The Turtles: Happy Together (1991)

The best music documentary you've never seen

Greetings, Jagged Time Lapsers!

Okay, so the title of today’s newsletter is slightly hyperbolic — and if you’ve been a friend of mine since the 1990s, there’s a good chance you have actually seen the music doc The Turtles: Happy Together, because there were a few years back then when I wouldn’t have let you set foot in my apartment without forcing you to sit down and watch it with me. But having watched it again this past weekend, I’m hereby climbing back into my pulpit and proselytizing on its behalf…

But before we get into it, let me also say that while I am admittedly a latecomer to Andrew Hickey’s excellent podcast and blog A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs, I am very much an ardent convert. My pal Adam Dorn (better known as the brilliantly funky Mocean Worker) turned me on to Hickey’s podcast series last month, and it’s been my constant companion lately while driving or cleaning the house. Episode #155, on The Turtles and their massive 1967 hit “Happy Together,” is what sent me back to the Turtles doc for the first time in over a decade.

---

---

Directed by Rhino Records co-founder Harold Bronson, and originally released by Rhino on VHS (and about a decade later on DVD, albeit without any extras), The Turtles: Happy Together was clearly shot on a shoestring budget. The editing is fairly artless, the studio lighting does none of the interview subjects any favors, and no thought was apparently given to matching the visual aesthetics of the few segments with bigger-name interviews (Ray Manzarek, Graham Nash and Stephen Stills) with the rest of the doc. And yet, The Turtles: Happy Together remains one of the most entertaining and informative music docs I have ever had the pleasure of watching.

As I’ve written here before, I love a good music doc — and I am constantly frustrated by the plethora of awful, time-wasting ones out there on Tubi and elsewhere that have somehow gotten made and distributed despite not including any actual music or footage of the artist in question. But even more frustrating are the potentially great docs like Boom: A Film About The Sonics, which features interviews with every single member of the legendary band but utterly squanders the opportunity to go deeper into their music — or Have You Got It Yet?: The Story of Syd Barrett and Pink Floyd, which takes perhaps the archetypal tale of pop star burnout (along with some incredible, groundbreaking music) and somehow still manages to sail wide of the goal, thanks to a face-palming reliance upon impressionistic dramatizations and witless interviews with current artists who have nothing remotely interesting to add.

These not-quite-baked efforts are especially maddening to me, because once an artist receives a relatively high-profile documentary treatment, the odds of other, better docs being made about them instantly become incredibly slim. (Unless, of course, the artist in question is The Beatles; just as filmmakers will always find a taker for yet another documentary about New York Yankees, there will always be another Beatles-related doc somewhere in the pipeline.)

I had a text chat on this very topic a few months back with my pal Rachel Lichtman, the brilliantly twisted mind behind the alternate-universe 1970s TV network Programme 4, who has also done a fair amount of time in the music doc trenches. (Her wonderful 2014 documentary on Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart, The Guys Who Wrote ‘Em, has sadly never seen commercial release due to various industry roadblocks.) Some of Rachel’s points from that conversation have really stuck with me, and she has given me permission to share them here:

“It feels like we are really at a cultural crossroads where responsible archival, biographical and/or ‘canonizing’ of any 20th century subject is absolutely critical, as the internet turns it all into Sgt. Pet Sounds and the Spiders from Aja… Details matter, docs matter, and holding folks accountable matters, especially as the churn-outs with money (or, say, legacy-fixers with estate approval) are becoming accepted as the last word on an artist or band.”

Amen to all that. And this is why, as both a longtime Redd Kross fan and the co-author of Now You’re One of Us: The Incredible Story of Redd Kross, I was so delighted that Andrew Reich legitimately knocked it out of the park with his documentary Born Innocent: The Redd Kross Story. You only really get one chance to make a definitive doc about a band that never had an actual hit record, and Andrew’s film thankfully totally captures the spirit and personalities behind Redd Kross, putting Jeff and Steven McDonald’s improbable journey and fantastic music across in a way that both hardcore fans and newcomers can totally appreciate. (FYI, if you haven’t seen it yet, Born Innocent is now available to rent and stream at Vimeo.com.)

Back in 1991, The Turtles: Happy Together accomplished the same neat trick, albeit with considerably less technical polish and only a handful of interview subjects. The four main things that this doc has going for it are 1) great music, 2) great footage, 3) a compelling story, and 4) a couple of band members who tell their tale in an incredibly entertaining manner. And really, what else do you need?

I had been a casual Turtles fan since first hearing my Aunt Geri’s vintage 45 of “Happy Together” in the summer of 1978, and I bought my first Turtles LP (Rhino’s oddly-sequenced but jam-packed 14-song compilation The Turtles Greatest Hits) in the spring of 1985, around the same time that I was starting to really get into other such mid/late-sixties US pop groups as The Byrds, The Lovin’ Spoonful and The Young Rascals. I loved the Turtles’ sunshine-drenched harmonies and the intoxicating optimism that seemed to permeate most of their hits — an optimism that seemed rooted in defiance of the turbulent times those songs were written and recorded in, as opposed to the denial of them. But I knew little about the group beyond what was contained in that Rhino comp’s liner notes, and I went all the way through college thinking of The Turtles as a “mere” sixties pop band, albeit one with a perhaps slightly subversive sense of humor.

