1965: The Most Revolutionary Year in Music

by Andrew Grant Jackson

  “All I’d ever done was sing songs that were dead straight and expressed powerful new realities,” he writes in his memoir. “I was more a cowpuncher than a Pied Piper.”34

  Johnny Cash recorded “The One on the Right Is on the Left” in November as a spoof of the folk craze that had engulfed the pop charts thanks to his buddy Dylan. (After a correspondence, the two met when they both performed at the Newport Festival the year before Dylan went electric.) In the song, a folk group implodes due to differing political convictions. On stage, the one on the right, the one on the left, and the one in the middle descend into a violent fistfight, while the one in the rear incompetently burns his driver’s license before getting drafted. The song predicted the chaotic divisions that would erupt across the country for the rest of the decade. Cash advises artists to keep their opinions to themselves and work on performing songs well. About the only person who would heed his advice, ironically, would be Dylan, whose lyrics grew ever more inscrutable. He wasn’t going to lead a revolution. But he did lead a lot of people to think for themselves.

  19

  It Came from the Garage

  The McCoys hit No. 1 with “Hang on Sloopy,” on October 2; the forefathers of punk grapple with the British Invasion; and the original garage rockers, the Beach Boys, miss with an experimental single but hit with “Barbara Ann.”

  Throughout September and October, the songs that held the American top spot were heavy: “Help!”, “Eve of Destruction,” and “Yesterday.” But there was a brief respite for one week only when, on October 2, “Hang on Sloopy” went to No. 1.

  The song was by the Brill Building’s Bert Berns and Wes Farrell, a rewrite of Berns’s own “Twist and Shout.” However, while the writers were seasoned pros, the band that recorded the song, the McCoys, were teenagers from Union City, Indiana. They had been discovered by the Strangeloves, which was the name the songwriting team Feldman-Goldstein-Gottehrer came up with for themselves after writing “I Want Candy” with Berns. They sang the song backed by session musicians, and when the single made it to No. 11 in August, the songwriters (sans Berns) put on wigs and told the press they were Australian sheep farmers. They got an actor to help them with their fake accents, said they used the Masai drums of the Aborigines (really a tympani), and opened for the Beach Boys. While they toured the Midwest, they discovered Rick and the Raiders, led by eighteen-year-old guitarist Rick Derringer, and told Berns about them. Berns renamed the Raiders the McCoys, they quickly cranked out “Sloopy,” and it became one of the most enduring rock hits of the era.

  Elsewhere in American pop/rock, the Four Seasons and the Vogues (“Five o’Clock World”) were still hanging on to their cleanly parted hair, turtlenecks, and sweaters. But in the wake of the British Invasion, many American bands had adopted English-sounding names and costumes. The Beau Brummels took their name from the ultimate British dandy. Paul Revere and the Raiders took the opposite tack, claiming the name of the man who warned the American colonists of the approaching Redcoats, with band members dressing in Revolutionary War–style uniforms. Underneath the goofy garb, they were hardcore Seattle rockers who scored with their November release “Just Like Me.” With “Lies,” the Knickerbockers did the most precise Beatles imitation, as the band had both Lennon and McCartney sound-alikes. Almost as bad as the Byrds’ original name, the Beefeaters, was the Little Lord Fauntleroy outfit the Young Rascals wore: rounded collars, skinny ties, knickers, and knee socks. But their first single, November’s “I Ain’t Gonna Eat Out My Heart Anymore,” is bluesier than their image would have led one to expect.

  The blue-eyed soul dance master of the year was Mitch Ryder, backed by the Detroit Wheels. Their live shows in Michigan were so explosive that black Motown acts opened for them. Ryder figured “Jenny Take a Ride” (a medley of Chuck Willis’s “C.C. Rider” and Little Richard’s “Jenny Jenny”) was just a B side, but Keith Richards and Brian Jones visited the studio and predicted it would be a hit. Indeed, it made it to No. 10.

