JANUARY 1967 (48 YEARS AGO) The Turtles: Happy Together b/w Like The Seasons (White Whale WW-244) 45 single is released in the US. Happy Together is a song from The Turtles album of the same name. Released in January 1967, the song knocked The Beatles Penny Lane out of the number one slot for three weeks on the Billboard Hot 100. It was the groups only chart-topper. Happy Together reached #12 on the UK Singles Chart in April 1967. The song was written by Garry Bonner and Alan Gordon, former members of a band known as The Magicians. The song had been rejected a dozen times before it was offered to The Turtles, and the demo acetate was worn out. When performing the song on television, Mark Volman commonly played a different instrument not present in the song for each appearance. On Ed Sullivan he played a trumpet, on the Smothers Brothers a piano, and on others a French horn. This could be seen as a wink to the audience that they were lip-syncing, a common practice for 1960s television. The B-side, Like The Seasons, was written by Warren Zevon SONG REVIEW Denise Sullivan, allmusic Striving to break from the vacuous Top 40 mold in which theyd been cast and swept up by the movement toward serious, Beatles/Beach Boys conceptual pop, the Turtles chucked all their pop, folk, psychedelia, and Zombies-style harmony expertise into one song. As legend has it, a demo of Happy Together, recorded in a sparse, acoustic guitar and handclap arrangement, was passed on by a number of popular artists of the day only to be unearthed by the Turtles. Happy Together has literally bounced through decades of AM-car-radio-play unharmed, perhaps owing to its multi-layers of contradictions: Teetering near the brink of bubblegum, it rises above it; its a rock & roll song with a martial beat; the vocal is desperate and strident -- convincing the object of affection that the couple will be happy, dammit!; the horns are buried, yet entirely essential. And then there are the flourishes like the sound of a tinkling piano very audible after the line if I should call you up, invest a dime, mimicking a phone line. Plus, theres an in-joke (an added bonus for a good single), when the question how is the weather? pops up during the final refrain of so happy together. Though there were more Turtle hits and Mark Volman and Howard Kaylan, as Flo & Eddie, formed an enduring vocal partnership in the years after their groups egregious breakup, this is a most sublime slice of pop heaven. Happy Together was pop perfection and, in fact, was never beat in Turtleland -- it was their first and last number one. The Turtles
Posted on: Mon, 19 Jan 2015 01:20:00 +0000
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