The Story Behind The Song: ‘Happy Together’ by The Turtles
The idea that ‘Happy Together’ has a songwriter, an original version, or anything that makes it a piece of work created by the human hand is fairly mind-boggling. At this point, it feels more like a universal melody—a song everyone can hum but few can place. A track that has more in common with Beethoven’s ‘Fifth’ or Bach’s ‘Toccata and Fugue in D minor’. Yet, despite all that, ‘Happy Together’ by The Turtles is a product of, for the lack of a better term, trend-chasing.
‘Happy Together’ begins with Alan Gordon, a jobbing drummer who, in the mid-1960s, was the primary songwriter for the also-ran of garage rock, The Magicians. The band had a few regional hits, thanks to Gordon’s songwriting. However, he was cooking up something that would dwarf them all, based around a melody inspired by how often the band’s guitarist Allan ‘Jake’ Jacobs would spend tuning up during concerts.
He would fret an E chord and play each string from the top E downwards, shushing Gordon, who was ready to play all the while. For the guitar players among you, do the same and you’ll find yourself playing the first four notes of the main melody of ‘Happy Together’, but a few steps down. On the way to visit his father a few miles outside of Boston, Gordon had some time to kill and kept coming back to that descending pattern. After playing around with it and transposing it up three steps, he stumbled across one of the most infectious melodies of the 1960s.
Immediately, he knew that he had the bones of a hit, so he went to Jacobs to write the song with him. It was, after all, based on his tuning. Beginning a pattern of resistance that would continue well into the song’s development, Jacobs flatly refused. A little reminder for those of you who believe you have made some bad decisions in your life: one man turned down the chance to receive ‘Happy Together’ royalties. It could always be worse. Hence, Gordon wrote the song with Magicians vocalist Gary Bonner.
By this point, the writing was on the wall for The Magicians. Everyone, save for their drummer and singer, had lost interest in making music for a living. So, rather than risk giving a great song to a band that couldn’t care less, Bonner and Gordon decided to branch out into writing for other artists. They teamed up with Koppelman/Rubin Associates and cut a demo hawking their songwriting wares, led by the newly completed ‘Happy Together’. There was just one problem, though.
Clearly assembled as quickly as possible, the demo for ‘Happy Together’ was hot garbage. It consisted of Gordon on a barely tuned acoustic guitar, which he played with all the fluency of a lifelong drummer, and Bonner hollering the lyrics while slapping his thighs for percussion. It sounded like the work of rank amateurs, and the demo was naturally passed on by several different rock bands of the time, such as The Tokens, The Happenings, and The Vogues.
What Gordon and Bonner needed was a band desperate for a hit and willing to take a chance on them. This is exactly where The Turtles found themselves in late 1966. Just over a year previously, the band briefly reached the top of the world, riding the coattails of folk-rock’s explosion of success. Aping The Byrds so blatantly that they took a jangly Bob Dylan cover (‘It Ain’t Me Babe’) to the top ten in 1965, and even briefly spell their name as The Tyrtles, hilariously.
All this worked for a while, but at the end of late 1966, the wheels fell off the bandwagon. Their second album, 1966’s You Baby, tanked massively. A follow-up single, the actually pretty rad Warren Zevon-penned ‘Outside Chance’, didn’t even make the Billboard Hot 100. Their rhythm section quit the band, and they needed a radical change of sound and fast. Despite each Turtle agreeing that the demo sounded godawful, they could see the quality of the song buried deep within and decided to give Gordon and Bonner a chance.
On the understanding that this was the last chance saloon for The Turtles as a professional rock band with a record deal, everyone convened at Los Angeles’ Sunset Sound studios for the recording process—Gordon and Bonner included. The band were clearly done being a raucous folk-rock band; so, instead, their label White Whale threw everything at the song being a vaguely psychedelic chamber-pop hit. The kind The Beatles were churning out for fun on the previous August’s album Revolver.
Thanks to new bass player Chip Douglas proving himself to be a natural arranger for the woodwind and horn sections brought in to augment the band’s new sound, within 15 takes, the band had a workable version of the song in the can. It quickly became clear that they’d made the right choice. The song was glorious, and after a few more days spent working on vocals and mastering, they finished the song that would save the whole band from disaster.
What a song it is, too. ‘Happy Together’ is still astonishing well over half a century after its release. For an effervescent melody and arrangement bursting with so much colour and joy, it’s always a surprise to look at the lyrics and find the darkness within. After all, this isn’t a song about being happy with the person you love; it’s about how happy you could be if they only felt the same. It’s a song about corrosive, almost unsettling obsession, dressed like the big, unashamedly happy pop song it would knock off the top of the Billboard Hot 100—The Beatles’ ‘Penny Lane’.
Those glorious contradictions only add to its legacy. A deliriously happy song inspired by unrequited love with one of the most dazzling melodies in pop history coming from one of the worst demos ever recorded. Most of all, it’s a sign of how some of the most affecting pieces of music ever made can come from the most cut-throat of music industry machinations. It’s not often, but sometimes it’s all worth it.
