The Turtles -- "Happy Together" (1967)

Can this be one of the most perfect pop songs ever written, performed and arranged? I'm thinking it's got to be in my top 10.

The Turtles, formerly the surf band the Crossfires, had a string of "sunshine pop" hits in the mid-60's that make it well worth your while to buy their greatest hits album. Many of their songs were highly slick, west coast groovy, semi-bubblegum tunes -- almost all of them not written by the band, but an artillery of LA's top songwriters. In many ways, they were a musical precursor to the wonderful Grass Roots.


The Turtles, besides the rather un-threatening goofy name, were the home of the infamous Howard Kaylan and Mark Volman, better known later as dubbed by Frank Zappa as "the Phlorescent Leach and Eddie" when they joined his Mothers of Invention, and later just shortened to "Flo and Eddie." As you'll see in the videos below, Kaylan was the good looking lead singer, practically standing in for rock and roll's first bar mitzvah boy. His good friend Volman was his comic foil, a heavyset goofball with a kinky hair and nerdy glasses, always looking to make trouble or crack him up mid-song.

The verses of "Happy Together" were based on one of music's perennial chord patterns, the descending from the E minor, to the D, to the C, to the B major (ironically, the same blueprint for The Grass Roots' "I'd Wait A Million Years" verses -- if it ain't broke, don't fix it!). The lyrics are very much like a nursery rhyme, and that is why I feel it is so instantly familiar to any living breathing human being with its cadences and rhymes:


Imagine me and you, I do
I think about you day and night
It's only right
To think about the girl you love
And hold her tight
So happy together.

If I should call you up
Invest a dime
And you say you belong to me
And ease my mind
Imagine how the world could be
So very fine
So happy together.

And then later...

Me and you
And you and me
No matter how they tossed the dice
It had to be
The only one for me is you
And you for me
So happy together.


What brings it to a whole other level is the chorus, where it shifts into E major, straight electric guitar chords on the eighth beats, lots of horn and layered vocals ("pa-paa!"), like a blissful explosion of love, flower power and euphoria.

I can't see me loving nobody but you
For all my life
When you're with me
Baby the skies will be blue
For all my life.


This is akin to when Frankie Valli revs to the next gear on the second part of "Can't Take My Eyes Off Of You" when he belts out: "I-I love you baby, and if it's quite all right, I need you baby, until the morning light...." You are forced, literally forced to sing along, perhaps loudly, maybe even in a public setting and hypnotically forgetting any embarrassment.

For crying out loud, this is the song that knocked one of my very favorite Beatles songs, "Penny Lane," out of the #1 spot! I remember being at some Queens, NY day camp in the summer of '67, picking up dodgeball throwing tips from some kid named Barry (a two-handed grip on two sides of the ball, making an aggressive circular wind-up and then letting it loose at some poor kid's stomach), and "Happy Together" was rotating constantly on the AM radio. You just could not get it out of your head and everybody sang along to those nursery rhyme lyrics.

Let's just stop and honor these anonymous songwriters of "Happy Together," who never quite became as famous as Lennon and McCartney, or Bacharach and David, but who had the amazing skill to write these classic unforgettable pop songs. "Happy Together" was written by Gary Bonner and Alan Gordon, who also collaborated on Three Dog Night's "Celebrate."

Below, a fun home-movie-type promo video shot in '67 for "Happy Together," followed by their semi-live performance on "The Ed Sullivan Show."

The Grass Roots -- "Midnight Confessions"

Rock and roll is filled with "manufactured" groups -- acts that were put together solely for the purpose of looking good and singing hits written by professional songwriters and producers. The most famous case, of course, is The Monkees.

The Grass Roots (and note that "grass" and "roots" are two separate words for these guys) started off as one thing and then, like a writer taking out his pencil eraser, wiped it out and created something completely different.

I was listening to The Grass Roots' Greatest Hits today in my car and was struck how their first great hit, "Let's Live For Today," sounds almost nothing like what followed afterwards. Heck, that song was even in the famous Nuggets garage rock compilation.

The Grass Roots were ABC subsidiary Dunhill's baby, under the wing of the Steve Barri/P.F. Sloan team. It was when they released "Midnight Confessions," a completely re-arranged version of a song written by Lou Josie for a group he managed called The Evergreen Blues, that the group exploded into a string of best-selling singles.

"Midnight Confessions" was truly the template for the big songs that came afterwards: slick pop/soul tracks, infused with traces of bubblegum, performed and arranged by the top L.A. studio cats. In a way, The Grass Roots were like an even smoother version of Three Dog Night, white boys with great voices, covering other people's songs with a little soul inside. The personnel of The Grass Roots may have changed every couple of years, but the one constant was lead singer Rob Grill.

That pop/soul LA sound really blossomed in the early 70's, notably with Hamilton, Joe Frank & Reynolds ("Don't Pull Your Love," "Fallin' In Love") and the Four Tops' post-Motown run at Dunhill ("Keeper of the Castle," "Ain't No Woman (Like The One I Got").

For a simple pop single, the arrangement for "Midnight Confessions" is quite intricate, changing keys and chords patterns throughout the song. With that unmistakable opening bass line and cracking Jimmy Haskell horn arrangement (same guy who did Steely Dan's "My Old School" and you can definitely tell), "Midnight Confessions" just sort of grabbed you with its infectious tambourine beat and prominent organ arpeggios and chords. Grill has an air of desperation with his pop single predicament -- the girl he loves is engaged? Married?

The sound of your footsteps
Telling me that you're near
Your soft gentle motion, baby
Brings out the need in me that no-one can hear, except

In my midnight confessions
When I tell all the world that I love you
In my midnight confessions
When I say all the things that I want to
I love you!

But a little gold ring you wear on your hand makes me understand
There's another before me, you'll never be mine
I'm wasting my time.

Staggering through the daytime
Your image on my mind
Passing so close beside you baby
Sometimes the feelings are so hard to hide, except...

In my midnight confessions
When I tell all the world that I love you
In my midnight confessions
When I say all the things that I want to
I love you!


In around 2000, I was out in LA handling the publicity for Maxim magazine's first party there ("Circus Maximus") and the contracted producer had a gorgeous staff member helping us get ready for the big event. She was in her early 20's and was tantalizing us all with promises that she was going to visit New York City. She said her last name was Grill and her father "toured and sang." Well, leave it to the music trivia nut to take a few seconds and pull it out of the hat to ask her, "Rob Grill? The Grass Roots?" And yes, this was his daughter.

Below is a classic late 60's video of the band lip-synching their way through the marvelous "Midnight Confessions." I'm loving Rob Grill's pink frilly shirt under his brown tassled jacket... very hip.