1965: The Most Revolutionary Year in Music

by Andrew Grant Jackson

  Both English folkie Donovan and Glen Campbell, the session guitarist struggling to become a country-pop star in his own right, covered Buffy St. Marie’s “Universal Solider.” (On the flip side, Donovan covered Mick Softley’s “The War Drags On.”) Campbell seems to have been caught unaware by the antiwar slant of the lyrics, and by October he was telling journalists, “The people who are advocating burning draft cards should be hung. If you don’t have enough guts to fight for your country, you’re not a man.”10 He was perhaps stung by the Jan and Dean answer song, “The Universal Coward.”

  On the country front, neither Loretta Lynn’s “Dear Uncle Sam” or Willie Nelson’s “Jimmy’s Road” offered an opinion on the war itself. Rather, the songs focused on the death of a husband and a friend, respectively. However, Dave Dudley’s “What We’re Fighting For” and Johnnie Wright’s “Hello Vietnam” were the pro-war anthems to be expected from the country and western genre. The latter song said that we had to learn to put out fires before they got too big, alluding to how the Allies had avoided going to war with Hitler for years, allowing him the time to grab more countries, implying we couldn’t afford to do the same thing again with the Soviets and China. The writer of “Hello Vietnam,” Tom T. Hall, also wrote a female version called “Good-Bye to Viet Nam,” in which Kitty Hawkins sings how she just got news her man is coming back home to her.

  Staff sergeant Barry Sadler of the Green Berets was a combat medic in Vietnam wounded by the booby trap stake called the Punji stick.11 In the hospital, he wrote twelve verses of “The Ballad of the Green Berets.” The author of a book called The Green Berets, Robin Moore, helped Sadler edit the song down. It was recorded late in the year, for the military, and was so popular that it leaked out, and RCA decided to release it. It sold a million copies in two weeks and topped the charts on March 5, becoming the No. 1 single of 1966.

  A few weeks after “Eve of Destruction” itself leaked out, the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles detonated into flames. Though it’s impossible to say how many of its residents listened to the lyrics of a white folk-rock single, the song’s rage at the state of race relations grew even more disturbing when the rioters began torching white-owned stores. LA disc jockey Bob Eubanks asked, “How do you think the enemy will feel with a tune like that No. 1 in America?”12

  Sloan said that Dunhill Records received death threats. McGuire said, “‘Eve of Destruction’ was a scary song because it made it on its own; it had no ‘payola,’ no disc jockey manipulation. Phil [Sloan] told me later on that there was a letter that went out from The Gavin Report [the trade magazine for radio programmers] or something saying, ‘No matter what McGuire puts out next, don’t play it.’ … Because their feeling was that I was like a loose cannon in the record industry, and they wanted to get me back in line.”13

  It was a shame, because McGuire’s other Sloan-penned tracks are terrific. “What Exactly’s the Matter with Me” mines the same ennui that the Mike Nichols film The Graduate would two years later. McGuire bemoans the futility of going to college just to get a job to buy a TV, but admits he can’t march because he’s too insecure. “Child of Our Times” expresses his worry for children being born into the “Eve of Destruction.” Its B side, “Upon a Painted Ocean” is an invigorating mash-up of Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin’” and “When the Ship Comes In,” its title borrowed from eighteenth-century British poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.”

  In the wake of the success of “Eve of Destruction,” P. F. Sloan got to release his own solo singles. “Sins of a Family” was another of the songs he wrote that night while listening to Dylan. It was certainly the catchiest folk-rock ditty to beg compassion for the daughter of a schizo hooker. But Sloan’s pinnacle was “Halloween Mary,” which uses all Dylan’s tropes to sing the praises of a Sunset Strip scenester. (The title was itself probably inspired by a line in “She Belongs to Me.”)

  The Turtles made a passionate single out of Sloan’s “Let Me Be,” since, as lead singer Kaylan explained, it was “just the perfect level of rebellion … haircuts and nonconformity. That was as far as we were willing to go.”14 Sloan also wrote hits for Johnny Rivers, Herman’s Hermits, the Seekers, and the Grass Roots, but his career mysteriously faded after another year. Still, he could take solace in the fact that “Eve of Destruction” may have helped speed the passage of the Twenty-Sixth Amendment, which lowered the voting age from twenty-one to eighteen. Congressmen had attempted to lower the requirement during World War II, and President Eisenhower had backed a new constitutional amendment in 1953, but these efforts never passed. In 1969 the National Education Association began a new push with the help of the YMCA, the AFL-CIO, the NAACP, and U.S. congressmen, including Edward Kennedy. The Twenty-Sixth Amendment was ratified in 1971. Perhaps the fact that one of the biggest hits of the decade lamented being old enough to kill but not to vote was a crucial bit of agitprop that helped the campaign finally to succeed.

