The story of one of the sunniest and funniest personalities to emerge in the world of rock, the Turtles‘ Mark Volman, is being told in a new book whose title is a play on the name of his biggest hit, “Happy Together”. However, unlike many memoirs, Volman’s own words comprise less than five percent of the text. Instead, this is a third-person oral history, much like Legs McNeil’s wonderful punk rock history opus from 2016, Please Kill Me.
Mark Volman’s Happy Forever is told almost entirely by 100 of his famous collaborators, rock scenesters, friends, and family, with the occasional sidebar from Mark himself. This six-decade-long narrative includes his rise to fame with the Turtles alongside his singing partner Howard Kaylan, their brilliant stint with Frank Zappa’s the Mothers of Invention, their solo career as Flo & Eddie, and their role as backup singers on mega-hits by Marc Bolan, Bruce Springsteen, Alice Cooper, the Ramones, Steely Dan and more.
There are also the lesser-known but no less interesting chapters of Volman’s fascinating life – his and Kaylan’s time as radio DJs, as voice-over actors for the animated children’s series The Care Bears, and Volan’s return to school and reinvention as a beloved college professor.
Mark Volman’s story begins in Southern California, in post-WWII boom times. He is turned on to music by his jazz-loving dad and Puccini’s 1904 opera, Madame Butterfly. Even though he is a girthy lad, Volman surfs, skateboards, and even heads down to Tijuana to take in bullfights. In high school, he communes with classmates like SNL star-to-be Phil Hartman, Charles Manson acolyte Squeaky Fromme, and his lifelong partner in harmony, Howard Kaylan.
The honey-voiced Kaylan will let the loquacious Volman join his successful surf band, the Crossfires, more for comic relief than his talents as a musician. They will soon change their style and hit the big time as the Turtles, scoring chart-topping hits like “Happy Together” and “Eleanor“. The Doors’ Ray Manzarek would call “Happy Together” “the perfect song”, an illustration of Volman and Kaylan’s “two-man barbershop quartet” style. He would add that the tune was an unlikely but direct inspiration for his band’s hit, “People Are Strange“. “Happy Together” was a song many bands, including the Happenings, the Vogues, and the Association – according to their singer Russ Giguere – would pass on recording before the Turtles made history with it.
Belying their somewhat uncool image, Mark Volman and the Turtles were at the center of late-’60s counterculture craziness. Volman was among the first to move into Laurel Canyon and the last of the classic rockers to leave in 1994. He would indulge in as many drugs as the next star – weed, acid, nitrous oxide, hashish, and cocaine – and hang with everyone from the Beatles to Jimi Hendrix. His band would do underground things like having one album – 1969’s Turtle Soup – produced by the Kinks’ Ray Davies. For their 1968 effort, The Turtles Present the Battle of the Band, they would wax an album where they played in eight different styles, including Hawaiian, folk, and surf music. In Happy Forever, the legendary producer Hal Willner would call it “one of the greatest obscure records of all time.”
Like many ’60s bands, the Turtles were plagued with the bad management contracts they signed early on. The Rascals’ Felix Cavaliere and Jan and Dean’s Dean Torrence address Volman’s and their band’s similar fates. Torrence says: “Nobody cared about contracts because they figured their rock-n-roll career would only last a couple of years.” Susan Cowsill says that while her band, the Cowsills, played up to 300 gigs a year like the Turtles, they also didn’t see a penny of the profits. As for taking bad managers to court, singer Ron Dante does the math: “You would spend $100,000 on lawyers to get $10,000 back.”
With their band name held hostage by their legal battles, Volman and Kaylan would significantly up their cool and street cred by joining Frank Zappa’s new band, the Mothers of Invention. Their experience in this comedy-centric version of Zappa’s the Mothers of Invention may be one Happy Forever‘s best parts. Zappa’s right-hand man, multi-instrumentalist Ian Underwood, and keyboardist Don Preston agree that this band may have been Zappa’s favorite. Preston says their first job “was to make Frank laugh” and no one did that quite like Mark Volman.