  The Sir Douglas Quintet were another group trying to fool people they were British, even though they were from San Antonio, Texas, and had two Hispanic members, which was why their first album cover just showed the group in shadow. The album was also named The Best of the Sir Douglas Quintet, even though it was their first. But the group would endure for nine years and become one of Dylan’s favorites. Their first hit, “She’s about a Mover,” mixed front man Douglas Sahm’s Ray Charles–like vocals with Augie Meyers’ Farfisa organ in the Tex-Mex style, rock with a Latin influence from south of the border.

  Another Tex-Mex band was Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs. Instead of British costumes, Domingo “Sam” Zamudio wore an Arabic turban and tunic and drove a hearse with velvet curtains. In June, he released his three-chord ode to his cat, “Wooly Bully.” Even though it stalled at No. 2, Billboard declared it the best-selling song of the year.

  Perhaps the most exhilarating Texas band was the Bobby Fuller Four, whose rolling electric guitar and crashing drums sounded like an updated Buddy Holly. (Richie Valens’s producer, Bobby Keane, produced the band, and the Crickets’ lead guitarist, Sonny Curtis, wrote its hit “I Fought the Law.”) “Another Sad and Lonely Night” and “Love’s Made a Fool of You” are rousing tracks, and December’s “I Fought the Law” would go on to be the theme song for many counterculture heroes. (Fourteen members of Ken Kesey’s entourage, the Merry Pranksters, were arrested for pot in April, and Timothy Leary was given thirty years for trying to drive into Mexico with marijuana in the car on December 23. Others who wound up with jail sentences before the decade was over included Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman, Tom Hayden, the Black Panthers, and Jim Morrison—not that they all served.)

  As with Holly, Fuller’s potential was snuffed out far too soon. He died at age twenty-three the next July, in circumstances still shrouded in mystery. The Los Angeles County Coroner’s Office’s autopsy stated that he was found facedown in the front seat of his car next to a partially filled gas can. The cause of death is listed as “inhalation of gasoline.” His demise was originally declared a suicide, but rumors that he was drenched in gasoline and that his finger was broken led to speculation that he was murdered, perhaps by the Mob.

  The groups most beloved by contemporary hipsters were the most unpolished of the lot, the proto-punk garage rockers. The genre was so named because the borderline-competent bands often practiced in their parents’ garages, sometimes barely making it much farther into the outside world.

  Most of the garage bands did not even become one-hit wonders, but they were immortalized in the influential 1972 collection Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era, compiled by Lenny Kaye, the future guitarist of the Patti Smith Group, and Elektra Records’ Jac Holzman. The liner notes refer to the music as “punk,” apparently unaware that since the nineteenth century, the term referred to a man who is raped in prison. Kaye may have been inspired by influential rock critic Dave Marsh, who in Creem magazine in 1971 referred to a Hispanic American band from Michigan called? and the Mysterians as “punk rock.”1 In 1965 they recorded “96 Tears,” with its distinctive continental Vox organ sound, for a local label; when the national Cameo-Parkway label rereleased it the following February, it made it all the way to No. 1 on the Billboard pop chart.

  The Nuggets bands, the Velvet Underground, the Motor City 5, and the Stooges (with Iggy Pop)—these were not big sellers in the 1960s, but they inspired punk bands of the 1970s such as the Ramones. As Iggy Pop said of the Velvet Underground’s self-titled first album, “That record became very key for me, not just for what it said and how great it was, but also because I heard other people who could make good music without being any good at music. It gave me hope. It was the same thing the first time I heard Mick Jagger sing. He can only sing one note, there’s no tone, and he just goes, ‘Hey, well baby, baby, I can be oeweoww…’ Every song is the same monotone, and it’s just this kid rapping. It was the same with the Velvets. The s
ound was so cheap and yet so good.”2 It was more empowering hearing a band that sounded exciting and cool without being technically good—perhaps even sounding technically incompetent—than hearing a virtuoso band, because it made you believe you could go out and do it yourself.

  Garage rockers often emulated the glowering poses of the Rolling Stones on their album covers, along with Jagger’s harsh vocals. Sometimes they tried to cop his accent: American white kids imitating a British white kid imitating an American black guy. There was a lot of sneering, such as in the Lyrics’ “So What!!” in which the vocalist vociferously establishes that he’s unimpressed by the rich girl. Most of the songs expressed bitterness toward the fairer sex, maybe because the writers were still nerds in high school, or had lost the girl to the winner of the local Battle of the Bands.

