From the Vaults: The Turtles

 

     The Turtles almost didn’t happen.  Call it fate or kismet or whatever, but one of the top selling bands of the late 1960s were DOA and then they weren’t (more on this in a bit).  When vocalist Mark Voman passed away in September of 2025, it prompted me to find a copy of his 2023 book Happy Forever – My Musical Adventures with The Turtles, Frank Zappa, T.Rex, Flo & Eddie, and More (with John Cody, Jawbone Press).  Volman states in the book’s introduction that he took twelve years to finish Happy Forever because he actually didn’t write most of it.  Inspired by a book about George Plimpton (George, Being George (2008)), Happy Forever tells Mark’s story through interviews done with family, friends, and bandmates. 

    George, Being George was based on interviews with over 200 people after Plimpton was gone.  Volman’s take was, “I wasn’t sure I could find two hundred people who tolerated – let alone admired – me.  Surprisingly, over one hundred amazingly fantastic and impressive people agreed to be interviewed about me.  They are actually the writers of this book.  Throughout the book, I interject (hopefully without being facetious or didactic) to add insights, and sometimes self-defenses.”  Obviously, Plimpton never had a chance to add commentary, but Volman does not abuse this privilege.  He credits co-author John Cody for doing the heavy lifting in coordinating and conducting the interviews.

     Mark Volman was a born and bred California kid who came into the world on April 19, 1947.  Growing up in Westchester (about ten miles south of Los Angeles proper), he was but a bike ride away from Disney’s Magic Kingdom which opened when he was eight years old.  His mother used to often say, “That boy is so smart – he shouldn’t be so silly.”  As Volman himself recalled, “I realized early on how to get attention, and I loved making my family laugh.  The words, ‘Oh, Mark, stop!’ were used a lot in our house.”  He grew up hearing his dad’s collection of Dixieland jazz and picked up the clarinet at an early age.  Fellow Turtle Howard Kaylan credits the record collections of both Mark’s father (Joe) and brother (Phil) for, “Our musical influences which were all in place by junior high.  We were ready to roll, I’ll tell you.”

     Kaylan (nee: Kaplan) came west from New York when his father worked for General Electric and was transferred to El Sugundo.  When the GE job disappeared, he went to work for Hughes Aircraft.  This new job put young Howard in the right place to see the likes of future astronaut Scott Carpenter and the X-15 rocket plane making aviation history.  He first met Mark in tenth grade when they were next to each other in the a cappella choir.  They were ahead of the curve as they both read music and sang their parts flawlessly, which led to them being sent out almost daily by Mr. Robert Wood, the director (for cracking each other (and the class) up).  When Howard and Al Nichols started a surf band, it didn’t include Volman.  Mark asked to join (he isn’t even sure why he asked) and started out toting their equipment.  Before too long, he was banging a tambourine and eventually made it on stage to play saxophone and sing some back up vocals.  They were called The Crossfires and the band was well known at Westchester High.  When they started playing sock hops, more songs with vocals were added to their repertoire.  The Crossfires even won a Battle of the Bands at the Santa Monica Civic Center.

     Mark’s high school girlfriend and eventual first wife, Pat, recalled that they got pretty popular:  “After winning the Battle of the Bands, they worked at the Revelaire Club in Redondo Beach.  It was all-ages so a lot of kids from high school would go there and get all crazy.  Everybody would look forward to going Friday or Saturday night to the Revelaire.”  Future Doors keyboard player Ray Manzarek remembered hearing The Crossfires rehearse at the Club when he and his brother’s band, Rick and the Ravens, auditioned there.  He recalled, “I was impressed, even then, with Mark and Howard’s harmonies.”  The Crossfires got a little radio airplay from a couple of 45s they recorded and as well as a little TV time on a local channel.  They went the usual garage band route and played anywhere and everywhere they could get booked in the LA circuit.  The band made $120 a night (as the Revelaire house band) which was split six ways.  Backing  up a lot of famous musicians at the club made them very versatile, but along the way, money became an issue (especially when a couple of the guys in the band got married and had kids on the way).

     The night The Crossfires decided they weren’t going to be able to continue, they wrote a letter of resignation.  Howard was delegated the job of marching upstairs to the office to tell the owner his house band was going to call it quits when fate intervened.  Howard explains what happened on the way to deliver the bad news to Bill Utley (the owner):  “These two guys stopped me, and they said, “We loved your set.  We especially loved the way you did Mr. Tambourine Man’.  Now I started listening and paying attention.  No one had ever singled out anything that we did as particularly good or commercial.  The guys said, ‘We want you to go into the studio and record three songs’.  We [the band] took a meeting backstage, and I said, ‘Look, what have we got to lose?  We’re breaking up tonight.  We can either do this, or not.  Somebody says they’re going to pay for us to go into the studio and make a record.  Are we really not going to do it?”