  * * *

  In May the Byrds had opened for the Rolling Stones for a week in cities up and down the state of California. In July, the Byrds took Vito Paulekas’s freaky dance troupe with them in a sixty-passenger bus on their first tour outside the Golden State, to Colorado, South Dakota, Minnesota, Illinois, Iowa, Florida, Ohio, Missouri, and Kentucky. One of the dancers, Lizzie Donahue, recalled, “They thought we were from outer space. In Paris, Illinois, they actually threw us off the dance floor.”

  “We had to stick together because we were about the only thing that looked like us around the country,” Michael Clarke said. “[In the South] they wouldn’t serve us in restaurants. ‘Hey, did your barber die?’ ‘Are you a boy or a girl?’”15

  The Byrds’ roadie was a friend of David Crosby’s named Bryan MacLean, who lived above Paulekas’s studio and looked like a cross between Michael Clarke and Chris Hillman. He’d grown up in Beverly Hills, among show business families. (He was friends with Dean Martin’s son Dino and was Liza Minnelli’s boyfriend when the two were little.) As a teen, he took up folk guitar, then was hit by the Beatles. “I walked out of A Hard Day’s Night … different. I was never the same. I just immediately identified with that. I let my hair grow out and got kicked out of school, just immediately. That settled the whether-I-should-finish-high-school question right there.”16 He dated singer-songwriter Jackie DeShannon, whom the Byrds covered on their first album.

  One night MacLean was hanging out at Ben Frank’s (the diner on the Strip that the young hipsters went to when the clubs closed) when he got an offer from one of the most unusual musicians on the scene. Arthur Lee was a black singer in the R&B band LAGs (for “LA Group”) with childhood buddy and lead guitarist Johnny Echols. For a long time they’d been looking for an angle to help them break out; Lee had even written his own surf songs.

  Lee knew the Paulekas dancers would come see his band if MacLean were in it. So he invited MacLean to join, and the group became the Grass Roots—until they heard that songwriter P. F. Sloan (“Eve of Destruction”) had created his own band with the same name. So they changed their name to Love, and quickly developed a following as the most iconoclastic folk-rock/proto-punk band in Hollywood (or anywhere), led by a black guy imitating a white guy (Mick Jagger) who imitated black guys. (They weren’t the only interracial band in the middle of the decade, however. Rising Sons, with Taj Mahal and Ry Cooder; Booker T. and the M.G.s; the United Kingdom’s Equals, with Eddy Grant; and the Mynah Byrds, with Rick James and Neil Young, could also claim that distinction.)

  When the Byrds went on tour in July, Love took over their slot at Ciro’s, alternating with Rising Sons and the Leaves. Soon they would be playing the Whisky a Go Go when it wasn’t functioning as a disco. According to rock journalist Nik Cohn, “Discos were an early sixties development, an improvement on big, impersonal concert halls. The idea was that you had an intimate nightclub atmosphere and played mostly records, with only occasional live acts. First and last, discotheque records had to be danc
ing records.”17

  Discotheques originated in Paris. The first Whisky a Go Go opened there in 1947—go-go means “galore” in French—and then one followed in Chicago, in 1958. The Sunset Strip branch opened six years later. In July 1965 the club hired go-go dancers to dance in cages hanging from the ceiling. It was a concept borrowed from the TV music show Hullabaloo. Love would immortalize the Whisky in their song “Between Clark and Hillsdale (Maybe People Would Be the Times),” the title a reference to the club’s street intersection.

