“Shitting a brick” in the White House, playing ping-pong with Alice Cooper, reaping karma with Frank Zappa: it’s been a wild ride for MARK VOLMAN, rich voice of The Turtles and the larger half of Flo & Eddie. Living proof of the power of letting it all hang out? “Many artists wish they could relax and bare their chests,” he tells MARTIN ASTON.

DICK NIXON’S WHITE HOUSE, WASHINGTON DC, May 10, 1969. Full-fat freaks disguised as chummy chart pop purveyors, The Turtles are on enemy territory and everyone knows it. A suspicious ticktick-ticking sound in one of their flight cases has alerted the Security Service, and guns are trained on the longhaired band before the source can be ascertained – an electric metronome. In the words of Turtles singer Howard Kaylan: “the term ‘shitting a brick’ comes to mind…”

Later, maybe to settle his nerves, or perhaps as a gesture of freak-flag defiance, Kaylan snorts cocaine off a desk in Abraham Lincoln’s library. The band’s other featured singer, Mark Volman, is more circumspect; well, as circumspect as a man who is still as drunk and high as could be.

“Beer and champagne and pot played a part,” Volman tells MOJO today. “But I never felt confident during the coke years, and there was a lot going on that day and night.”

The Turtles’ presence – they’re here to play Nixon’s daughter Tricia’s masked ball – encapsulates their current dilemma. When the band’s fourth single, the high-octane harmony pop of Happy Together, knocked The Beatles’ Penny Lane off the top of the US charts in early 1967, delight at their success was tempered by subsequent expectations and pigeonholing. Whilst The Turtles wanted to be The Beatles, straddling pop singles and rock albums, their record label, White Whale, demanded assemblyline hits. But since early ’69, the hits have dried up. And now this dubious accolade: Tricia Nixon’s Favourite Band.

“It all caught up with us,” Volman sighs. “The White House gig would prolong our career for another month but the fun had gone. White Whale were tiny compared to Capitol and Columbia; how do you compete with The Beatles and The Byrds? We weren’t great songwriters either. And we’d gone through seven managers in five years. It was madness.”

By late 1970, lawsuits had started to fly. Not only did White Whale claim it owned the name ‘The Turtles’, but those of ‘Howard Kaylan’ and ‘Mark Volman’ too. What were they to do?

Get your freak on: Mark Volman (left) and Howard Kaylan, AKA Flo & Eddie, ready to blow up, Amsterdam, 1975.

Portrait by GIJSBERT HANEKROOT.

Getty

Tricky business: (right) Mark Volman keeps his eye on Tricia Nixon, daughter of US President Richard Nixon, before The Turtles entertain a White House ball, May 10, 1969 (from right) John Seiter, Volman, Tricia Nixon, Howard Kaylan, Al Nichol, Jim Pons;

(below) The Turtles meet an inflatable namesake, 1967 (clockwise from bottom) Chuck Portz, Nichol, Don Murray, Kaylan, Volman, Jim Tucker.

Alamy, Courtesy Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum

It was then that the least imaginable figure came to their rescue: none other than countercultural warlord Frank Zappa offered the duo the chance to join The Mothers Of Invention. Kaylan and Volman were about to ascend to another level of madness…

IN 2023, THE 76-YEAR-OLD VOLMAN CAN LOOK BACK at seven decades of creativity and high-jinks and chuckle at the absurdity of it all, not to mention the extraordinary variety of his collaborations, from Lennon and Ringo to Bowie and Bolan, Springsteen, Steely Dan, Blondie and Lou Reed, The Psychedelic Furs and Duran Duran.