Kaylan and Vollman might not have had any real ideas of their own, but they knew what to take. Instead, they were using those guys’ innovations and putting them in service of the sort of silly no-stakes love songs that the Beatles or the Beach Boys might’ve recorded a few years earlier in their career. They weren’t obsessive creators like Brian Wilson, Paul McCartney, or John Lennon. The Beatles and the Beach Boys were getting into using the studio as an instrument, challenging the very idea of pop music by experimenting and pushing at the accepted boundaries of rock ‘n’ roll. The funny thing about “Happy Together” is that it came out in the midst of this psychedelic awakening in pop music. It’s the sound of the sun bursting through the clouds. The verses are the tension, and the chorus is an insane and ridiculous charge of relief. “Happy Together” has exultant regal horn-bursts and euphorically dazed backing vocals and tootling woodwinds and martial drum-cracks and a sly little guitar riff. Either way, the Turtles took that simple song, piled lush orchestration all over it, and turned it into an absolutely monstrous pop record.īassist Chip Douglas, who had only just joined the Turtles, arranged “Happy Together,” and he went all the way in with it.
You could hear it as a straight love song, or you could hear it as a song written from the point of view of a man pining for a woman, knowing they’ll never get together. “Happy Together” is a song so simple that it could be a nursery rhyme. When they found a song called “Happy Together,” it all fit. But the 1967 version of the Turtles, starving for a hit, were in the process of making themselves over as a happy band. Legend has it that they wore their demo acetate of “Happy Together” down, just by playing it for people in the hopes that they’d record it. They had tried, again and again, to sell “Happy Together” to somebody, anybody. “Happy Together” had come from Garry Bonner and Alan Gordon, two songwriters who were in a Boston band called the Magicians. Because without that thirst, we don’t get “Happy Together.” (For the Turtles, it was “It Ain’t Me Babe,” and they took it to #8.) The Turtles spent the next two years chasing hits, recording the songs that the Byrds had turned down. Like the Byrds, the Turtles had their first hit when they covered a Bob Dylan song in 1965.
Even in 1965, though, that turned out to be too obvious. Initially, they called themselves the Tyrtles, following the lead of the Beatles and the Byrds. When they learned that surf music wasn’t really popping off anymore, they tried folk-rock out.
The Los Angeles teenagers Howard Kaylan and Mark Vollman formed a surf-rock band called the Crossfires in 1965. All the Turtles ever cared about was making money while making music. In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present.
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