That perception began to shift in 1990, when I found a copy of The Turtles Present the Battle of the Bands, the 1968 album in which The Turtles assumed a different band “identity” for each of the LP’s dozen songs, and dressed up accordingly for the hilarious photos included in the album’s gatefold. These guys clearly smoked a lot of pot, and came up with some pretty conceptual ideas in the process… and as my own band spent countless bong sessions talking about making a film that would tell the history of rock music through a series of Don’t Look Back-style vignettes wherein everyone from Tom Jones to Levon Helm to Richard Thompson to Alice Cooper guitarist Glen Buxton verbally abused Donovan for his various personal and musical shortcomings, I could totally relate. (For the record, we all loved Donovan; we just thought that the more twee aspects of his shtick offered endless opportunities for comedic riffing.)

The U.S. Teens featuring Raoul, singers of the song “Battle of the Bands”.

But it wasn’t until our drummer brought home a VHS copy of The Turtles: Happy Together that I fully began to understand the greatness of The Turtles. Though the documentary features interviews with most of the band’s members (co-founding guitarist Al Nichols and final-lineup drummer John Seiter either couldn’t or wouldn’t participate), the undisputed stars of the show are singers Mark Volman and Howard Kaylan, a.k.a. Flo and Eddie. Aside from being tremendously talented vocalists who sang on post-Turtles records by everyone from Frank Zappa and T. Rex to Bruce Springsteen and Psychedelic Furs, the duo have also hosted various radio shows over the years. They definitely possess the gift of gab — and man do they have some stories to tell…

The arc of The Turtles’ story is pretty similar to that of dozens of other Southern California bands of the era — they started off as a surf instrumental band (The Crossfires), then switched to vocal numbers once The Beach Boys and The Beatles began dominating the pop charts. Unlike most of their local peers, however, they managed to score eight US Top 20 singles between 1965 and 1969, five of which made the Top 10, and one of which (“Happy Together”) knocked “Penny Lane” off the top of the US charts in March 1967. Their demise, however, was all too typical: A fatal combination of tensions between band members, delusions of artistic grandeur, fights with their record company (L.A. indie label White Whale, which treated the band like the proverbial golden goose), a truckload of lawsuits and widespread managerial malfeasance caused The Turtles to break up in 1970.

Just about every plot point — from the band’s accidental formation to their painful demise — is vividly recounted in The Turtles: Happy Together with a hilarious story or two and punctuated by either performance footage or promotional videos, all of which are allowed to play through in their entirety. Though I’m particularly fond of the promo clip for their 1967 single “She’s My Girl” (which is included here in all its color-saturated psychedelic glory), it’s the performance footage — most notably a stomping live rendition of “Elenore” — that really demonstrates how unique The Turtles were for their era. Not only were they all really strong musicians and singers in their own right, but the onstage interplay between perennial class clown Volman and the more strait-laced Kaylan really owed more to (as Andrew Hickey astutely points out in his 500 songs episode) Louis Prima and Keely Smith than, say, John Lennon and Paul McCartney.

They’re not ashamed to admit that they owed plenty of other stuff to The Beatles, though — the Turtles’ Fab Four worship was so intense that bassist Jim Pons even admits onscreen to a brief period in which he actually thought he was “The Walrus”. The story of the band’s surreal London encounter with John and Paul is just one of the documentary’s many highlights, though my personal favorite anecdote involves their experience touring with Tom Jones and his irrepressible buddy “Wendell”. (I shall not spoil it for you by saying anything more.)

But perhaps the most memorable segment of The Turtles: Happy Together is the part where Volman and Kaylan get up in front of a dry-erase board and attempt to chart their succession of disastrous managerial dealings. Though filmed in the early 1990s about a group from the 1960s, this cautionary — if screamingly funny — music industry lesson nonetheless remains totally relevant today.

Not only did my initial viewing of The Turtles: Happy Together give me a significantly greater understanding and appreciation of The Turtles and their music, but Volman and Kaylan’s wiseass sense of humor was so familiar to me that they felt like my long-lost hip Jewish uncles — an impression that was further reinforced over a decade later, when I interviewed Kaylan for a Guitar World piece on Marc Bolan that sadly never ran. (I really hope I can unearth the tape of it one of these days; if I do, I will definitely share the transcript here.)

The Turtles: Happy Together has been out of print for years, and to my knowledge has never been available on streaming services, so I got really excited last week when I found that someone had uploaded a full version of it on YouTube. (Well, mostly full; this version runs for 82 minutes, while the original ran for 90, at least according to the original VHS box. And I can think of at least one interview segment from the original that has gone missing here.) I decided that watching the doc would be a great way to celebrate my birthday, as it had always brought me such joy in the past. And since my girlfriend loves music docs and shares my goofy sense of humor, I figured Happy Together would be right up her alley.

I worried, though: It had been at least a decade since I’d seen the doc; would it still hold up? Did my fond feelings for it have more to do with the carefree time of my life where I initially watched than the doc’s actual contents? And would it resonate at all with my girlfriend, who by her own admission liked the Turtles’ hits just fine but had no prior awareness of their origins or personalities?

I needn’t have been concerned. Even with the YouTube dub’s less-than-pristine visual quality, everything I remembered loving about The Turtles: Happy Together — the clips, the stories, the general absurdity — still comes across beautifully, and Shannon absolutely loved it. I think you will love it, too; we could all use a serious infusion of laughter and joy in these dark days, which this doc definitely delivers. And despite the film’s technical shortcomings, every budding documentarian should give it a watch as well, simply because this is how you tell a goddamn music story.

Enjoy!

---