1965: The Most Revolutionary Year in Music (32 page)

Suddenly, their old friend Barry McGuire was jetting up the charts with “Eve of Destruction.” A couple of years earlier, when Phillips lived at the Earl Hotel, McGuire would come by and jam with him and Roger McGuinn. Cass knew him, too, and called him up and asked him if he needed backing vocalists. They went to see him in LA and played him songs such as “California Dreamin’,” which Phillips had written two years earlier in New York, in the dead of winter, waking Michelle up to help him finish it. McGuire wanted to record it with them backing him.

Mogul Lou Adler heard them and quickly decided to become their manager-producer. Originally they were going to release “Go Where You Wanna Go” as their first single. But as the group worked out their vocal counterpart for McGuire’s version of “California Dreamin’,” Adler realized he had struck gold and told them that
that
had to be their single. Apologetically, they asked McGuire for it back. He was bummed, but understood. Producer Adler replaced McGuire’s vocal track with Doherty’s on top of the Wrecking Crew’s instrumentation and added a flute. Now they needed a name, and the foursome picked theirs after they heard that the Hells Angels called their ladies Mamas.

The single was the first of Phillips’s West Coast anthems, and after its release in December, it inspired countless to pack up and follow their freedom. But just as “California Dreamin’” was becoming a reality, Michelle and Doherty almost blew the whole thing apart. During Cass’s birthday celebration, Phillips and Cass passed out. Wordlessly, Doherty led Michelle into the apartment next door, where they made love. The Monday after, the foursome signed the deal with Adler’s company, Dunhill. That Wednesday, Phillips caught his bandmate and wife in flagrante delicto.
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Somehow the band kept going. Phillips and Michelle moved to a different part of town. But Doherty said, “Michelle had found a little independence and could go out and have a fling with whoever she wished at that point, because her husband had just condoned the fact that she was having a dalliance with me, for reasons known only to himself. So she started seeing other people, and now she’s got two guys, me and John, going, [heartbreaking moan] ‘Ahh, ohh…’ She’s seeing other people, and he can’t really get into it with her. I can’t really get into it with her because of the group thing, and they’re husband and wife. Meanwhile, I’m standing back, and Cass is going, ‘You son of a bitch…’ It was a rather
touchy
time.”
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Another day, Phillips tried to sneak up on Michelle and Doherty and catch them, but Michelle spied him approaching and ran off. When she sneaked back, she heard Phillips saying, “I understand, Denny. I understand what a little
temptress
she is.” Michelle recalled, “I thought, ‘
Wait
a minute. Now it’s all my fault?’ They were talking very manfully, like buddies.”
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Cass, meanwhile, had long carried an unrequited torch for Doherty and was furious with Michelle, though she eventually forgave her. Cass proposed to Denny, but he declined. Doherty wrote the melody to “I Saw Her Again Last Night,” and then Phillips penned lyrics about Doherty and Michelle’s infidelity, Doherty said, “Because [John] wanted me to sing it onstage every night. ‘Here you are—sing about it!’”
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Even Fleetwood Mac twelve years later would have trouble matching the Mamas and the Papas’ twisted interband dynamics. And Michelle hadn’t even started her affair with Byrd cofounder Gene Clark yet. By that time, “California Dreamin’” would be tied with “The Ballad of the Green Berets” for top-selling song of 1966.

*   *   *

“Folk-rock” implied anticommercial authenticity,
so it was ironic that much of the music was performed by the West Coast’s slick studio pros, the Wrecking Crew. They played on the tracks of Barry McGuire, Simon and Garfunkel, the Mamas and the Papas, Sonny and Cher, and the Byrds’ first single—not to mention the Beach Boys, Elvis Presley, Frank and Nancy Sinatra, Dean Martin, Johnny Rivers, and the Righteous Brothers.

Bassist Carol Kaye was just about the only female in the male-dominated scene. Brian Wilson called her the greatest bass player he’d ever met. Though Wilson started out as the Beach Boys’ bassist, in 1964 he’d started delegating that task on records. The Beach Boys bass had a profound effect on Paul McCartney: “It set me off on a period I had then for a couple of years of nearly always writing quite melodic bass lines.”
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Still, Kaye has always been quick to credit, “those were 99 percent [Wilson’s] notes.”
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Along with pop songs, Kaye also played bass on TV theme songs such as
The Addams Family
.

