The Turtles History: Happy Together Full Movie

[Music] hi there that's the sound of the day and it belongs to one of the most fast-moving groups in the country the turtles [Music] [Music] and you say you belong to me [Music] together me and you and me no matter how they toss the dice it had to be the only one for me is you and you for me so happy together foreign [Music] for me so happy together no matter how they tossed the dice it had to be the only one for me is you and you for me so happy to give so happy together this is the turtles that everyone remembers but there was much more top ten hits eleanor it ain't me babe and you showed me and the story of how a bunch of guys from westchester high school in los angeles became one of america's top bands we met bob dylan we met the beatles and we even played the white house but while everyone knew our hits nobody really knew what it was like to be a turtle it all started from humble beginnings as a neighborhood surf fan sit back watch they were unique all four of them were different and unique uh the quietest one in my memory uh would be al nichols he was the quietest at least in my class he was uh chuck was the sportsman the swimming star mark was the clown howard was the uh sort of stability of of the force howard had a fabulous voice for a young man of 16 or 17 at the time choir probably added a dimension to us as a as a local band of singers that a lot of the other bands didn't have as a part of their uh career even in high school was we learned about part singing we learned that you could put different people on different notes and we didn't really understand music that well at the time to know we exactly what we were doing but we knew that we could add different notes and sing in parts because we were singing already in parts in acapella choir i've always been attracted to funny people so when he asked about joining the group especially when he answered that he had no particular skills at all i was sold you know i thought the band could really use this guy in it you know a little levity something to lighten up the situation because it was not a a happy band it was a band that was concentrating on on the music on getting it and getting it right and uh and having mark in the band it just turned into a fun situation mark could get up on stage and he'd sing a couple of duets with howard you know this is this is the early days of the crossfires and uh ali'd go well that's real nice and howard keep pushing for mark to be a permanent member and al would say absolutely not this guy doesn't play an instrument i'm not going to pay him we were a surfing band so essentially we were playing pretty much about 90 percent instrumental music and i had picked up a saxophone at kind of the demand of my father that i began making the same amount of money as the rest of the guys we kind of honked our way through the hits of the late 50s and early 60s which was at the time pretty much dick dale and the del bones and the safaris and the [Music] rhythm [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Music] [Applause] i don't know about mark but for my own self i had zip personality i mean my i poured myself into the books and stuff and i did pretty well in school but as far as my social life you know i was a leper and and therefore uh after the crossfires became a big band and all of a sudden i was into my second year of high school and people were going yo rock and roller it wasn't so much yo neil sedaka looking nerd uh you know it was more like uh being accepted by your peers and beyond accepted to the point where you were just sort of a local celebrity we worked with the turtles at the revelaire club they were the headliners and uh we got to play one gig with the turtles in redondo beach as rick and the ravens they all had matching suits everyone had as i recall the turtles all had matching suits but then as rick and the ravens we all had matching suits too so everyone had matching suits everyone was a surf band at the time we wanted to be the beatles so bad we knew we couldn't be the beatles because everybody knew what they looked like but we knew we could get away with being jerry and the pacemakers because nobody knew what they looked like so we would go into these bars and restaurants and introduce ourselves as jerry and the pacemakers from england then we all knew the names oh yeah tell me the names freddie marsden my brother and then we'd order white tea please can we have white tea and dry toast bickies please and they would look at us like what without white tea take the tag with milk in it and give us a dry bicky on the side so we can dunk her say al was married with a child don was married with a child on the way uh al couldn't survive on the 40 or 50 dollars a weekend we were earning as a surfing band we were becoming adults and we did not know what to do we we started this rock and roll dream as high school kids and now that we were adults and had to earn a living at it we were between a rock and a hard place to coin a phrase we really didn't know what to do al was the guy instrumental in coming to us and saying look i can't live like this we scribbled out a resignation note and i was elected to take it upstairs to the office in the back and give it to bill utley reb foster's cousin uh explaining why we were resigning and we couldn't afford to do this kind of thing anymore literally up the stairs two guys uh had been brought in by bill and reb uh to hear us play that night and had literally grabbed us as we were going upstairs and said that they liked the way that it sounded singing the bird songs yeah mr tambourine had just come out the week before and we did the bird songs and the guy said yes this is great folk rock is the new direction come up with a few more of these we'll take you into the studio let's make a record reb foster brilliant disc jockey that he was uh saw that the english invasion had taken a firm hold in america and said i've had this name rattling around in my brain how would you guys like to be the turtles we thought he was crazy we thought he was kind of making fun of us we had picked out the name the six pack and the half dozen and other names we thought would yeah work for the six of us and uh we we thought actually the name turtles was kind of stupid at the time because we felt that he was kind of picking on the way that we looked in the fact that we were slow and we were clunky and it wouldn't work but he pointed out to us not