Full frontal assaults are for HBO softcore miniseries now, not for productive entertainment, political, or social action. You’re not going to get anywhere charging at the media machine guns. What you’re going to have to learn is subversion. When the front door is locked, go around the side and jiggle the back door knob and see if some of the windows are unlocked. Once you’re inside, you can make changes, usually while no one is the wiser that you’re doing it.
This is how it’s done:
I have some bad news. This is going to require talent wedded to effort as a prerequisite. The Turtles had that in spades. The connected kids can be made famous before they know how to even turn on the machines, but you’re probably going to work tirelessly in obscurity for a long while, and submit to multiple humiliations along the way. But once you hotwire the car, you can drive it in any direction you want.
The Turtles were immensely talented. They were also immensely weird, in the squarest way possible. They weren’t going to get a record deal with a big company. So they signed with the obscure White Whale label. That at least put them in the henhouse. They were originally called The Crossfires, and played surf music, because it had been popular up until then. It was fading fast. So they changed their name and started recording Sunshine Pop songs like Happy Together and the magnificently jolly She’d Rather Be With Me.
But Howard Kaylan and Mark Volman wanted to write their own songs. Happy Together and She’d Rather Be With Me were written by Alan Gordon and Gary Bonner. Their fly-by-night record company had struck gold with the Turtles covers, and didn’t want the Turtles to write their own material. So the Turtles decided to subvert the situation by writing and recording a parody of Happy Together. Howard Kaylan remembered it like this:
Elenore was a parody of “Happy Together.” It was never intended to be a straight-forward song. It was meant as an anti-love letter to White Whale [Records], who were constantly on our backs to bring them another “Happy Together.” So I gave them a very skewed version. Not only with the chords changed, but with all these bizarre words. It was my feeling that they would listen to how strange and stupid the song was and leave us alone. But they didn’t get the joke. They thought it sounded good. Truthfully, though, the production on “Elenore” WAS so damn good. Lyrically or not, the sound of the thing was so positive that it worked. It certainly surprised me.
The Turtles got tired of White Whale’s shenanigans, and disbanded. The record company retaliated by claiming that not only did they own the Turtle’s back catalog, they also owned Kaylan and Volman’s names.
Kaylan and Volman were old hands at subversion at this point. They changed their name to Flo and Eddie, and went into session work. White Whale went out of business. Flo and Eddie bought all their stuff back at the bankruptcy auction.
Subversion, people. Look into it.
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I was walking my dog down a dusty country road on a hot summer day. The road dipped down between two swamps, and there was a huge snapping turtle in the middle making its way across. My doofus dog went up to it, barking and dodging, doing the usual dog stuff. I warned him to stay away, but he insisted on doing the doggie dance around it. The snapper just sat with its legs and head retracted into its shell hissing the entire time.
My dog finally got tired of it, and raising his leg, took a lengthy piss on the turtle and then turned to go away. The turtle stretched its neck out about a foot and took a snapping “CLACK” at my dog’s tail, at which the dog quickly retired with short whining yelps. A quick investigation showed no real damage, just a triangle of “feathers” snapped from the bottom of his tail…he had escaped a severed tail by a half inch or so.
There’s a moral of that story similar to this one, but you’ll have to study to find it. ‘Tain’t worth the trouble.
This post and Blackwing’s comment both made my day a little better.