  Tripping on LSD also gained popularity as a theme, in such tracks as “Out of Our Tree” by the Wailers, from Tacoma, Washington (not the identically named Jamaican group or Waylon Jennings’s group) and in “Strychnine” (alluding to the rumor that street LSD was laced with rat poison), by fellow Tacoma band the Sonics.

  Musically, the bands might employ the trebly folk-rock guitar of the Byrds, but more frequently they copped the Stones or the Yardbirds copping black blues, complete with wailing harmonica. “Primitive,” by the Groupies (before the word gained currency as a term for party girls), reworked Howlin’ Wolf’s “Smokestack Lightning” and summed up the whole aesthetic. After the Stones unleashed “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” by the end of the year all the Gibson Maestro Fuzz-Tone boxes were sold out as countless garage bands integrated distortion into their assault in songs such as Count Five’s “Psychotic Reaction.”

  The other quality that bound most garage bands together was one they didn’t want: low-budget production values. Ironically, future indie rockers such as the White Stripes and the Strokes deliberately attempted to capture the distorted, two-dimensional sound. Kurt Cobain said, “The Sonics recorded very, very cheaply on a two-track, you know, and they just used one microphone over the drums, and they got the most amazing drum sound I’ve ever heard. Still to this day, it’s still my favorite drum sound. It sounds like he’s hitting harder than anyone I’ve ever known.”3

  The song every garage band had to know was “Gloria,” by Them. In it, Van Morrison yawps like a seriously irate alligator with perhaps the most ripped-up British blues vocals of them all, while über–session guitarist Jimmy Page stings and rings, influencing everybody years before Zeppelin—before anyone even knew it was Page playing. But the song was banned in many parts of the United States because Morrison sings of the titular female coming upstairs to his room. Chicago’s Shadows of Knights changed the words and released their own version in December, scoring the American Top 10 hit.

  In November, LA folk-rock band the Leaves released the first version of the “murdered-my-girlfriend” tune “Hey Joe,” which would soon rival “Gloria” as the go-to garage anthem. Everyone from Love to the Byrds covered it, until Jimi Hendrix slowed it down the following year and annihilated all previous comers, backed by the unearthly Breakaways trio moaning like the ghost of the slain girlfriend. Another November release by an LA group, the Standells’ “Dirty Water,” was a favorite due to its lyrics about frustrated college girls who had to be back in their dorms by midnight.

  Probably the most archetypal proto-punk band was LA’s the Seeds. (As with the Leaves, by the end of 1965, band names that referenced drugs were taking over from misspelled animal names; fruits and vegetables would be next.) Their first single, “Can’t Seem to Make You Mine,” came out in March. As Sky Saxon’s goofy vocals demonstrate, bands still didn’t take themselves seriously, though acid and politics would solemnize them in a year or two. Saxon wrote the seminal “Pushin’ Too Hard” (released in November) after a fight with his girlfriend. Though the singer is yelling at a girl in the song, with the draft now breathing down young men’s necks, many heard the lyrics (lines about just wanting to be free to live his life the way he wants) as antiestablishment. The song had the fuzz tone and the reverb, along with a new trend: minor keys on an electric keyboard. The Turtles’ Mark Volman said that originally the Sunset Strip was dominated by the folk-rock sound of the Byrds and the Turtles, but that it was soon overtaken by darker, minor-key bands such as the Seeds, the Chocolate Watchband, and the Doors.4 Both the Seeds and Love had residencies at the Hollywood club Bito Lito’s; the Doors would open for the Seeds there.

  In cape and bad Prince Valiant haircut, Saxon frugged to the electric piano like an uninhibited (if slightly clueless) Mick Jagger, cool because he was so free, influencing the smart-moron ethos of Iggy Pop and the Ramones. Decades later Saxon opined, “Garage music is not bad, because Christ was born in a manger, which was probably like a garage of that time.”

  * * *

  Probably the most successful garage band of all time was the Beach Boys. When the Wilson brothers were small, their father, Murry, turned the garage into a music room, where he and his wife, Audree, played the Hammond B-3 organ and piano while singing with the boys. Later, Brian Wilson slept there.5 One day, Dennis came home from the beach and told Brian he should write a song about surfing because it had gotten really popular. When their folks went on vacation, they used the food money their parents had left them to buy instruments, and came up with their first hit, “Surfin’.”