  Also in July, a new law allowed minors to dance in public eating places unaccompanied by parents, and the Strip was soon bursting with clubs and coffeehouses that catered to the baby boomers coming of age, such as Pandora’s Box (where Brian Wilson had met his wife, Marilyn), Gazzarri’s, the Sea Witch, the Fifth Estate, and the Trip.18 Weekend traffic ground to a halt as kids cruised the streets and swarmed the sidewalks. Producers for a new TV pilot called The Monkees ran ads in September’s Variety and the Hollywood Reporter reading, “Madness!! Auditions. Folk & Roll Musicians-Singers for acting roles in new TV series. Running Parts for 4 insane boys, age 17–21. Want spirited Ben Frank’s-types. Have courage to work. Must come down for interview.” Musician Stephen Stills arrived in town from New York and tried out. He was rejected because of his teeth and suggested the producers check out his friend Peter Tork. Meanwhile, one of Arthur Lee’s biggest fans, Jim Morrison, prowled the Strip after Love’s gigs. By the beginning of next year his band, the Doors, would start performing at the London Fog, a few buildings down from the Whisky. As the Byrds came chiming over the airwaves, the West Coast nights shimmered with limitless possibility.

  * * *

  John Sebastian was the son of a classical harmonica player. He’d grown up in Greenwich Village around Woody Guthrie and Burl Ives and was the godson of Vivian Vance (Ethel on I Love Lucy). He played on numerous folk sessions, logged in and out of bands. With Zal Yanovsky, the son of a Toronto political cartoonist, he formed the Mugwumps with future Mamas and Papas members Denny Doherty and Cass Elliott in 1964. (Mugwump was originally the name given to a group of Republicans who switched allegiance to the Democrats in the 1800s. In his 1959 book Naked Lunch, William Burroughs appropriates the label for the sexually ambivalent creatures who eat candy with razor-sharp beaks and drip with addictive fluid.)

  The Mugwumps recorded a few singles but broke up after eight months. Sebastian and Yanovsky kept playing their unique blend of jug band music, folk, country, blues, R&B, and honky-tonk, calling it simply “good-time music.” In January they decided to go electric with a rhythm section, adding Joe Butler on drums and Steve Boone on bass. (Sebastian and Boone had played briefly on an unreleased Bringing It All Back Home session that month.19) Sebastian asked a friend what he should name his new band, describing the sound as “Mississippi John Hurt meets Chuck Berry.” The friend suggested “The Lovin’ Spoonful,” a phrase from Hurt’s song “Coffee Blues.”

  Yanovsky and Butler had an eight-by-ten room in the grubby Albert Hotel, and the assistant manager agreed to let them rehearse in the basement, where the ceiling was caving in. Butler said, “It inspired us, because it made us frightened of poverty.”20

  They gigged at the Night Owl Café, which was so small the drums didn’t fit onstage and had to be on the floor in front of the rest of the band. Sebastian recalled,

  We were playing pretty steadily for the local people from Greenwich Village who were part of the jazz scene or part of the kind of downtown “in crowd.” They were “finger poppers,” guys who played chess, “beatniks.” But there was this one particular night as we were playing, I looked out in the audience and saw this beautiful 16-year-old girl just dancing the night away. And I remember Zal and I just elbowed each other the entire night, because to us, that young girl symbolized the fact that our audience was changing, that maybe they had finally found us. I wrote “Do You Believe in Magic” the next day.21

  Spector was interested, but the band didn’t want to be dominated by Spector. Instead, they signed with the Kama Sutra record label and released “Magic” on July 20. (It was a good week for music: “Like a Rolling Stone,” “Help!,” and “Eve of Destruction” all came out within the same day or two.) Featuring Sebastian playing his signature autoharp, “Do You Believe in Magic,” a celebration of young girls’ souls and rock and roll setting you free, made it to No. 9, its euphoria serving as an innocent bookend to “Satisfaction.” Now that the Beatles had moved on to melancholy singles, it was the Spoonful who bottled the exhilaration of going into the city to find girls to dance with all night. Two weeks before Dylan’s metaphoric stoning at the Newport Folk Festival, the Spoonful exhorted the listener not to waste time choosing between jug band music or rhythm and blues: just get happy and blow your mind. “Magic” also used the word groovy, which had been around since the 1920s but was now beginning to gain critical mass with songs such as the Mindbenders’ “A Groovy Kind of Love” and Simon and Garfunkel’s alternatively spelled “We’ve Got a Groovey Thing Goin’.”

  On the Lovin’ Spoonful’s first album, Do You Believe in Magic, Sebastian continued to be haunted by the (not legal) girl who had inspired him with her dancing. Perhaps he was warning himself of the consequences of statutory rape when he refitted the guitar of “Prison Wall Blues,” by Gus Cannon’s Jug Stompers, for the gentle “Younger Girl,” in which he moans that it is killing him to have to wait a few more years. Still, he was quickly distracted in their next single, “Did You Ever Have to Make Up Your Mind.” Yanovsky’s guitar wryly commiserates as a father of two girls tells Sebastian he has to go home and pick which daughter he wants. The song went to No. 2. The wailing “Night Owl Blues” let Sebastian show his chops as the son of a harp blower.

