Page 34 - The NOISE December 2015

the turtles: part two
continued from last month
The next album Turtle Soup (produced by Ray Davies of The Kinks) was a non-event with no hit singles, and turned out to be The Turtles’ last. After the group imploded in 1970,
Volman and Kaylan sued White Whale for unpaid royalties. The label promptly declared bankruptcy, and a tedious court battle ensued.
Not long after the end of the only band they had ever been in, Mark and Howard ran into Frank Zappa, who invited them to join The Mothers of Invention. Zappa had mocked The Turtles by name in the liner notes of Freak Out! but they never took it personally. Frank made fun of everyone.
By 1970, The Turtles were no longer remembered as hip. They sang dippy tunes for kids, clowned around and smiled too much. They didn’t have any ten minute raga guitar jams or political lyrics. They weren’t heavy.
But Frank Zappa was definitely heavy, and his acceptance of Volman and Kaylan into The Mothers not only showed faith in their musicianship, but also gave them some much-needed cool points. Plus, Mark and Howard knew how to laugh at themselves. This lineup was known as the “Vaudeville Mothers,” an apt nickname considering Frank had just hired two of the biggest goofballs on the West Coast (three, counting Turtles’ bassist Jim Pons, who was briefly a Mother).
Volman and Kaylan discovered they had a unique legal problem. Due to the imbroglio with White Whale, the two were not only prevented from using The Turtles’ name on albums, they were temporarily unable to use their own names, forcing them to adopt pseudonyms for their new gig. And so Mark Volman and Howard Kaylan morphed into The Phlorescent Leech and Eddie. The invention of their alter-egos gave Volman and Kaylan the opportunity to needle their contemporaries (and the music scene) further. Frank encouraged Mark and Howard to be as audacious and offensive as possible when in character, and they were ready to step up (or down, as it were).
Onstage and on LP, Flo and Eddie picked up sleazy women, ingested every drug in sight, and generally acted like clichéd pampered 1970s rockers on the road. In one bit, Flo the groupie tells Eddie the rock star she can’t get hot for him until he sings his big hit single, whereupon The Mothers launch into
ththee
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Flo & eddie, circa 1970s; warren Zevon, collector’s wikipedia.org, amaZon.com
a sarcastic “Happy Together,” with Mark and Howard joyously belting out their #1 like it was 1967 all over. Flo and Eddie stayed with Zappa through four albums, over
100 shows, and one insane film, 200 Motels.
Warren Zevon aimlessly bummed around L.A. after leaving White Whale, and then accepted an offer from Imperial Records to make an LP. Wanted Dead or Alive (released in 1969 and credited to just Zevon) was an ambitious, odd and uncommercial debut. A short time later, Imperial went bankrupt and Warren’s first album was out of print a scant few weeks after its appearance. Zevon lay low for years, writing jingles, playing keyboards in the Everly Brothers’ touring band, and stockpiling some rather amazing songs. During this period, Warren shared an apartment with a pre- Fleetwood Mac Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks.
In 1976, old friend Jackson Browne helped Zevon land a contract with David Geffen’s Asylum label. Warren referred to his self-titled Asylum debut as his first album. He viewed Wanted Dead or Alive and the lyme & cybelle singles as trash and rarely mentioned them in interviews. Old friend Linda Ronstadt covered several of Warren’s tunes, including “Poor Poor Pitiful Me” (she left out the S&M verse). 1978’s Excitable Boy contained many of his best-loved songs, such as “Lawyers, Guns and Money,” “Roland The Headless Thompson Gunner” and the immortal “Werewolves of London.” The album marked the true arrival of Warren Zevon, superstar.
Warren’s life was up and down, in and out of the public eye, full of loneliness, parties, bottoming out, scores of lovely ladies, loud rock & roll, alcohol, drugs, bad luck, undiagnosed OCD and embarrassing public incidents. He cleaned up in 1987 and continued his idiosyncratic career to a core of devoted fans, many of whom were famous names like Martin Scorsese and Hunter S. Thompson.
After leaving The Mothers, Mark Volman and Howard Kaylan toured and recorded several albums as Flo and Eddie, hosted a radio program and began a lucrative second career as backup vocalists, appearing on hits by T. Rex (“Bang a Gong”), Bruce Springsteen (“Hungry