1965: The Most Revolutionary Year in Music (22 page)

Sloan’s writing-producing partner, Steve Barri, took a copy of the tape with him so he could listen to it in his office the next day. The president of Dunhill, Jay Lasker, heard it and took the tape to listen to it again himself. A few hours later, Lou Adler burst into the office, enraged. “Eve of Destruction” was playing on the radio, in what Adler believed was a completely unpolished form.
8

Lasker had instructed a promo man to take the tape down to radio station KFWB to find out if it was too controversial to air. The program director was so exhilarated by the track that he played it on air immediately, and it became their most requested song since “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” Adler initially thought McGuire needed to redo his vocals—after all, the singer had had trouble reading Sloan’s handwriting—but in the end, Adler simply added a ghostly female background choir to make it sound less like a rough mix. Just as “Like a Rolling Stone” was doing that same July, the song had bypassed the gatekeepers. “Eve” would make it to No. 1 on September 25, as the kids across the country returned to school. Ironically, it would block its inspiration, Dylan, from rising above No. 2.

In October a group called the Spokesmen—comprised of a deejay and two of the songwriters responsible for “At the Hop,” Lesley Gore’s “You Don’t Own Me, and “1-2-3,” by Len Barry—issued “Dawn of Correction,” their answer to “Eve of Destruction.” The song made it to No. 36 on October 16, with lyrics affirming that Americans needed to keep the world free from Communists and that the A-bomb was ultimately good because it fostered negotiation. The song pointed to progress in voter registration, vaccination, the United Nations, and decolonization. (Luckily for the writers, these all rhymed.)

Sloan’s reaction was “This is great! Maybe it’s a dialogue happening: via the radio via musical recordings.”
9
Sonny Bono sang in “The Revolution Kind” that men weren’t necessarily radicals just because they spoke their minds (which he would prove when he became a Republican congressman in 1994). “It’s Good News Week,” by Hedgehoppers Anonymous, took the black comedy approach for their knockoff, in which nukes reanimate the rotting dead.

Now that Dylan had left topical protest behind, Phil Ochs stepped in with “Draft Dodger Rag.” Ochs’s “I Ain’t Marching Anymore” was an epic account of the history of U.S. warfare in two minutes and thirty-five seconds, and he even tried his own electric version, though the acoustic original has more grace. Tom Paxton sang “Lyndon Johnson Told the Nation” and, in “We Didn’t Know,” equated the Americans who turned a blind eye to Jim Crow and Vietnam with “good Germans” ignoring the Holocaust during World War II. The Chad Mitchell Trio sang “Business Goes on as Usual,” in which the economy booms while the singer’s brother dies in a war he doesn’t understand.

Both English folkie Donovan and Glen Campbell, the session guitarist struggling to become a country-pop star in his own right, covered Buffy St. Marie’s “Universal Solider.” (On the flip side, Donovan covered Mick Softley’s “The War Drags On.”) Campbell seems to have been caught unaware by the antiwar slant of the lyrics, and by October he was telling journalists, “The people who are advocating burning draft cards should be hung. If you don’t have enough guts to fight for your country, you’re not a man.”
10
He was perhaps stung by the Jan and Dean answer song, “The Universal Coward.”

On the country front, neither Loretta Lynn’s “Dear Uncle Sam” or Willie Nelson’s “Jimmy’s Road” offered an opinion on the war itself. Rather, the songs focused on the death of a husband and a friend, respectively. However, Dave Dudley’s “What We’re Fighting For” and Johnnie Wright’s “Hello Vietnam” were the pro-war anthems to be expected from the country and western genre. The latter song said that we had to learn to put out fires before they got too big, alluding to how the Allies had avoided going to war with Hitler for years, allowing him the time to grab more countries, implying we couldn’t afford to do the same thing again with the Soviets and China. The writer of “Hello Vietnam,” Tom T. Hall, also wrote a female version called “Good-Bye to Viet Nam,” in which Kitty Hawkins sings how she just got news her man is coming back home to her.

Staff sergeant Barry Sadler of the Green Berets was a combat medic in Vietnam wounded by the booby trap stake called the Punji stick.
11
In the hospital, he wrote twelve verses of “The Ballad of the Green Berets.” The author of a book called
The Green Berets
, Robin Moore, helped Sadler edit the song down. It was recorded late in the year, for the military, and was so popular that it leaked out, and RCA decided to release it. It sold a million copies in two weeks and topped the charts on March 5, becoming the No. 1 single of 1966.