so not so first of all it's an animal sounding name it has a tles ending much like the beatles it's going to be on a brand new label and there were so many new labels releasing independent english stuff at the time that we would probably be mistaken for a british band which is exactly what happened the records that were made in the 60s uh for the large part were that were successful were made with one group of studio musicians playing um you know the birds and the and uh and the mamas and papas and uh the association records that i made all had the same rhythm section on them uh the turtles were great in that they could play on their own records so all of a sudden these guys from westchester high school find ourselves signed up to join dick clark's caravan of stars and meet the tour in chicago we're so psyched we can't believe this a national tour so we go to the uh the hilton hotels in chicago yes and uh we're meeting all the people we're about to tour with tom jones is on this tour peter and gordon and the sherelles and billy joe royal and ronnie dove and brian highland an endless list of stellar 60s figures to us and we're so impressed it's unbelievable the first night we joined the tour we checked into the hotel our guitar player al nicol goes to the park just to look at the hotel and go gosh it's great to be on the road he gets mugged he gets mugged hit over his all his money is taken he comes back chuck ports gets into a fight with the veterans of foreign wars who have a convention in the hotel where the only long-haired weirdos there he gets to into a fight on the stairway with them they surrounded us immediately and called us slime and [ __ ] and when they were done drinking that night they'd come back down and shoot us it's a it's a nightmare it's a horror show we haven't even played our first gig yet and we get onto the tour bus we're escorted to our newly assigned seats in the back of the bus they hit playstation with a broken air conditioner now they lead us back to these seats in the back of the bus and we notice with great glee that we're paired up with with our idols you know that i'm getting to sit next to gordon waller from peter and gordon and mark's sitting next to tom jones the star of the show right behind each other unbelievable we're going how did we luck out how did we get these great seats then we figured it out when the sun was set that night and tom and gordon wanted to spread out on their their seats they kind of both looked at us and went um we said wow like we should know and uh we were told at the time by both of them that we were fortunate enough to have our own place to sleep which was on the floor between the seats there was just enough room for somebody to lay out and stretch out on the floor and i remember very vividly laying on my floor area looking under the seat in front of me and there's howard um facing back and we're kind of scrunched up with we waved to each other we were learning from the best man we were learning from experts we were seeing after a show tom jones go up to the window of the bus and all these screaming girls and they couldn't hear him he was talking through the glass oh you love me darling oh darling you'd love to suck on wendell wouldn't you oh he's getting a rise out of you there are you at the title oh show us your tits are oh look at wendell he's a big boy now he's growing and we we really were shocked at the openness of the people on this tour there was no doubt about it was rock and roll we were high school kids we had no idea this was rock and roll we just saw it as incredible fun we ended the show with it ain't me babe uh for his benefit largely and also it was our biggest hit at the time and uh we were paraded by him like it was the queen and it was some sort of a royal uh introduction and everybody in the band shook his head and bob was comatose he was pretty dark glasses right at the time were his big thing the the subterranean laying down in a dish of pasta i think was his big thing he was like all but bent over kind of shaking out sure i don't remember this night but we all filed by him we shook your hand and uh i was the one of the last guys up there if not the last guy up there and you shook my hand you looked up from your stupor and you said that last song was great man you ought to record that thing that's a voice impersonation that was a voice celebrity voice impersonation and he was right back into his pasta again with cheese on his face we were going bob you wrote that song don't don't you remember we already had a hit with that song we it was kind of a shock for us to see that happen please don't mistake me or try to make me the shadow of [Applause] [Music] just anybody hard to be myself oh society's goal is to be part of the whole let me sound into you that's let me be let me be to think like i want to let me be let me be that's all i ask of you i am what i am and that's all i ever can don't try to change me or rearrange me to satisfy the selfishness in you i'm not a piece of clay to multi move each day and i'm not up [Applause] let me let me we'd uh sit at the dinner table uh uh mother father sister and myself and uh and then we'd throw around uh topics and uh i usually uh i usually got hit from every direction uh it's just uh years of uh years of having other people trying to uh to change the way i uh was thinking it was something that i really had said many times you know as you get up and leave the dinner table let me be to think like i want to okay we suffered a lot of indignity because of the long hair especially in the south in the midwest where people were very conservative they would see they would see the long hairs on tv and they would probably make derisive comments about it but the thing was those people were on tv when the long hairs came to their town and all the kids in town had crew cuts we stood out we stood out real bad we'd go into restaurants and the whole place would go silent and they would stare at us mel carter in atlanta georgia i went into a predominantly white restaurant with him it was a white restaurant this was in 1965 on the same tour and a 70 year old man picked up his plate of mashed potatoes and gravy and beef and just threw it at him went down his front and the cops came and took us away as as a group the doors we played as the house band at the whiskey a go-go which meant that we opened for the turtles mark and howard by then had gone completely over the edge they were completely insane