  With “Daydream,” Sebastian tried to rewrite the Supremes’ “Baby Love” as a jug band song and wound up with another No. 2 hit on both sides of the Atlantic. The song inspired the Beatles and the Kinks to begin following their own music hall leanings with “Good Day Sunshine” and “Sunny Afternoon,” respectively.

  The band recorded the Daydream album from August to December. Boone cowrote (with Sebastian) two of the album’s greatest tracks, “You Didn’t Have to Be So Nice” and “Butchie’s Tune.” The disconsolate country guitar of “Butchie’s Tune” sets the mood as the singer slips out on his woman for good, in the early dawn, before she wakes up. “Didn’t Want to Have to Do It” is another sad ballad about breaking someone’s heart. “It’s Not Time” marries Bakersfield twang with wise lyrics about trying to be mature enough not to argue.

  Brian Wilson later said that it was the Spoonful’s “You Didn’t Have to Be So Nice” that inspired him to write “God Only Knows,” the centerpiece of Pet Sounds.22 With its chiming guitar and warm humming vocals, “You Didn’t Have to Be So Nice” made the Top 10 like all the Lovin’ Spoonful’s first seven singles. Woody Allen enlisted them for the soundtrack to What’s Up Tiger Lily?, and Francis Ford Coppola grabbed them for You’re a Big Boy Now. And soon John Lennon would even adopt Sebastian’s circular wire-frame glasses, as distinctive as McGuinn’s rectangular shades, for his own look.

  The producers who created The Monkees TV show first considered hiring the Spoonful because they were playful clowns like the Beatles used to be, singing about old-time movies with their arms around one another, unconcerned with posing arrogantly aloof like the Stones or the Byrds. But the Spoonful didn’t need a TV show; almost overnight they had catapulted into the big leagues, respected as formidable writers and performers.

  Two members of their old band the Mugwumps, Mama Cass and Denny Doherty, were about to join them there.

  14

  Soulsville and the Godfather Challenge Hitsville to Get Raw

  The Four Tops’ “I Can’t Help Myself” makes it to No. 1 twice, in June and July, and the Supremes debut at the Copacabana on July 29. At Stax Records, Wilson Pickett tops the R&B charts with the new beat of “In the Midnight Hour” on August 7, and Otis Redding releases
“Respect” on August 15. That same week, James Brown tops the R&B charts with “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag,” inventing funk.

  Aside from their work with the Supremes, the writer-producer team of Holland-Dozier-Holland also transformed the Four Tops into a band that rivaled the Temptations for the position of Motown’s most successful male group. The Tops started on Chess Records in 1956 and later moved to Columbia, but it wasn’t until they joined Motown and HDH gave them “Baby I Need Your Loving,” in 1964, that they made the Top 20. Then HDH retooled the Supremes’ “Where Did Our Love Go” into “I Can’t Help Myself (Sugar Pie Honey Bunch)” for the Tops, and the song went to No. 1 on June 19. After being interrupted for a week by “Mr. Tambourine Man,” it returned to the top spot on July 3.

  For the sequel, Dozier reversed the chords, and within twenty-four hours the team recorded, pressed, and distributed “It’s the Same Old Song.” It made No. 5 on the pop charts. The exercise epitomized their determination to suck every last drop of juice from a hit. But at the same time, the new lyrics were substantial: about how songs heard when we’re in love return to haunt us after a breakup. “This Old Heart of Mine” recycles the melody again and mixes it with the bridge of the Supremes’ “Back in My Arms Again.” Realizing they would be pushing it to give it to the Tops, HDH gave the track to the Isley Brothers, and somehow “Heart” turned out the best of all (though it may just seem that way because it hasn’t been as overplayed).

  Frantically cranking out hits for the Tops, the Supremes, and Martha and the Vandellas, HDH didn’t even cut demos. Dozier said, “I’d come up with an idea, Brian and I would finish it off and then run downstairs and cut the track with the band. A lot of times we didn’t even have a title. Then we’d bring it back up and Eddie and I would sit there and bounce things around and (ask) what is this track saying?”1