Rant #2,032: Happy Together

On Black Friday, as I had mentioned in a previous Rant, I only went to my local record shop to do any shopping that day.

I bought a couple of new and used records to add to my collection, and my money went the extra mile, because the store donated a percentage of whatever money it took in that day to charity, specifically some pet-related charities.

So bully for me, and double bully for the store, which is a very nice place to do shopping, whether on Record Store Day or any day.

Anyway, one of the records I bought was a classic single, with its picture sleeve, a song that I have loved since I first heard it on local WABC and WMCA Top-40 radio way back in early 1967.

The record is "Happy Together" by the Turtles, a record that spent three weeks at the No. 1 spot on the Billboard Hot 100 chart beginning in February of the year that spawned "The Summer of Love."

It is a bouncy little song, with kind of basic lyrics, about the love between two people, and back then, those two people were obviously a man and a woman.

Of course, it could have been the kind of love that is shared between two friends, siblings, parents and children ... you make it what you want to make it, I always thought it was between a man and a woman.

1967 was quite a year for music, and this record simply continued the Turtles' string of hits, which started with "It Ain't Me Babe" in 1965.

They were a West Coast band led by Howard Kaylan (nee Kaplan) and Mark Volman, which included a constantly changing cast of other bandmates. Kaylan and Volman have readily admitted that the band roster changed as their need for different recreational drugs changed, but the backbone of the band was Kaylan and Volman.

Their forte was "Sunshine Pop," or music that really had no underlying messages but made you feel good when you listened to it.

And "Happy Together" did just that.

Listening to it all these years later, you still get that "happy" vibe, and it is one of those songs that even if you can't sing, like me, you sing along anyway, because the song is so good and is so engrained in your memory.

I remember that in the 1980s, the Captain and Tennille had the nerve to cover this song, but they made it more of an angry song, and renamed it "Happy Together (A Fantasy)."

Their version completely lost the verve of the original, and happily, it only peaked in the middle ranges of the Hot 100. And we know what happened to the Captain and Tennille, so perhaps it was a forewarning of the storm clouds that were to be made public in their marriage 20 years later.

But back to the Turtles ... they were the epitome of Sunshine Pop, and they appeared on every variety show around at the time promoting this recording. And you had to smile when you saw them, because they seemed to be having so much fun doing so.

The song, and the Turtles, were infectious in a really good way. I mean, a band named the Turtles ... heck, turtles are so cute to begin with, and you just know that they were a great influence on what the producers wanted the Monkees to be.

But whatever the case, the Turtles went on to have quite a career, and when their flow of hits stopped, Mark Volman and Howard Kaylan moved on to Frank Zappa's Mothers of Invention, where they became the fabled "Fluorescent Leech and Eddie," better known as Flo and Eddie.

Fast forward to today, and Volman and Kaylan, or Flo and Eddie, headline the annual "Happy Together Tour," which has spotlighted the Turtles and other acts for the past few years, including the Cowsills and Buckinghams.

There were constant battles, legal and otherwise, for Kaylan and Volman to retain ownership of their recordings and the name of the "Turtles," and they have finally won out.

But even though it wasn't their first hit, "Happy Together" stands as their ultimate release. covered by many, including Dawn and the Nylons, but all inferior to the original release.

And more than 50 years after the fact, I finally got the single with its picture sleeve, so I am as "Happy Together" as I can be.