A few weeks after “Eve of Destruction” itself leaked out, the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles detonated into flames. Though it’s impossible to say how many of its residents listened to the lyrics of a white folk-rock single, the song’s rage at the state of race relations grew even more disturbing when the rioters began torching white-owned stores. LA disc jockey Bob Eubanks asked, “How do you think the enemy will feel with a tune like that No. 1 in America?”
12

Sloan said that Dunhill Records received death threats. McGuire said, “‘Eve of Destruction’ was a scary song because it made it on its own; it had no ‘payola,’ no disc jockey manipulation. Phil [Sloan] told me later on that there was a letter that went out from
The Gavin Report
[the trade magazine for radio programmers] or something saying, ‘No matter what McGuire puts out next, don’t play it.’ … Because their feeling was that I was like a loose cannon in the record industry, and they wanted to get me back in line.”
13

It was a shame, because McGuire’s other Sloan-penned tracks are terrific. “What Exactly’s the Matter with Me” mines the same ennui that the Mike Nichols film
The Graduate
would two years later. McGuire bemoans the futility of going to college just to get a job to buy a TV, but admits he can’t march because he’s too insecure. “Child of Our Times” expresses his worry for children being born into the “Eve of Destruction.” Its B side, “Upon a Painted Ocean” is an invigorating mash-up of Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin’” and “When the Ship Comes In,” its title borrowed from eighteenth-century British poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.”

In the wake of the success of “Eve of Destruction,” P. F. Sloan got to release his own solo singles. “Sins of a Family” was another of the songs he wrote that night while listening to Dylan. It was certainly the catchiest folk-rock ditty to beg compassion for the daughter of a schizo hooker. But Sloan’s pinnacle was “Halloween Mary,” which uses all Dylan’s tropes to sing the praises of a Sunset Strip scenester. (The title was itself probably inspired by a line in “She Belongs to Me.”)

The Turtles made a passionate single out of Sloan’s “Let Me Be,” since, as lead singer Kaylan explained, it was “just the perfect level of rebellion … haircuts and nonconformity. That was as far as we were willing to go.”
14
Sloan also wrote hits for Johnny Rivers, Herman’s Hermits, the Seekers, and the Grass Roots, but his career mysteriously faded after another year. Still, he could take solace in the fact that “Eve of Destruction” may have helped speed the passage of the Twenty-Sixth Amendment, which lowered the voting age from twenty-one to eighteen. Congressmen had attempted to lower the requirement during World War II, and President Eisenhower had backed a new constitutional amendment in 1953, but these efforts never passed. In 1969 the National Education Association began a new push with the help of the YMCA, the AFL-CIO, the NAACP, and U.S. congressmen, including Edward Kennedy. The Twenty-Sixth Amendment was ratified in 1971. Perhaps the fact that one of the biggest hits of the decade lamented being old enough to kill but not to vote was a crucial bit of agitprop that helped the campaign finally to succeed.

*   *   *

In May the Byrds had
opened for the Rolling Stones for a week in cities up and down the state of California. In July, the Byrds took Vito Paulekas’s freaky dance troupe with them in a sixty-passenger bus on their first tour outside the Golden State, to Colorado, South Dakota, Minnesota, Illinois, Iowa, Florida, Ohio, Missouri, and Kentucky. One of the dancers, Lizzie Donahue, recalled, “They thought we were from outer space. In Paris, Illinois, they actually threw us off the dance floor.”

“We had to stick together because we were about the only thing that looked like us around the country,” Michael Clarke said. “[In the South] they wouldn’t serve us in restaurants. ‘Hey, did your barber die?’ ‘Are you a boy or a girl?’”
15

The Byrds’ roadie was a friend of David Crosby’s named Bryan MacLean, who lived above Paulekas’s studio and looked like a cross between Michael Clarke and Chris Hillman. He’d grown up in Beverly Hills, among show business families. (He was friends with Dean Martin’s son Dino and was Liza Minnelli’s boyfriend when the two were little.) As a teen, he took up folk guitar, then was hit by the Beatles. “I walked out of
A Hard Day’s Night
 … different. I was never the same. I just immediately identified with that. I let my hair grow out and got kicked out of school, just immediately. That settled the whether-I-should-finish-high-school question right there.”
16
He dated singer-songwriter Jackie DeShannon, whom the Byrds covered on their first album.

