It’s become painfully obvious that we’re running FAR too many In Memoriam columns on Pencil Storm, and even more painfully obvious that the Universe of Rock & Roll has reached a point where that trend is not about to slow down anytime soon. So, my In Memoriam approach from here on out is gonna be personalized stories. You can read all about the obituary facts & figures ANYWHERE on this InterWideWeb; this is my Mark Volman tribute.
The Turtles, Flo & Eddie and I go WAY BACK.
I bought most of The Turtles singles from the mid-1960’s on; from “It Ain’t Me Babe” at least through “Happy Together” and “She’d Rather Be With Me,” and I still have them. I saw them live in 1966 at Vet’s Memorial here in Columbus, OH, courtesy of my sainted Italian father working in the ticket office there. (Yeah, I know this has become a recurring theme in these blogs, but it’s important because he’s the only reason I ever got to see a rock & roll show, and it changed my life.)
At that show - which was great - The Turtles as a live unit were everything I wanted from a 60’s band; loud, tight, great vocals, entertaining AND hilarious, (something I missed dearly from about 1968 on when rock & roll got SO PONDEROUS and self-serious). Every Mother’s Son (“Come On Down To My Boat, Baby” a classic slice of 60’s pop ephemera I also loved) was second-billed and BOTTOM of the bill was Neil Diamond, whose “Cherry Cherry” was only just then hitting the Top 40, after “Solitary Man.”
I also saw the early incarnation of the “Phlorescent Leech & Eddie” as Volman and Howard Kaylan - Mark’s lifelong musical partner in crime and rock & roll - were then billed due to a record company dispute in which not only couldn’t they call themselves “The Turtles,” they couldn’t even perform or record under their OWN NAMES. Ahhh, contracts in the 1960’s. Rock & roll kids would sign ANYTHING.
Flo & Eddie were then fronting Frank Zappa’s Mothers Of Invention and, again, they delivered not only spot-on vocals, but lent a hefty sense-of-humor to the sometimes overbearing “wit & whimsy” Zappa traded in back then. And yeah, The Mothers performed “Happy Together” as the blow-out conclusion to a literally 30-plus minute mini-rock opera called - I think - “Billy The Mountain” Zappa wrote to end the set. (That might not be the name of the song, it was 1970 or ‘71 and I was still drinkin’ heavily.)
Later - between 1970 & 1973 - while I was attending (but not graduating from) Ohio State University and working at the Doctor’s North Hospital parking lot (but mainly listening to the radio in the parking lot booth) I was a devotee of “Flo & Eddie By the Fireside,” an epic syndicated radio show that ran on some long-forgotten (by me) Columbus radio station on Sunday afternoons. It was often the high point of my weekends.
That show was tremendous; Howard & Mark would play overly-healthy doses of power-pop (non-existent on the radio in those days of prog-rock, mellow singer-songwriters & metal). They’d play the same song over 2 or 3 times in a row, play songs they didn’t care for at the wrong speed, make up totally untrue & hilarious stories about the artists they played; essentially anything that would offend the laid-back, staid “hippie” no-sense-of-humor Program Directors of the day.
Decades later, sometime in the early 1990’s I saw Flo & Eddie at a little bar in Grandview, OH, a suburb of Columbus. It was my first experience seeing one of my 60’s favorites in those kind of diminished circumstances, and - truthfully - I feared the worst. I thought, “Oh, man, this might be terrible. These guys have been reduced from playing 3000-seat venues in the 60’s with The Turtles and opening 10,000-capacity arenas for Alice Cooper in the 70’s to playing a bar in Grandview on a Sunday afternoon. They might just be going through the motions.”
I couldn’t have been more wrong. Howard Kaylan & Mark Volman and their backing guys (including longtime lead guitarist Gary Rowles) hit that tiny stage at 3 or 4 pm and ROCKED that place like it was 1967 again and they were playing the Ed Sullivan Show later that night. It was tremendous. They did every hit from “It Ain’t Me, Babe” to “Elenore,” and a healthy helping of Flo & Eddie “classics” (as I think of them) like “The Best Part of Breaking Up” and their sublime cover of The Kinks’ “Days.” They hung around after the show and greeted pretty much every member of the - admittedly - small crowd that Sunday afternoon. I couldn’t have had a better time.
I think about that show (that I maybe paid a 5-buck cover charge at the door for) on that Sunday afternoon, whenever I see acts like “The Who” or KISS do endless “Farewell - This Time We Mean It!” mega-tours for hundreds of dollars, and then are mediocre at best. Flo & Eddie put their hearts & souls into that little show, for about a hundred people, and I’ll never forget them for the effort.
Mark Volman, R.I.P.
aaaaah, two-minute songs; I miss you…….
Flo & Eddie / 1973
Ricki C. is 73 years old and has two dresser drawers full of black rock & roll t-shirts, which he wears incessantly. He also has a hand-tooled leather hippie belt from 1972 that still fits. He has congestive heart failure and prostate cancer and KNOWS that all this rock & roll nonsense has to stop someday.
But not yet.