnel House publishing company.
As a band, we were doing so much flying from coast to coast it was getting cost-prohibitive to do shows in the West. That is, until we stumbled on the ultimate solution: We got Andy Cahan, our L.A. keyboard player, to assemble a band of superior musicians in Southern California. They would be our West Coast band. The division of work was simple. If the shows were east of the Rockies or the mighty Mississippi, depending on the costs involved, the New York band did the concerts. In the West, it was Andy’s group. We saved thousands on each and every show. We still tour this way. I don’t know why every band doesn’t do the same thing.
Shell Shocked: My Life with the Turtles, Flo and Eddie, and Frank Zappa, etc. Page 26