In May through July, the U.S. No. 1 chart bounced from tracks played by the Crew (“Help Me, Rhonda”) to tracks played by Motown’s session team, the Funk Brothers (“Back in My Arms Again,” “I Can’t Help Myself”) to the Wrecking Crew again (“Mr. Tambourine Man”). Ultimately, of the twenty-seven U.S. No. 1 hits of the year, the Crew and the Brothers tied, with six No. 1s each. (The other Crew songs were “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’,” “This Diamond Ring,” “Eve of Destruction,” and “I Got You Babe.”)

But while the session musicians could still flourish in the new era, Bob Dylan’s anti-authority, increasingly surreal lyrics made the straightforward material of the hit factory the Brill Building seem old-fashioned. And Dylan’s rise proved you didn’t need to be a heartthrob to perform your own material. His and the Beatles’ examples undermined the old-school producer’s job of picking a pretty face to sing someone else’s song.

The Saturday Evening Post
assigned Al Aronowitz, the reporter who’d introduced the Beatles to Dylan, a story on girl groups. During the course of writing it, he became friends with the Brill’s songwriters Gerry Goffin and Carole King. The Beatles had wanted to meet the husband-and-wife team, so in mid-August, when Aronowitz, en route to a party in the Beatles’ suite at New York’s Warwick Hotel, saw King on the street, he invited her along. King’s introduction to the Fabs didn’t go as smoothly as Dylan’s.

She arrived at the crowded party knowing, as she wrote in her memoir,
A Natural Woman
, that “early in their career Paul and John reportedly had said that they hoped to become the Goffin and King of the United Kingdom. I had taken this to mean not that they hoped to marry each other and live in New Jersey but that they aspired to be successful songwriters.”
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When she introduced herself to McCartney, he warmly listed off all the songs by her and her husband that the Beatles respected. But when King found Lennon, in a different section of the suite, stoned, and surrounded by women, he made “a remark so disrespectful that I cannot remember what he said, but I remember how I felt. I had proffered a face of friendship, and he had responded with a figurative slap. Had I been mature enough to realize that pushing the edge of decorum was a reflex for John at that stage of his life, I might not have taken it so personally. But I was very young, and I took it very personally.”
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She left the party. Goffin later characterized it as “John made come-ons to Carole, but in a kidding way.”
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When King met Lennon again eleven years later she asked why he’d been so rude. “D’you really want to know?” he said after a pause. “It’s because I was intimidated. You and Gerry were sooch [
sic
] great songwriters.”
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It didn’t go well with Dylan, either, when the couple went backstage to meet him after his Carnegie Hall show on October 1. Goffin told Dylan, “You’ve got a right to be very proud of yourself.”

Dylan replied enigmatically, “I do?”
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His road manager, Bobby Neuwirth, later snidely asked King, “You’re the chick who writes songs for bubblegum wrappers, right?”
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Goffin said Dylan’s lyrics made him feel “like a dwarf.”
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The latest songs the couple had been trying to sell now seemed out of date, so they gathered up the acetates of the demos they had made for them and snapped them in half, vowing to catch up to the new folk-rock style. They also began to manage a New Jersey group with Aronowitz called the Myddle Class. (The success of the Byrds saw a mini-boom in bands with “y” in their names, such as the Cyrkle and, initially, the Tyrtles.) Goffin and King wrote “Free as the Wind” for their clients, a wistful anthem to newly liberated young ladies “running wild and riding high,” released in December. Aronowitz also briefly managed the Velvet Underground with Lou Reed at that time, and on December 11, the Underground opened for the Myddle Class at New Jersey’s Summit High School.

Just as Dylan got the Beatles into weed, Aronowitz got Goffin into it—and then LSD. Goffin, a former chemist, began making his own and soon had Spectoresque ambitions of producing sessions with dozens of musicians. His fellow Brill composer friends Mann and Weil began to worry about his increased drug intake and wrote “Kicks” as a plea for him to straighten out. (The Animals turned down the song because it was antidrug, leaving it for Paul Revere and the Raiders to release the next year, in February.)