Happy Forever clarifies some myths about Zappa’s famous gig at and live album from the Fillmore East in 1971 with John Lennon and Yoko Ono. The event was not impromptu but rehearsed in three or four meetings. Kaylan adds that the proudest moment in his career may have come when he put Ono in a burlap bag on stage. Also new to this Zappaphile? Grace Slick and Joni Mitchell also guested during this run. Slick joined the band to sing while Mitchell recited her poem, “Penelope“, saying, “Penelope wants to fuck the sea”. Zappa’s widow, Gail, reveals that Volman was a frequent visitor during Zappa’s final days while battling prostate cancer. Volman says that Zappa accepted his fate and that his only regret was that he couldn’t eat pizza on the day he died. His diet was mostly pizza, coffee, and his beloved Winston cigarettes.
Mark Volman and Howard Kaylan’s solo career as Flo & Eddie is covered in depth in Happy Forever. During the ’70s, they were one of the most popular support acts on mega-tours by Alice Cooper, the Doobie Brothers, Jefferson Starship, and Stephen Stills. They made great records with superstar producers like Bob Ezrin – such as their second album Flo & Eddie (1973) and Illegal, Immoral and Fattening (1975), a great album for Columbia but not produced by Ezrin – which were, unfortunately, commercial disappointments to their label, Columbia Records. Flo and Eddie would call it quits when their guitarist Phil Reed jumped or was thrown out of a ten-story hotel window.
Producer Tony Visconti recounts the Turtles’ role as the secret sauce in T. Rex’s Marc Bolan hits like “Bang a Gong” and “Hot Love”, which include 16 tracks of backing vocals. The producer also shares how Bolan stiffed the duo on money for all their many contributions. Alice Cooper praises their vocal work on ten of his albums, and we also hear of their contributions to Bruce Springsteen’s biggest single, “Hungry Heart“. Another interesting fact is that their uncredited vocal work on Steely Dan’s demos may have played a big role in getting the band their first contract with ABC Records.
Notables like songwriter/actor Paul Williams discuss Mark Volman and his rocker counterparts’ long history of drug use. Williams claims that of the 48 appearances he did on The Tonight Show, he recalls maybe six. Volman and Kaylan were potheads who smoked before every show until Volman finally quit 15 years back. Volman paid for his profound coke addiction in the ’80s by doing under-the-table work singing on children’s records and for the Miss Universe broadcast. During this time, Volman and Kaylan did a lot of work in animation, doing voices and writing songs for the television series Strawberry Shortcake, Dirty Duck, and The Care Bears. Their work here gets high praise from Harry Shearer of The Simpsons and Spinal Tap fame.
When his music career slowed, Volman and his partner Kaylan spent a few years as popular DJs, first at KROQ in Los Angeles and later K-Rock in New York, alongside Howard Stern. His musical fortunes would turn when the Turtles became part of the annual summer-long Hippie Fest and Happy Together tours, alongside other ’60s notables like the Monkees and the Zombies. With the $300k a year he would earn from the summer tour, Volman had the resources to enter college in 1992 at age 45. He would earn bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. He would then begin teaching courses on music and the music business at Los Angeles Valley College and later Belmont University in Nashville, where he became the department head.
Mark Volman’s good friend, the Monkees’ Micky Dolenz, praises his hard-earned business smarts, especially his wrestling back the rights to his back catalog, something few of his contemporaries have managed. He also commends Volman’s astounding ability to survive by constantly reinventing himself. Dolenz also believes it is “criminal” that Volman, Kaylan, and their band are not in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
The final chapters of Mark Volman’s story deal with his successful battle against throat cancer and the unique chemistry of his longtime partnership with Howard Kaylan. Indeed, it lasted longer than their marriages (Kaylan has had five wives; Volman two), and it is a bit like old showbiz. Kaylan compares him and Volan to the Smothers Brothers, with a straight man and a stooge. The Doors’ Ray Manzarek believes they were very influenced by and came out of the tradition of subversive television kids’ show host and comedian Soupy Sales, while Hal Willner and Harry Shearer both think they picked up a lot from classic comedy duos like Dean Martin, Jerry Lewis, and Abbott and Costello.