by then but were holding it all in nicely quite obviously they had been psychedelicized they had the most outrageous sense of humor of uh you know of of any rock and roll musicians that i've ever met for me the turtles were more like the loving spoonful than they were like the birds they were more uh you know like sebastian than they were like maguires or something and i always felt that because they were so nuts on stage and so and so nuts in the studio they really belonged in the good time thing as opposed to the you know hard protest folk rock thing and you baby was our first sort of experiment in moving into this kind of feel-good music if you will you baby was uh for me that was you know that was as close as i wanted to come to at that time to a good rhythm and blues and um i was very happy and surprised i remember that i remember the talk around the music business at the time was how the turtles could do such a thing i mean it was like they turned their back on folk rock and it was like they were going to make oh i don't know they were going to alienate the people in the the folk people who loved folk and that they had lost 60 of their audience and and i i took the brunt of that storm too this is the bunker hill section of los angeles right across the street from the uh water and power building you'll find a magnificent structure that's our music center over there and somewhere down along the sidewalk oh bless you gentlemen here are the turtles and i feel alright cause i know tonight i'll be with you [Music] baby [Applause] nobody [Music] [Music] is nobody can please crazy a little ray of sunshine a little and just a touch of magic you got the [Music] [Music] greatest [Music] playing as the crossfires uh was was the best time we ever had together we double dated we rehearsed at least once a week sometimes twice a week we couldn't get enough of trying out new things of uh you know hoping and dreaming together we were very close very very close when we started doing the road shows as the turtles we were together so much that when we got back to los angeles in between tours we'd never even see each other we were all friends grew up together and we we enjoyed being with each other but after you know a certain period of time on the road you get you know you start getting on each other's nerves just like regular family life or anything else in high school the night riders and the crossfires and even to the first year and a half of the turtles we were really a happy group we did a lot of things together but then it got more pushed and pushed and our time was used more by the record companies and recording and tours by the agents and things like that and we basically could never get away from each other my reason for leaving the band was it was a complicated conglomeration of a lot of different things that were occurring as i mentioned earlier there was there was friction between al and howard over over uh songwriting there was uh there was the undercurrents of of all the wives and girlfriends uh pressuring us about uh about whether or not we were uh sleeping with groupies there was the there was the road weariness you know all the dives we were playing in and and for my own self i always i always felt a pressure of trying to lift anything we did on record up to a higher artistic quality of a new record company a new group and new management all breaking at the same time it's it's too bad that we we didn't all have a little bit more experience and weren't a little bit more accommodating to one another's positions you can try to please me but it won't be [Music] that easy even found it and you don't stand outside whatever you do girl you know you can't get through girl can't bring me down [Music] but you can try [Music] but it is be easy but you can't drive me barbados was probably the flashiest drummer i'd ever seen i mean he never played anything without going twirling the sticks a few times first i mean he was probably the fastest guy i'd ever seen you know like right up there with ginger baker and he was like just amazing to watch he was an art form i eventually left the group because i wasn't considered part of them off stage if i wasn't part of them off stage therefore i couldn't be part of them on stage and i think i was just a product of everything we were doing i was stressed out when we sorted through those stacks of records looking for that next single to cut and stumbled upon happy together and heard somebody that heard something in those grooves that no one else had heard a song that had been rejected by every band that had listened to it um the vogues yeah the happenings the tokens i mean people passed on this song you just go i don't get it it was a new york song i mean there was no doubt about it i mean when you heard the the uh demo it didn't sound like very much the quality of the demo was really really poor it was just a guy on a guitar and a couple of kind of whiny singers and one guy in the back playing on his knees and i can't see imagine me and you i do i think about you day and night it's only right to think about the girl you love and hold you tight so happy together [Music] if i should call you up invest a dime and you say you belong to me [Music] together you and foreign no matter how they toss the dice it had to be the only one for me is you and you for me so happy together [Music] for all my [Music] it had to be the only one for me is you and you for me so happy together [Music] no matter how they toss the dice it had to be the only one for me is you and you for me so happy together so happy together and how is the weather um you know i'd be playing getting ready to play drums and jake our lead guitar player we'd be trying to tune up and go no no no no no no no no no no no no so then then after that gig my dad lived about 35 miles out of boston and i didn't sleep much that night and i went off to see him early sunday morning was too early to go to his house so i went to the park street diner in ayer massachusetts and i was having breakfast sunday morning and it just came to me [Applause] to arrange the vocals and to play bass chip douglas was there i i really do believe that he was primarily responsible for the turtle's arrangement of that song he got us out into the road with it and we would shed it and play the audience he was actually a member of our touring band playing out on the road but i think chip saw something bigger for himself waiting at the end of this because as soon