     Kaylan continues the tale:  “It was weird on many levels.  It was weird because A)  we’re going to break up, B) we had no idea who these guys were, and C) these guys, Lee Lasseff and Ted Feigin, didn’t have a name for their record company yet.  They had no artists at that point, either.  They just had a dream.  Ted Feigin said he was the PR guy from London Records.  Lee Lasseff said, ‘I do the same thing for Liberty Records.  And we’re sick and tired of doing this crap, we wanna start our own record company, and you’re the guys we’re going to launch it with’.”  Ironically, The Byrds weren’t well known (yet) and had only released their version of Bob Dylan’s Mr Tambourine Man two weeks earlier.  The Turtles liked what they heard, picked up their own twelve-string guitar (a used Danelectro, not a Rickenbacker like Roger McGuinn used in The Byrds), and The Crossfires’ version had caught Feigin and Lasseff’s ears.

     The record label they formed was called White Whale (and they called their publishing company Ishmael).  They insisted that the band would need a new name and after pondering the variables, their new manager decided it would be ‘The Turtles’.  Animal band names were popular and the ‘tles’ ending mirrored The Beatles name.  Everybody in their neck of the woods knew the ‘new band’ was The Crossfires, but to the rest of the world, they were just another new band.  On the heels of the British Invasion, everybody thought The Turtles were the next British band storming the American beachheads.  The Turtles were not about to correct this misconception.

     There was one small problem but it was a typical scenario for many bands in those days.  Mark’s brother Phil recalled what happened when the managers got involved:  “Reb Foster and Bill Utley (who took over managing the band) were thieves.  But they got interested in the Crossfires, and with Lee Lassiff and Ted Feigin, they formed White Whale, and Mark and Howard signed with White Whale.  Our father had to sign everything because Mark was still underage.”  

     Howard continued, “Mark and I were the youngest guys, and because we were so young, our parents had to sign for us, and we had to go before a judge to do it.  The judge told us that we were making a gigantic mistake.  He took both of our parents aside and said, ‘You’re doing the wrong thing,  This is a contract that is going to get them in huge financial trouble.  I don’t know if you’re reading the small print here . . .’.”  To put it simply, the record company would make good money and the band members would not.  The parents explained it to the boys, and Kaylan said, “We wanted it so bad that we convinced them to sign.  We figured one of two things would happen:  A) this is not going to work, so it won’t matter, or B) this is going to work, and we’ll worry about it later.  And everybody just signed it, because the odds of this working were slim and none.  Reb became our manager and he came up with the new name.”

     In a period of ten days, the band changed their name, signed the contract, and began looking for material to record.  Howard had written folk rock songs and as soon as he heard Dylan’s It Ain’t Me Babe, he knew exactly the formula they needed to make it work:  “I heard it more as a Zombies record, going from very quiet minor verses to crashing 4/4 choruses.  It changed the meaning of Dylan’s song from a plaintive one to an angry one.  We were saying, ‘No! No! No! It ain’t me, babe!’ and singing it with that sort of venom after coming out of a very, very light, almost gay-sounding verse.”  Famed Wrecking Crew producer Bones Howe was brought in for their first record and the first thing he asked was, “Do you know any Dylan songs?  After Foster took them to L.A. for a fashion makeover, all they needed next was a seamless way to break out from being The Crossfires to being The Turtles.

     According to Al Nicols, they copped an idea from the PR campaign Alfred Hitchcock was using for his new movie The Birds.  All the movie ads proclaimed, “The Birds is Coming” so The Turtles put up a big banner behind them at gigs that said “The Turtles Is Coming”.  Nicols described the switch:  “The regular fans saw the banner and said, ‘What’s that?’  It Ain’t Me, Babe was being played on the radio and the fans were getting excited (‘The Turtles are gonna come!’).  They didn’t know – everyone across the country thought The Turtles were another band from England.  And so, right in the middle of the show one night at the Revelaire Club, we took a break and put down our instruments.  We went backstage and took off our seersucker jackets and all put on green velour hats and velour turtle necks (ed. note:  the turtle neck shirts were an inspired idea).  Reb came out and he says, ‘We got a special treat for you:  The Turtles!’  And here come The Crossfires back out.  All the people are like, ‘Ah, it’s you guys!  Oh, man!’ But then we were The Turtles.”

