A Million Dollar Mistake: When The Turtles were rejected for being “too simple”
It’s never easy to spot a hit record, even when it’s directly in front of your face. There are occasionally those songs that come to an artist fully formed and are impossible to ignore from the moment they start, but some of the most celebrated tracks tend to be a bit of a slow burn, looking to grow on people the more they listen to until it’s one of the greatest things they’ve ever heard. While no one will call a song like ‘Happy Together’ by The Turtles forceful, it ended up being a bit too mellow for anyone to take it seriously at first.
When the song was first written, rock and roll was still in the midst of the British invasion. Fans and prospective musicians loved what they heard out of everyone from The Beatles to The Animals, and a young songwriter named Alan Gordon was all ready to throw his hat into the ring with the song that he thought would make him a star.
While working in his first band, The Magicians, Gordon put together the best melody that he could based on the noise that guitarist Jake Jacobs used to tune his guitar. Since the sound of tuning is the kind of noise that most musicians would rather forget, Jacobs almost automatically nixed the song because he thought it was too easy.
Discussing the song, Gordon remembered being told that it was too simplistic to create a song out of, saying, “I excitedly and in fairness asked Jake to complete the song with me as co-writer, but he refused, saying it was all ‘too simple’ for him to be involved, so my regular partner Gary [Bonner] then helped me with the finishing touches”.
They finally had a finished song in the can, but Jacobs wasn’t the only one not sold on the idea. Playing the song to various record companies and prospective bands, Gordon got turned down every single time, having the same complaint of the song still sounding like the kind of music that someone would come up with on a whim.
If you can’t make it sound like yourself, the next best thing was to reference other songs that were on the charts. After hearing the song’s skeleton, guitarist Rick Casale thought he would add a guitar part inspired by The Lovin’ Spoonful, explaining, “I came up with what I considered and called a Lovin’ Spoonful feel. I created the figure and all the other musicians, including [Gary] Bonner and Gordon, immediately understood the direction”.
By the time The Turtles got their hands on it, the song transformed into something completely different. Whereas the original may have been a laughable attempt by a kid to write his first song, there’s a lot more nuance in the 1960s classic than most people realise if you look at how the harmony works.
Considering how much this is celebrated as a love song, the song fluctuates between major and minor quite often, as if the couple in question is unstable or slowly turning a corner in their relationship. While it’s likely that none of the writers were thinking along these lines when they wrote the song, ‘Happy Together’ is still a fun slice of 1960s pop to work as both a time capsule and a soundtrack to any movie sequence that needs a song about someone falling in love for the first time.