as he cut happy together as the bass player and had been on the road for seven or eight months as a part of our touring ban in those cars that was it for chip chip was he had his demo sort of speak for his next part of his career i actually think it took uh the the vietnam guys returning home to tell us about their experiences and how that song helped get them through the war and and how they would be alone at night in a foxhole and hear those lyrics and be able to imagine me and you i do it wasn't a song about two people together it was a song about a person dreaming he was with an unattainable love at the time and that brought them home they imagined themselves happy together with their girlfriends and it helped get them through the war we had no idea i mean we really thought it was a light frothy mysterious but very poppy song you know we liked it on those merits we were looking for hidden meanings or subtleties there were no head head trips going on when you say how is the weather that's not exactly subtle that's sort of a you know a flying mallet so uh the fact that that kind of crept through and sort of added a sense of humor to the way the turtles were to be perceived from then on was also a nice little foothold in pop that and it kind of set up the type of material that writers such as gary bonner and alan gordon were now able to conjure up uh when imagine me and you lyrically set up what would become our next hit record she'd rather be with me which was another twist on the love affair romance of some guy pointing out to this other guy that your girl likes me more than she likes you it was another kind of tongue-in-cheek so as you know what i mean i mean all of those songs are you know wouldn't it be great if we were both together none of those three songs said anything about hey life is great being with you right those guys didn't feel that way because they didn't have those kind of relationships mark and i drove over to meet jim and jim actually had signed a hit single call uh hey joe with the leaves and we like to sing and we went over to meet this guy and he was eating like potato chips for breakfast pepsi cola turtles take six [Applause] the others [Applause] [Music] [Applause] now well happy together was an international hit and uh no one could have been more shocked than we were to have a record that was that big especially in england we were just so thrilled because that meant to us that the beatles heard our record we didn't care about anything else or anybody else or whether or not it sold or made money the beatles were hearing our record now every day of their lives we had no idea what to expect all we had was this promo clip that they'd done for happy together which i guess was actually more along the lines of being one of the first rock videos and we were so used to seeing american groups like the birds and the walker brothers and the loving spoonful who were so serious with their images they're wearing these anorexic tight jeans and this perfect would-be beetle mop top hairdos and then here's the turtles this bunch of happy-go-lucky raga muffins basically in this video of them frolicking and falling about in fields full of flowers and one guy in the turtles was an unashamedly fat guy who had for christ's sake curly hair the first night we were there so we were stoked we were jazzed and this mcdougall guy who we were just meeting for the first time would later be part of our lives ever since um took us to this nightclub called the speakeasy we weren't really ready for what was to come we went into this dark dingy environment must have been 11 or 12 at night and we entered the private entrance down the hall around the corner and they had the first people that we saw this little table off to the side literally the first people we saw in the club were the beatles right it was george uh paul and john and they were sitting in this kind of up it was like a step and a half up up above the rest of the club kind of tucked in this corner and everybody in the club kind of was always watching this area because this was like the first the first place that came in and and the speaking speakeasy had a glass in restaurant in the middle of this rock and roll club where you could go in and actually eat dinner in silence while the noise and cacao anyway we were led past the beatles once again much like bob dylan in a procession-like style except that the beatles were really drunk at least something like that something like that and they were pretty out of their minds and come on it was late at a nightclub they have every right to have their fun but we didn't know that they were gods to us john was kind of falling into his table and he had a candle in front of him and it kept burning and when to sit back up and and i was so involved watching him and he was that i didn't know until somebody said you know you're sitting next to paul a bunch of girls sitting around and paul taking his camera and literally climbing under the table and taking pictures of their skirts and crawling to the next table hello darling so just kind of being you know yeah being the beatles kind of just like hard day's night what you would imagine them to be and but more but more so a little more out of control a little and we could handle it it was okay and nice to see what a silly bunch of wacky guys well jim tucker our rhythm player did not have the same reaction uh he looked at his icons crumbling before his very eyes and said no man no don't do this to me you're the beatles you're not supposed to be wacky normal guys you got to be the beatles man please well that kind of went on the next few days you kind of noticed jim had kind of a despondency kind of growing over him some [Music] with girls [Music] some boys me let's see [Music] [Music] [Music] um the turtles got over really well in england i think because they had these great harmonizing voices you know uh howard kalin i still think is one of the greatest voices in rock and roll and the blend between howard and markipoo was just great so you got these great british harmonizers like clark cakes and nash from the hollies and john paul and george from the fabs were just crazy about the turtles they came in to see us almost every night we played uh lennon would start out sitting in the booth and end up on the floor it was all we imagined london would be uh there was graham nash there was donovan sitting on a rock compiled sense burning and big hookah pipes hash all over the