Goffin painted “Love Your Brother” on the side of his house, and one night he started raving so strangely that a scared King called Mann-Weil. Brill mogul Don Kirshner lived near Goffin-King, so Mann-Weil asked him to check on them. Kirshner arrived to find Goffin on the roof planning to “hurt himself.”
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Kirshner talked him down, saying, “There’s too much to lose.” Kirshner contacted a doctor, and Goffin was taken to the psychiatric ward. “How could you do this to me?” Goffin asked Mann and Weil.
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He was first diagnosed as schizophrenic, then manic (now called bipolar), for which he was prescribed Thorazine. When the Thorazine made him depressed, the doctors gave him electroshock therapy and, eventually, lithium. Amazingly, Goffin and King still proceeded to write the very anticonformist anthems they’d intended to, such as “Pleasant Valley Sunday,” “Wasn’t Born to Follow,” “Goin’ Back,” “Porpoise Song,” and perhaps greatest of all, “You Make Me Feel Like a Natural Woman,” for artists such as the Byrds, the Monkees, Dusty Springfield, and Aretha Franklin, before King divorced Goffin and became one of the era’s most successful singer-songwriters with
Tapestry.

*   *   *

Along with the hecklers
at Dylan’s concerts, there was another group constantly calling to him: the idealists, such as Joan Baez, asking him to become a leader in the antiwar movement. Phil Ochs wanted him for the Sing-in for Peace, the Vietnam Day Committee wanted him for its November march—everybody wanted him to use his power to stop the war.

When Dylan was a teen, his father ran a furniture store and sent Dylan out on some repossession runs, to take back appliances from families who couldn’t pay.
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Dylan didn’t like it, and he sang about the plight of the poor on his early albums. He turned down
The Ed Sullivan Show
because they wouldn’t let him sing “Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues.” He wrote songs that inspired a lot of people. But now he was getting ready to downshift.

On November 19 he secretly married Sara Lownds; their first son, Jesse Byron (named for the controversial Romantic poet), was born January 6. Three more children would follow. Over the next few years, their home in Woodstock was constantly invaded by strange hippies who believed Dylan to be their guru. To distance himself from the counterculture, he moved away from rock and into country music. He didn’t want to be the spokesman for his generation or a messiah. The ones who did, such as King and, later, Lennon, got shot.

“All I’d ever done was sing songs that were dead straight and expressed powerful new realities,” he writes in his memoir. “I was more a cowpuncher than a Pied Piper.”
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Johnny Cash recorded “The One on the Right Is on the Left” in November as a spoof of the folk craze that had engulfed the pop charts thanks to his buddy Dylan. (After a correspondence, the two met when they both performed at the Newport Festival the year before Dylan went electric.) In the song, a folk group implodes due to differing political convictions. On stage, the one on the right, the one on the left, and the one in the middle descend into a violent fistfight, while the one in the rear incompetently burns his driver’s license before getting drafted. The song predicted the chaotic divisions that would erupt across the country for the rest of the decade. Cash advises artists to keep their opinions to themselves and work on performing songs well. About the only person who would heed his advice, ironically, would be Dylan, whose lyrics grew ever more inscrutable. He wasn’t going to lead a revolution. But he did lead a lot of people to think for themselves.

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It Came from the Garage

The McCoys hit No. 1 with “Hang on Sloopy,” on October 2; the forefathers of punk grapple with the British Invasion; and the original garage rockers, the Beach Boys, miss with an experimental single but hit with “Barbara Ann.”

Throughout September and October,
the songs that held the American top spot were heavy: “Help!”, “Eve of Destruction,” and “Yesterday.” But there was a brief respite for one week only when, on October 2, “Hang on Sloopy” went to No. 1.

The song was by the Brill Building’s Bert Berns and Wes Farrell, a rewrite of Berns’s own “Twist and Shout.” However, while the writers were seasoned pros, the band that recorded the song, the McCoys, were teenagers from Union City, Indiana. They had been discovered by the Strangeloves, which was the name the songwriting team Feldman-Goldstein-Gottehrer came up with for themselves after writing “I Want Candy” with Berns. They sang the song backed by session musicians, and when the single made it to No. 11 in August, the songwriters (sans Berns) put on wigs and told the press they were Australian sheep farmers. They got an actor to help them with their fake accents, said they used the Masai drums of the Aborigines (really a tympani), and opened for the Beach Boys. While they toured the Midwest, they discovered Rick and the Raiders, led by eighteen-year-old guitarist Rick Derringer, and told Berns about them. Berns renamed the Raiders the McCoys, they quickly cranked out “Sloopy,” and it became one of the most enduring rock hits of the era.