Subversion. You’re Really Going To Have To Learn It

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.

They Showed Us… Something

It’s hard to tell from such a woolly, potato-cam video, but for a while, you might think The Turtles were actually performing You Showed Me live in that video. The guitar and bass have cords trailing off somewhere. They might be plugged into something. If the drummer isn’t really playing, he certainly remembers the drum part from the record exactly. I didn’t spot any misalignments. You have to wait for the outro for your definitive clue, Watson. The drummer loses interest and stands up while the song is still fading out.

It’s not an unusual question to ask. It was quite common back in the day for bands to appear on teevee shows of all kinds and mime their hits. It was part of the little personality cults bands have used as a substitute for talent for the last 75 years or so. Of course the Turtles had all sorts of talent, but they’d be lumped in with all the other acts in the 60s in the producer’s schedule. They wouldn’t have had any trouble performing it live, and probably would have brought something new to the table. That’s another reason the teevee producers would have them lip sync. Anything could break out on stage with these weirdos. Mark Volman is wearing chaps for some reason. Can’t chance it.

According to the ToYoube comments, the girls arrayed on stage are Miss Teen USA contestants. That looks quite believable. They’re well equipped with late sixties togs, and rocking the requisite bumpits and water buffalo hairdos. They don’t flinch when the camera focuses right on their faces. It’s a mark of the breed. One commenter claimed to have married one of them. Well, internet commenters are always like that. Informative, and married to beauty queens, who adore them for their Congressional Medals of Honor.

If you’re young, and you’ve tuned in to get an explanation of what the Turtles were up to back then, you’ve come to the wrong place. Absolutely uncategorizable.