place stoned gypsy girls twirling around in tie dyed dresses and lace curtain just it was everything you wanted it to be in 1967 in england it was and and more i remember once when they came to my house in in london when i'd gotten the uh one of the only copies of sergeant pepper on on a on a reel-to-reel from uh from george and i sat them down in my house i loaded up a huge pipe with uh some of the coffee of course some of the finest uh lebanese coffee that was ever actually grown on that side of the mountain and smoked a huge pipe and played them this album and their reaction was of course the same as everyone's reaction to sergeant pepper what a what a breakthrough album but um they were very nice i did kind of take them under my wing because you know they were visitors from america and it was their first time in england the beatles sitting there telling telling me that they liked my stuff how much better can it get brian jones was had become kind of a friend brian was an enormous surf music california sound he loved the harmony music of the 60s all of it and when the when the turtles came over he just was completely knocked out by he came to watch several shows hendricks also was a big fan coming from the u.s and knew who he were and he did it a couple of times brian's standing in front of the stage it's a speakeasy with a camera shooting us stills and the movie camera i wonder where those went huh yeah and he's got this they had this hat on and the flower shirts and i remember hendricks coming to see us dressed in the exact outfit he wore on the ru experienced album i played my last job in england howard and i got sick and like i said we cancelled uh probably three or four engagements and we were both flat on our back and i woke up one morning when we were feeling good or better and walked over to the window and took a look around and said i'm tired i don't want to do this anymore and they had two more weeks back east before they were due back in l.a well i got on a plane that day and flew back to l.a with one of our managers [Music] [Music] so out of sight she's my girl and that's where i was last night she's [Music] every time i see you with that smile upon your face [Applause] is [Music] is up in the sky that's where i was last night right [Music] it was originally she's my girl you took her away from me yeah she's my girl you took her away from me you're breaking my heart she's my girl i thought that was that was over and above uh the artistic level of of uh any american group i thought they'd really hit hit on something and i was disappointed to see that that that after she's my girl they never quite hit that stride again and i was also sorry to see that that record didn't go to number one like it should have there was some controversy about the lyrics mentioning morning glories and you know it was there was some rumor that people were eating morning glory seeds and getting high and it was kind of it was a drug there was a time where i uh probably thought i was the walrus i had you know john lennon's personality pretty much although i played the bass like paul i was i thought more like john and a lot of my thinking ran toward their attempt to to develop a higher consciousness and find out what was beyond the reality of our lives and george was they were doing it through the eastern mysticism in those days transcendental meditation and i dabbled in that our influence of the beatles was because they were something that every group wanted to be i mean to be able to make the kind of records and to be themselves was something that every group hoped to attain we uh we went nuts yeah we did the same thing unfortunately i mean we got obsessed to the point that uh we looked at their clothes we wear their clothes we would read what kind of drugs they were taking we took those drugs if they did a psychedelic raga we would do a psychedelic raga when they formed their own company and called it apple we formed our own company and called it blimp when we got to florida and wanted to take a week off we went over to the bahamas and rented motorcycles and scoured the island uh just like help just like they had done when apple boutique opened in london our wives uh wanted to open the boutique on the sunset we scouted out locations and gave them money and they were designing lacy we went in and created the battle of the bands that was a tremendous uh spin-off of what they had set up with sergeant pepper's lonely hearts club band because here they had done what people were calling a concept album we we wanted to do a concept album sergeant pepper was basically a variety show right they presented the show glad you had a good time at the show so long now we took it one step farther we went back to our roots you know and the original show of shows for us was winning at these battle of the bands and so we wanted to portray the music of the era as performed by the bands of the era and so we went to western costumes and each group that we created musically when you opened the album we wanted to portray visually so that on the cover we're in tuxedos kind of like the way come on in folks just like the beatles did were sergeant pepper's lonely hearts club man we were now tuxedoed saying come on right tonight well the battle of the bands became our sergeant pepper's lonely hearts club band and it immediately went bringing the audience into something and it and it spun off with a harp into a song called the last thing i remember which was a way of showing that this album was all drug induced and influenced psychedelicized very beatlesque to some extent there was an ongoing crisis of of identity with the turtles if the turtles had had really been comfortable with who and what they were i think they would have been um bigger group now howard i considered the intellectual of the group howard would come over and it was like everyone would just sit like her at his feet you know to hear his stories he was hysterical and he would stay all night and we would stay up all night and just listen to howard talk i just got so fed up sick and tired of the guys from white whale coming to us constantly and saying give us another happy together give us another happy the only thing we can sell from you guys is another happy together so in chicago at the astor towers uh in one of those decadent periods where we all had sweets i went away to my room plugged up on something or other and uh slammed the door and just said all right damn it you want