Mark Volman, the singer and co-founder of the Sixties pop-rock group the Turtles, best known for their 1967 hit “Happy Together,” died Friday, Sept. 5. He was 78.
Reps for Volman confirmed his death to Rolling Stone, saying he died in Nashville after a “brief, unexpected illness.” Volman was also battling Lewy body dementia, which he was diagnosed with in 2020. However, he continued to tour and did not publicly reveal his diagnosis until 2023.
For much of his career, Volman worked closely with his friend Howard Kaylan, another co-founder of the Turtles and the band’s lead vocalist. After the Turtles disbanded, Volman and Kaylan linked up with Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, where they began to perform under the name Flo and Eddie. (Volman was “Flo,” which was short for “The Phlorescent Leech.”)
Along with their work with Zappa, Flo and Eddie released numerous albums of their own and scored a handful of films and TV shows. They also provided backing vocals for some of the biggest artists of the Seventies and Eighties, including John Lennon and Yoko Ono, T.Rex, Alice Cooper, Bruce Springsteen, Blondie, Stephen Stills, David Cassidy, Ray Manzarek, and Roger McGuinn.
Volman was born April 19, 1947, in Los Angeles and began playing music as a teenager. In junior high (per an old band bio), he took up the clarinet and happened to take lessons with the same teacher who was teaching Kaylan the same instrument. It wasn’t until high school, however, that the pair would meet in an a cappella group (both sang tenor).
Volman, Kaylan, and several friends — guitarist Al Nichol, drummer Don Murray, and bassist Chuck Portz — played in a band called the Crossfires during high school before forming the Turtles after graduation. (Jim Tucker, another guitarist, rounded out the band’s original lineup.) The Turtles cut their teeth playing clubs and college parties around Southern California before embarking on lengthier tours. They released their first recordings in 1965, scoring a Top 10 hit with their debut single, a rendition of Bob Dylan’s “It Ain’t Me Babe.”
After releasing two albums (1965’s It Ain’t Me, Babe and 1966’s You Baby), the Turtles scored their signature hit with “Happy Together” — a peppy blast of lovestruck flower-power pop defined by its rousing refrain of ba-ba-baaaahh’s. The song enjoyed a three-week stand at Number One on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1967 and has remained one of the defining songs of the era.
While “Happy Together” anchored the Turtles’ 1967 album of the same name, it wasn’t their only hit. The duo that penned the title track — Alan Gordon and Garry Bonner — also wrote “She’d Rather Be With Me,” which peaked at Number Three on the Hot 100. The pair would write some of the Turtles’ other big hits in the coming years, too, including “She’s My Girl” and “You Know What I Mean.”
In a 2023 interview with Goldmine, Volman said that “Happy Together” “held up so well that it became the record of our career.” But, he continued, “musically I think ‘She’s My Girl,’ ‘You Know What I Mean,’ ‘Me About You,’ ‘The Story of Rock & Roll,’ and a few others are even better records. But every group hopes to have a ‘Happy Together’ and that makes us very fortunate.”
The Turtles would release two more albums — 1968’s The Turtles Present the Battle of the Bands and 1969’s Turtle Soup — before disbanding in 1970. Volman, Kaylan, and Jim Pons (who’d become the Turtles’ bassist in 1967) went on to join Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, with whom they played regularly over the next several decades. (As Flo and Eddie, they sang a wonkier version of “Happy Together” on Zappa’s live album, Fillmore East – June 1971.)
“Frank opened the door for us to explore and be involved with a lot of really grown up music,” Volman told the Recording Academy. “I say ‘grown up’ because it had guitar changes and singing parts that we created for Frank. We couldn’t create those for any other place.” He added that Zappa “really turned us loose. He turned us loose to sing what we could bring to the different songs.”
Over the next few decades, Volman and Kaylan were almost always busy. On top of their work with Zappa, they became in-demand session vocalists, and wrote and recorded several Flo and Eddie albums of their own (the first, The Phlorescent Leech & Eddie, arrived in 1972). In the Eighties, they started composing music more regularly for film and TV, doing both children’s projects like The Care Bears TV series and the Zucker-Abrams-Zucker spoof comedy Top Secret!
While he stayed busy as a musician into the Nineties, Volman also went back to college and got his bachelor’s degree at Loyola Marymount University. He went on to earn a Master’s degree and eventually started teaching college-level music business courses, enjoying a lengthy stint at Belmont University in Nashville (which is famous for its music and music business programs).
Volman and Kaylan were also part of several major music copyright cases. In 1991, they sued De La Soul over a sample of the Turtles’ “You Showed Me” in “Transmitting Live From Mars.” The case was settled out of court, but many in the hip-hop world criticized the outcome, saying it set a dangerous precedent that could bankrupt artists with licensing and/or legal fees.
Then, in 2013 they filed a class action lawsuit against SiriusXM, accusing the satellite radio company of broadcasting songs recorded before 1972 without compensating labels or artists. (New sound recordings didn’t receive federal copyright protection until 1972, but the law wasn’t clear on what protections should be given to pre-72 recordings.)
The case led to a groundswell of similar suits brought by major and independent labels. The courts repeatedly ruled in favor of the labels, and eventually Sirius began to settle the suits, including a $99 million settlement with the Turtles in 2016. The case helped pave the way for the CLASSICS (Compensating Legacy Artists for their Songs, Service, and Important Contributions to Society) Act, a component of the 2019 Music Modernization Act, that finally extends federal copyright protections to pre-1972 recordings.
In 2015, Volman and Kaylan celebrated their 50th anniversary together with a massive North American tour. While Kaylan retired from the road in 2018 because of health issues, Volman continued to perform regularly. In 2023, he published his memoir, Happy Forever: My Musical Adventures With The Turtles, Frank Zappa, T. Rex, Flo & Eddie, and More.
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