     Three weeks later, they were No. 12 with a bullet on the Billboard chart.  Dick Clark added them to his traveling Caravan of Stars music review.  A couple of weeks later, they joined Herman’s Hermits, The Lovin’ Spoonful, Cannibal & the Headhunters and a host of other hot bands for a big show at the Rose Bowl.  A week later, they repeated this show in San Diego. They found themselves performing in front of a hundred thousand people and Nicols recalled, “We couldn’t even hear ourselves play.  It was an overnight indoctrination of Beatlemania.  This was something we had seen, but hadn’t experienced, and then, boom!  It happened.”  It was on the Dick Clark Caravan of Stars Tour where The Turtles were first exposed to marijuana.  Howard noted, “Marijuana wasn’t introduced to the high school culture until two or three years later.  By Sgt. Pepper, I think everybody knew what pot was.  But we’re talking about Jan & Dean [when we got into it];  this was the spring of ‘65.”

     When The Turtles did their version of It Ain’t Me Babe, they were filed in the column set aside for ‘protest groups’.  Howard explained how they made a conscious decision as to where they wanted their music to land:  “We knew that we had more humour than we were getting into our folk-rock stuff, and we didn’t want to be those doom-and-gloom guys that the west coast prophets – the Barry McGuire (Eve of Destruction) people – were turning themselves into.  We figured, ‘What are we singing protest music for, anyway?  What are we protesting?  We’re white, middle-class, affluent kids from Los Angeles, California, with our own band and our own income.’  We knew exactly what we were doing.  We knew that folk-rock was a very limited proposition.  It was not like we lucked into good-time music – we reinvented ourselves.”

     The record company was shocked when they were informed that the band was planning to change the formula to avoid getting lumped together in the folk-rock protest scene.  Luckily for The Turtles, they happened upon a song by P.F. Sloan – the same writer who had provided them with Let Me Be.  Let Me Be was decidedly in the protest genre, but the new song, You Baby helped them bridge the gap between their first hits and their new ‘good-time music’ formula.  Kaylan surmised, “The folk-rock years were wonderful for us, and set us up with a rock’n’roll fan base, but if we hadn’t made the move into good-time music, we would have died with Barry McGuire.

     Personnel changes came next.  Drummer Don Murray was having trouble at home and was taking it out on the group.  He also wasn’t the greatest drummer, so they tried out drummer Joel Larson and he was a perfect fit, but he could not stay due to prior commitments.  The next drummer to occupy the throne was Johnny Barbata who was not only good, he was a stick twirling show drummer who took a fifteen minute solo that gave the band a mid-show break.  Barbata would eventually go on to play with Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young and Jefferson Starship.  The hits kept coming, the tours got longer and Mark Volman’s tambourine tossing stage antics made their shows entertaining.  Their 1967 No. 1 hit Happy Together knocked The Beatles Penny Lane out of the chart’s top slot and became their signature song. 

      All was great until they were invited to perform at the Nixon White House.  The Turtles were Nixon’s daughter Tricia’s favorite band.  This gig opened doors to a different side of the political spectrum and when Howard got tired of doing ‘dog and pony shows’ for the well connected, he revolted and left The Turtles.  When he stopped to visit the band months later, he found they were trying to continue in a more democratic manner with all members contributing their own songs.  As Creedence Clearwater Revival found when they made one album this way, it was a bad idea.  CCR needed John Fogerty in the lead and The Turtles needed Kaylan and Volman at the helm.  When their last album (the democratically produced Turtle Soup) crashed and burned, the band’s end was near.  By 1970, The Turtles had disbanded, but the recorded legacy they left behind has remained strong. 

      I never owned a Turtles album or 45 until I found a Greatest Hits CD.  It must have been on my mind for a while because I purchased it before I even owned a CD player.  My Turtles collection has been greatly expanded over the years.  Playing She’d Rather Be With Me in my own bands always brought a smile to my face –  I  called it ‘The Turtle Effect’.  The Turtles are a band one never gets tired of because they mixed great hooks and much humour into their catalog of hits.

     Mark Volman and Howard Kaylan were not done with the music business when The Turtles folded.  We will come back to their continuing adventures in a future article, FTV:  Flo & Eddie.    

Top Piece Video:  Yes, lip synching as one can see by no guitar cords and Johnny Barbata’s drumming not matching the music – and what about

that introduction Ed?  Hmmmmmmm – okay, so he only references Happy Together  – but I loved singing She’d Rather Be With Me . . . so here you go