another happy together you're gonna get another happy together and i went through the process of analyzing what made happy together work and wherever happy together's chords went down my chords went up and whenever that melody line took that turn my song took another and i purposely threw in uh lyrics that would show the white whale people the folly of their ways pride and joy etc was in fact at first fab and gear etc but the fact that anybody was using etc in a song was was pretty ludicrous and the fact that i was singing real um pre-teen lyrics about going to the movies and not being understood by this fictional girl's parents and all that stuff i figured it was the kind of thing that the guys at white whale would come back to me and go what are you out of your mind okay we were wrong thanks anyway we don't want another happy together get progressive but they didn't get the joke in fact nobody got the joke in fact years and years later i'm being asked to this very day if if i meant to say etc did i know that was a funny song yeah i knew it was a funny song [Music] your looks intoxicate me even though your folks hate me there's no one like you eleanor [Music] really enjoy tell me that you love me [Music] [Music] what do you see now eleanor [Music] maybe we won't watch the show i think i love you [Applause] [Music] tell me [Applause] sound was so big um they all sang and i i never understood you know what was the deal but their harmonies um were just like encompassing in that big arena it was just gigantic and they did all their hits i just was stunned by uh the bigness of sound uh they were terrific they really made it all worthwhile it was it was it was one of the probably the best concert i'd ever been to i mean their concerts were always very energetic i mean mark and howard have amazing voices and they were always right on and just so happy and so you know so much fun i mean i i cracked up at their concerts more than any other concerts i remember seeing them at the hollywood bowl and they did the flying sanzini brothers circus act in the middle of the show and the way that mark and howard would imitate other groups i thought that was amazing i i they were some of the best entertainers i think in pop music the turtles really were happy together i mean you know that of all the bands i've been in they they never hardly had any arguments and they all got along good and it was a lot of fun we had we joked a lot mark he was a nutcase i mean one time i went to see them in chicago and they asked me to sit in you know i mean this is kind of a normal thing to do when one group goes to see another group we wound up in a pile on the floor of the nightclub everybody holding their microphones never missing a note but in this big pile of arms and legs kind of like a love pile it was hysterical it was one instance where i had a solo tour going and i and i had a i had another singer just as a duo and he bowed out and it was like a week and so i was desperate and i called mark bowman i said call howard and see if he want we'd come just it's like four just five or six cities and we want to you know just help and it said absolutely so they show up in the first gig they come out on stage and they've got on t-shirts that say david and graham i think we just went to number one and i think either mark or one of them brought in a box a gift to me and said we got a present for you i was all excited and everything and i opened up the box it was this big turtle in there you know what is this you know and then he said take you know use a pencil man and and put it in front of it i put it in front of it and the turtle snapped the pencil right now if it was a snapping turtle i thought what kind of what kind of gift is this spanky made at that time a devastating pot punch now we can talk about it then we couldn't i mean seed stem everything went and boil it up with wine and fruit juices and she used to come over with you know the guys in the band nigel and kenny and the original members of the band john cider was the drummer john became a very good friend our drummer uh john cider the chief was hanging out with the turtles a lot i think he was interested in one of their wives and he he wormed his way into the turtles he became so tight with their drummer john cider that our own drummer john barbada wouldn't even come around us he'd stay in his own room he'd hang out by himself he was really by this time either he had eased himself or we had eased him right out of a family situation which was very very important in the turtles it always was a friendship and a feeling of camaraderie was more important than the music that we played and case in point was our hiring john cider who a wonderful human being that he is and a real good soul singer and stuff he was never the drummer that johnny barbado was he was never hired to be he was hired because he fit in so well with us that it was like he was already family so we sat around for days and days trying to figure out who should produce our next record if we had our druthers and big names were being dropped around i mean we're talking george martin and yeah you know everyone right hallie i mean just giant producers in the business if you have your pick of you know the biggest of the big that was the way we did a lot of things was just what if and so we all came to the conclusion that if we really had our choice the guy that we'd like to have produced the record was ray davis of the kinks he had just produced village green preservation society it was a fantastic album we loved it we knew every word of it we could all sing it and we believed not only in what he was saying but the purity in which he was saying it [Music] tonight [Music] and now is somewhere with you and i don't know the reason why is could this be spain [Music] [Music] me this is [Music] [Music] but there is something wrong here somewhere friday [Music] tonight tonight [Music] tonight [Music] we received an invitation first we had read an article in red book or one of these magazines trisha nixon the president's daughter it was an interview with her and she'd listed her likes and dislikes and when it got to her favorite music her favorite band was the turtles well hard to believe we couldn't believe it we certainly uh politically were not aligned with the nixon administration at all so that when several weeks later our management company received hand-engraved invitations to play the white house the band took it very negatively