  Now, four years later, thinking July’s Summer Days (and Summer Nights!!) had temporarily satiated his label, Capitol, Wilson believed himself free to write an album that could make use of all the experimentation he had been doing in the studios with orchestras. To give himself the proper beach-oriented writing space, he had a wooden box built four feet off the ground in his dining room, put a grand piano in it, and then filled it with two feet of sand. But then Capitol started pressuring him to deliver his third album of the year, in time for Christmas sales.

  Wilson wanted to get back to writing his baroque opus as soon as possible, so he decided the band would bang out a bunch of covers of songs by the likes of the Beatles, Dion, and even Bob Dylan—Jardine leads them through “The Times They Are A-Changin’”—and then overdub sounds as if there were a party going on in the studio, and call it Beach Boys’ Party! The resultant album would stand today as a nice unplugged-style album if the annoying crowd sounds could be stripped out.

  The group was recording in the studio next door to Jan and Dean, LA’s other big surf group. William Jan Berry and Dean Ormsby Torrence started out as the Barons, a group that had rehearsed endlessly in Berry’s garage while they were in high school. On September 23, after the duo had a fight, a drunken Dean stalked over to the Beach Boys and ended up singing lead on their album’s cover of “Barbara Ann.”

  With Party! in the can, Wilson returned to his ambitious music. The arrangement of November’s “The Little Girl I Once Knew” was groundbreaking in that the song comes to a complete stop at a number of points during the track. Lennon raved to Melody Maker, “This is the greatest! Turn it up, turn it right up. It’s got to be a hit. It’s the greatest record I’ve heard for weeks. It’s fantastic. I hope it will be a hit. It’s all Brian Wilson. He just uses the voices as instruments. He never tours or does anything. He just sits at home thinking up fantastic arrangements out of his head. Doesn’t even read music. You keep waiting for the fabulous breaks. Great arrangement. It goes on and on with all different things. I hope it’s a hit so I can hear it all the time.”6 But the pauses were too avant-garde for the radio. Programmers feared listeners would change the station if they heard silence, and the song went only to No. 20.

  Ironically, the ragged song the Boys tossed off with Dean singing lead, “Barbara Ann,” went to No. 2 on both sides of the Atlantic, becoming the fifth-highest charting hit of their career, and the sing-along for drunken frat boys everywhere.

  20

  Anarchy and Androgyny, British Style

  In mid-October the Who struggle to channel their rage into the My Generation
album instead of at one another. On November 6, “Get Off My Cloud” becomes the Stones’ second U.S. No. 1 as they push the envelope with drugs and bad behavior.

  In the beginning the Who was vocalist Roger Daltrey’s group, but when Keith Moon joined the band, the maniacal drummer synched with fellow speed freaks Townshend and Entwistle to form a musical combo of such ferocious energy that they threatened to lift off and leave Daltrey in their dust.

  Daltrey felt that amphetamines impeded his singing ability. “Once I got off the pill thing, I realized how much the band deteriorated through playing on speed. Musically, it really took a downturn.” He thought drugs were turning the music into noise without tempo. So the pugnacious singer stalked offstage one night in September in Denmark, grabbed the others’ stash of pills, and flushed them down the toilet. Moon freaked out and attacked Daltrey with a tambourine. Daltrey flattened him, gave him a bloody nose—and was thrown out of the band.

  Townshend said, “Roger puts this band together then finds the three dwarves that he’s brought in to support him suddenly sort of leaving him behind … Moon was a genius, Entwistle was a genius, I was maybe getting in the vicinity, and Daltrey was just a singer.”1

  Daltrey reflected, “It was the first time in my life that I realized I loved something else other than myself … [If I was being] thrown out for being like I was, then I have to change, because the band was more important to me than anything2 … I thought if I lost the band I was dead. If I didn’t stick with the Who, I would be a sheet metal worker for the rest of my life.”3 They brought him back on probation, warning that, with one more outburst, he would be dismissed for good. He worked on not raising his voice again offstage.