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Shell Shocked
My Life with the Turtles, Flo & Eddie, and Frank Zappa, etc . . .
by Howard Kaylan with
Jeff Tamarkin
Backbeat Books
“Come on, John. Leave the candles alone. You’re gonna start a bloody fire in here.”
“I can’t see anything down here, Paul. It’s as dark as a hooker’s heart.”
Shortly before the release of “Sgt. Pepper’s” solidified the Beatles’ position as the most admired band on the planet, that was McCartney and Lennon at a London club called the Speakeasy in 1967, with John “under the table taking Polaroid pictures up the skirts of his female companions, while Paul lent a hand.”
The fly on the wall for this perverted piece of rock history was Howard Kaylan, singer (along with musical partner Mark Volman) for the Turtles, whose biggest hit was that year’s “Happy Together.”
Kaylan, a proud pothead who took full advantage of the sex-and-drugs ’60s, was a much sought-after singer who befriended, got wasted and shared women with the musical gods of the era, recalling however much of that time he can in this breezy tell-all.
Lennon’s leering occurred just hours after the Turtles landed in London and friend Graham Nash whisked them off to meet the Fab Four.
When Kaylan first saw them, McCartney was joining his writing partner under the table to “illuminate the proceedings with a disposable lighter” as his girlfriend, Jane Asher, stormed out in disgust.
When Nash made introductions, both Lennon and McCartney complimented Kaylan, and they all performed an impromptu a cappella rendition of “Happy Together.”
But Lennon soon turned dark, telling Kaylan his record was “sappy” and sounded “a bit light in the loafers.”
When a distressed Kaylan protested, “We’re just trying to be the American version of you!” Lennon laid into him, sarcastically noting, “That’s not bloody likely, is it?”
Then Lennon, looking over the band like a hunter picking his next kill, settled on their rhythm guitarist, Jim Tucker, who was unfortunately adorned in a scruffy brown suit.
“Bad suit, son. And an even worse haircut,” Lennon said. “Did you tell your barber to give you a Beatle cut? It’s awful, man. You give rhythm players a bad name.”
Tucker was crushed, awkwardly replying, “You’re like a god to me, man. You guys changed my life.”
But Lennon continued on, calling Tucker “stupid” and worse. The dejected guitarist finally told the Beatle he was an a – – hole and stormed out. Following their few British shows, Tucker quit the band and “never played music again.”
More enjoyable for Kaylan was his time singing for Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention. In the book, he recalls one night after a 1971 show in Berkeley when “a call came in: orgy in Frank’s room!”
When the singer got there, he found two stewardesses naked, “each on one of two double beds,” surrounded by the entire band, the crew, and a groupie he says Zappa spent several years with.
It quickly became a sexual free-for-all where “the stewardesses were more than courteous and accommodated three or four guys at a time.” Kaylan called the night “great fun” and a bonding experience for the band. “It felt like we were a club now,” he writes. “We had, for better or worse, a shared secret, and nothing brings a band closer than a shared secret. Ask Fleetwood Mac.”
The book is filled with such tales of misbehavior and decadence, including how Ike Turner kept a “giant Fabergé egg” on his mixing console “filled to the tip with cocaine,” and how singer Tom Jones, whom the Turtles toured with, taunted the “screaming teenage girls” who surrounded their bus.
“He pulled out his legendary-for-good-reason schlong, which he had nicknamed Wendell,” Kaylan writes, “and waved it at the befuddled girls, who hooted, hollered and pushed their friends aside to get a look at the one-eyed monster.”
Kaylan even once snorted cocaine off of Abraham Lincoln’s desk in the White House, when the Turtles performed there at the request of President Nixon’s daughter Tricia. (The band also found themselves with Secret Service guns pointed at their heads, when a metronome in one of their bags accidentally turned on.)
So many rock memoirs that spotlight this sort of debauchery take a jaundiced later look at the misjudgments of youth. Kaylan, who proudly admits to still smoking pot at age 65, conveys no such regret.
“When it’s all over and the piper plays ‘Happy Together’ one last time,” he writes, “I want to kiss my wife, hug my dog, take a giant toke and smile my way through the obsidian void.”