and management looked at it just the other way they said hey look this is not a political thing you're doing this is like performing before the queen you do it because you're an american you don't do it because you disagree or agree with the guy's politics and he's just again he wasn't even there i mean uh it was a called uh trisha nixon's mask ball the turtles were met at the airport and each member of the band was put into a car with a driver and an american flag on the front and security each member had his own we went to the white house where they had dossiers on each member of the group in a holding uh lounge where each member had his own dossier and so they checked against you with the dossier and they were unloading the equipment into the front door of the white house and they brought in all the amplifiers and they brought in the drums and they're bringing in the drum trap case where the snare drum goes and the drumsticks and all those things and uh as they were picking it up they kind of picked it up sideways or something because they were secure secret service guys security not really equipment handlers and so in the trap case getting turned upside down inside the trap case they set off the metronome combination guitar tuner to to to these guys thought it was a bomb they went crazy they grabbed everybody and cleared the area drew guns they put us up against the wall they had some other guy going there like he was a commando and lift the thing out and start examining it and as he was examining it he he touched the button that that sent out the a the 440a tuning tone and that was it that was everybody they had a still standing up against the wall nobody was moving about 10 minutes later they came back with it it was soaking wet the front plate had been all peeled off and they gave it back to us they said it's a metronome well we told them that yeah so they gave us a check actually which would be kind of nice to have today because i know we never was like seven dollars i think it might have been a little more but it would have been a real nice thing to have for history quite a memento anyway the party itself was pretty raucous and the kids were pretty wild and they allowed us to get pretty wild in fact we were three sheets to the wind by the way oh yeah one of the great things about it the people were really nice they gave us complete run of the white house we were allowed to go anywhere we wanted in the white house except the private quarters upstairs and other than that we could go anywhere without guards or something they gave us the lincoln library for our dressing room and boy did we use that library for things other than mr lincoln would have intended and uh at the party that evening in a kind of a i was a little bit uh higher than probably i should have i know that i made a play for lucy baines johnson that almost got me into a tremendous fight with her husband we were on the road about 80 percent of the time in those years we'd be out on the road for three or four weeks at a time and be home maybe for just a week sometimes not even that just long enough to change clothes turn in the money get new contracts and leave again we were still under contract to white whale the company who we did an audit of and discovered they had literally taken hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars of hours one six month period we found a discrepancy of about 160 000 and multiplied that times five years we felt if they were if they were skimming that kind of money off the top of our one six-month period which was not a very successful part of our career uh what what laid out there so our lawyer slapped a lawsuit on white whale they released eve of destruction from our 1965 album as a single and we just we had no idea what the hell was going on so before everything just went totally nuts we had tried to make a deal with them whereby we said look you guys this isn't working can we just at least leave a good taste in the in the mouth of the american public and give them one more single one more record that will represent some quality involved with the turtles we want to leave it on a positive note this was one of the great nights in turtle history we were at a dude ranch shooting this video in wickensburg arizona dude ranch and we really got into the roles for this video might not show it but we dressed up probably like the eagles were remember on the long riders album they did and we were wearing all of the the guns tied to our legs and the night before we stayed up in this dude ranch dining living room where they had this huge round table and we had taken lsd because poker it was one of those nights and whiskey and shot glasses and playing poker and dressed up like cowboys getting into it we had been up all night we had taken copas i mean being out in the desert and here this was we were one with nature and then they hired these five models to also go on horseback with us like our my horse and her horse were to meet and we were to walk down the hill together kind of nice you know like romantic i don't remember the video ever looking romantic it looked like a bunch of stupid people on horses yeah what the hell the outtakes of this video would be hilarious because the horse i was on tried to roll me four times the guy finally looked under the saddle and said dude look at the bur under there my god the size of a magnet took all day to shoot three-minute video because none of us knew how to ride and we're completely stoned and we've been up all night and these people are trying to direct us and trying to direct us horse number three sure babe i'll kick him and see what he does all right now you're trying to direct us on this 3 000 pound animal or something and you've got to meet with these other people it was one of the most hilarious evenings and afternoons [Music] while you sit and seek a crescent moon is laying at your feet with hope that's made of sand you don't think you can but you have held it all in your hands [Music] i've [Music] still somehow my love for you grows [Music] yes [Laughter] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Laughter] so on my heels [Music] dreams [Music] [Laughter] [Music] it grows [Music] um [Music] what a lot of people don't know is the turtles were in lawsuits from 1966 to 1974. we trusted everybody we believed and we'd sign anything here's a brief description of the managerial problems faced by a rock and roll band us here's what happened first of all our