One night MacLean was hanging out at Ben Frank’s (the diner on the Strip that the young hipsters went to when the clubs closed) when he got an offer from one of the most unusual musicians on the scene. Arthur Lee was a black singer in the R&B band LAGs (for “LA Group”) with childhood buddy and lead guitarist Johnny Echols. For a long time they’d been looking for an angle to help them break out; Lee had even written his own surf songs.

Lee knew the Paulekas dancers would come see his band if MacLean were in it. So he invited MacLean to join, and the group became the Grass Roots—until they heard that songwriter P. F. Sloan (“Eve of Destruction”) had created his own band with the same name. So they changed their name to Love, and quickly developed a following as the most iconoclastic folk-rock/proto-punk band in Hollywood (or anywhere), led by a black guy imitating a white guy (Mick Jagger) who imitated black guys. (They weren’t the only interracial band in the middle of the decade, however. Rising Sons, with Taj Mahal and Ry Cooder; Booker T. and the M.G.s; the United Kingdom’s Equals, with Eddy Grant; and the Mynah Byrds, with Rick James and Neil Young, could also claim that distinction.)

When the Byrds went on tour in July, Love took over their slot at Ciro’s, alternating with Rising Sons and the Leaves. Soon they would be playing the Whisky a Go Go when it wasn’t functioning as a disco. According to rock journalist Nik Cohn, “Discos were an early sixties development, an improvement on big, impersonal concert halls. The idea was that you had an intimate nightclub atmosphere and played mostly records, with only occasional live acts. First and last, discotheque records had to be dancing records.”
17

Discotheques originated in Paris. The first Whisky a Go Go opened there in 1947—
go-go
means “galore” in French—and then one followed in Chicago, in 1958. The Sunset Strip branch opened six years later. In July 1965 the club hired go-go dancers to dance in cages hanging from the ceiling. It was a concept borrowed from the TV music show
Hullabaloo
. Love would immortalize the Whisky in their song “Between Clark and Hillsdale (Maybe People Would Be the Times),” the title a reference to the club’s street intersection.

Also in July, a new law allowed minors to dance in public eating places unaccompanied by parents, and the Strip was soon bursting with clubs and coffeehouses that catered to the baby boomers coming of age, such as Pandora’s Box (where Brian Wilson had met his wife, Marilyn), Gazzarri’s, the Sea Witch, the Fifth Estate, and the Trip.
18
Weekend traffic ground to a halt as kids cruised the streets and swarmed the sidewalks. Producers for a new TV pilot called
The Monkees
ran ads in September’s
Variety
and the
Hollywood Reporter
reading, “Madness!! Auditions. Folk & Roll Musicians-Singers for acting roles in new TV series. Running Parts for 4 insane boys, age 17–21. Want spirited Ben Frank’s-types. Have courage to work. Must come down for interview.” Musician Stephen Stills arrived in town from New York and tried out. He was rejected because of his teeth and suggested the producers check out his friend Peter Tork. Meanwhile, one of Arthur Lee’s biggest fans, Jim Morrison, prowled the Strip after Love’s gigs. By the beginning of next year his band, the Doors, would start performing at the London Fog, a few buildings down from the Whisky. As the Byrds came chiming over the airwaves, the West Coast nights shimmered with limitless possibility.

*   *   *

John Sebastian was the son
of a classical harmonica player. He’d grown up in Greenwich Village around Woody Guthrie and Burl Ives and was the godson of Vivian Vance (Ethel on
I Love Lucy)
. He played on numerous folk sessions, logged in and out of bands. With Zal Yanovsky, the son of a Toronto political cartoonist, he formed the Mugwumps with future Mamas and Papas members Denny Doherty and Cass Elliott in 1964. (Mugwump was originally the name given to a group of Republicans who switched allegiance to the Democrats in the 1800s. In his 1959 book
Naked Lunch
, William Burroughs appropriates the label for the sexually ambivalent creatures who eat candy with razor-sharp beaks and drip with addictive fluid.)

The Mugwumps recorded a few singles but broke up after eight months. Sebastian and Yanovsky kept playing their unique blend of jug band music, folk, country, blues, R&B, and honky-tonk, calling it simply “good-time music.” In January they decided to go electric with a rhythm section, adding Joe Butler on drums and Steve Boone on bass. (Sebastian and Boone had played briefly on an unreleased
Bringing It All Back Home
session that month.
19
) Sebastian asked a friend what he should name his new band, describing the sound as “Mississippi John Hurt meets Chuck Berry.” The friend suggested “The Lovin’ Spoonful,” a phrase from Hurt’s song “Coffee Blues.”