How The Turtles’ big 1967 hit could have easily been their last song
The opening melody of The Turtles’ ‘Happy Together’ is one of those that, since its release at the beginning of 1967, has become synonymous with the psychedelic age; a folk-meets-rock song with a pop sensibility that harnessed an underlying tragedy in its lyrics, it stands as a timeless classic.
The song also made The Turtles a defining band of the latter half of the 1960s, where rock ‘n’ roll was concerned, and while they would be broken up by 1970, their initial few years together yielded moments of commercial success matched with longer periods of strife. While ‘Happy Together’ became The Turtles’ signature, it was not written by any of the members; rather, it was written by two members of the garage rock band The Magicians, drummer and songwriter Alan Gordon, and vocalist Garry Bonner.
Its unforgettable melody was inspired by their guitarist Allan ‘Jake’ Jacobs’ guitar tuning onstage, and formed the backbone of the song’s story of unreciprocated love. The duo shopped the song to numerous pop-rock bands of the time, to no avail, until they found the then-struggling California band, The Turtles, who were suffering under the weight of financial and personal burdens. They’d scored three early top 40 hits, but their next five singles didn’t match their prior success. A couple of lineup changes followed, but their lack of progress on the charts signalled something of an unstable future. However, the demo of ‘Happy Together’ eventually found them when they needed it most.
Vocalist Howard Kaylan remembered the moment as sifting through demos submitted by music publishing companies; vocalist and guitarist Mark Volman recalled being approached by Bonner and Gordon with the prospect of new material, sending over the demo soon after. The demo acetate, as Kaylan described it, was “scratchy and sticky”, nearly unlistenable after being sent around to various bands.
The Turtles attempted to parse through the noise anyway, giving the simple recording of Bonner’s acoustic guitar and Gordon’s falsettos a chance. There was a glimpse of promise in the melody and, regardless of how ‘Happy Together’ fell into The Turtles’ laps, the song was meant to be.
“[The demo] only included a singer and a guitar, but we could hear the melody and chorus,” Volman explained, quoted in the 2017 book Groovy: When Flower Power Bloomed in Pop Culture. “We were very careful because we had had those records that had been done poorly, and we needed something to be great. It could have easily been our last recording. After all, how many failures were we going to be given by a small, independent record label?”
To avoid the upset of their label, White Whale, The Turtles asked that Bonner and Gordon fly from New York to California and perform their song for them at the Beverly Hills Hotel. “They sounded even worse than the demo, but it didn’t matter,” Kaylan recalled in his 2013 memoir Shell Shocked, “We wanted this song, and they and their publishers [Koppleman-Rubin] certainly wanted us to have it.”
As many bands do, The Turtles took ‘Happy Together’ on the road, testing out the audience’s reactions to the tune, which were positive, and deciding to finally record the song in earnest in January 1967. With no session musicians, as their label could not afford them, The Turtles played on the recording themselves, with an orchestra of horns and woodwinds behind them.
In a final effort to save themselves from potential obscurity, The Turtles transformed ‘Happy Together’ from a somewhat hopeful demo to a masterful psych-pop arrangement that maintained a cinematic form of storytelling through song.