first manager came along he's the guy who owned the nightclub remember him yeah he convinced us he was good by telling us i'm your manager we signed we believe good enough for us manager number one now we got a manager we went out on the road with this guy right here call him two we'll call him number two he told us that manager number one was no good he said he was a crook said manager number one hated us stole our money never wanted to see us again so he said what should we do sign with you yeah so we believe with number two we went to our record company and we borrowed two hundred and fifty thousand dollars we paid manager number one fifty thousand dollars of our money power money cash cash we promised manager one five payments of fifty thousand dollars manager number two now we're really poor we're out on the road he takes our contract and sells it to a company in new york and told us it was a new agency we believed him there was no agency no no so he gave us that money told us it was in advance but it wasn't in advance it was the other money he sold them 50 of our managerial contract and then we didn't make the next payment on on our on our loan remember the loan default so number one now is silliest right about this time for two and one half million dollars because we owe him money so now we don't like number three a bunch of swag new and number two of course is run off to mexico with our bass player's wife and forty thousand dollars of tour money wife money mexico down here and we are with a new road manager who tells us that number three is really bad we already know that we hate three anyway so we signed with manager number four we're now with manager number four and he brings in a lawyer let's just call her lawyer and she's really bad for us she ruins our career really bad as if we needed help can we just reiterate manager number one still suing us two and a half million dollars so now we're out on the road with the new guy he tells us manager number four is not doing anything good manager four goes up north and we sign with manager number five if i if i've got this right we're still being sued two and a half million dollars manager number six comes in big big managers big company a big tv star still a big tv star very famous like number one show kind of a tv star we hate them so we leave them hate we leave them and we go with two guys two of those guys we didn't hate we two they were good they became manager number seven let us again point out suing us still still all the way over here energy number seven were pretty good they brought us to the white house that's right we had a good run but then you know what we hated them we didn't like them manager number one is still suing two and a half million dollars so we come over here but also manager number one is very popular now got big on money on the money the 50 000. so we come back to we'll call it number eight guy number one manager we call him up and say hey you were always the guy we love you he throws out the lawsuit because now we're friends we become his new group and then we break up well back then it was great because uh you know i was 21 22 years old and and had a great car had a little material things i wanted to have money in the bank and for me at that age i mean i just couldn't believe it you know it was like the heart of our career as the turtles and we were successful we were doing a lot of tv everybody knew who we were you know and and uh mamas and papa's lived down the street from us and jim morrison used to hang out with us and you know all the local l.a groups and the birds and the monkeys and i used to give mickey dolan's drum lessons and you know it was a pretty tight knit little thing down there and it was it was incredible i mean it really was it's what happened in the 60s is never going to happen again if we had kept having hit records we probably wouldn't have started looking at each other and finding faults with ourselves i never looked at myself as a as the head or ahead turtle i just always looked at it like i was the singer in the band i always um gave way to al's a superior musical knowledge or to a group vote of any kind every once in a while i guess i would exercise some sort of a veto power in the early days chuck ports used to call me the king penguin because i strutted around the stage and in the rehearsal halls in fact like i knew what was happening and everybody else just better keep it down but it was strictly a facade i mean i really felt by and large in the turtle years quite helpless out there alone i mean yeah i was singing and i was fronting a band but that was the band and i think probably deep down psychologically i knew that physically i had no business being there i wasn't peter noon i wasn't mark lindsey i wasn't any front man who was going to be on the cover of any gloria stavers publication i wasn't the pretty boy so there was a little van morrison kind of a thing going on with me i felt that wasn't it wasn't a pretty picture so i tried to make up for it in other ways you know like singing my ass off it taught me about uh commitment and it taught me about responsibility and when i was married at the age of 19 years old i needed both of those things because i didn't have them all through high school i had no commitment and no responsibilities and the turtles gave me all of those things it taught me about getting up off the ground at the lowest points and trying to get back to the top it taught me about humility and how to how to deal with people in our most successful of times so that i wouldn't be thought of as somebody who relied on their success for friendship and for anything else other than it becoming my work it became it taught me the ethics of work [Music] you showed me how to do exactly what you do how i fell in love with you oh it's true you showed me how to say exactly what you say in that very special way oh it's true you fell for me too and when i tried it's not a you taught it to me too exactly what you do and now you love me too oh it's true [Music] me [Music] we showed me how to do exactly what you do how i fell in love with you showed me how to say exactly what you say in that very special world you taught it to me too exactly what you do and now you love me too [Music] now you love me too [Music] now you love me too now you love me

Channel: Cal Vid

Views: 439,032

Keywords:

Id: TUoMHtUhlfY

Length: 82min 41sec (4961 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 15 2020