1965: The Most Revolutionary Year in Music (44 page)

The special aired on December 9. The execs of little faith were stunned the morning after to see that it brought in a 49 share of the Nielson ratings, meaning half the TVs in the country had tuned in. It was the second-most-watched show that week, behind
Bonanza
, and the highest-rated Christmas special in history.
Variety
called it “Fascinating and haunting,” and it won an Emmy and a Peabody.
10

“Charlie Brown is not used to winning, so we thank you,” Schulz said when accepting the Emmy.

Schulz vetoed the idea of polishing the amateur voices and low-budget animation for future rebroadcasts, as these made the show as real and endearing as the little tree. Guaraldi’s
Charlie Brown
soundtrack would go on to be one of the best-selling holiday albums of all time. The perennial airing of
A Charlie Brown Christmas
became a unifying bastion of tradition in the face of the culture wars that lay ahead.

*   *   *

As equally unorthodox
as a cartoon character with a security blanket reciting the Bible was a rock band reaching No. 1 with lyrics from the Book of Ecclesiastes, the same week the
Peanuts
TV special aired.

In the late 1950s, Pete Seeger’s publisher told him he couldn’t sell his protest songs. Angry, Seeger decided to turn some verses from the Bible into a song, and created “Turn! Turn! Turn!” in just fifteen minutes.
11
His only original contributions were the title and six words at the end about peace.

That
song the publisher easily sold, to the Limeliters and Marlene Dietrich. At the time, Jim McGuinn was in the Limeliters’ backing band, and he arranged the song for Judy Collins to sing on
Judy Collins 3.

On the Byrds’ tour bus, when they weren’t playing tapes of Ravi Shankar and John Coltrane, McGuinn’s future wife, Dolores, asked him to play the song on his acoustic, and he jazzed it up with a rock-and-samba beat.
12
It took the band seventy-eight takes to get it right
13
—cracking that snare at the perfect moment would have been tricky even if drummer Clarke hadn’t been a newbie—but at last it was molded into the ultimate single for the holidays.

*   *   *

Rubber Soul
hit stores
December 3. The Beatles’ label mate Brian Wilson and some friends listened to it while sitting at a table sharing a joint. Wilson said,

It blew me fucking out. The album blew my mind, because it was a whole album with all good stuff. It was definitely a challenge for me. I saw that every cut was very artistically interesting and stimulating … I suddenly realized that the recording industry was getting so free and intelligent. We could go into new things—string quartets, auto harps, and instruments from another culture. I decided right then: I’m gonna try that, where a whole album becomes a gas. I’m gonna make the greatest rock ’n’ roll album ever made! So I went to the piano thinking, “
Goddamn, I feel competitive now
” … I said, “Come on. We gotta beat the Beatles.” That was the spirit I had, you know? Carl and I had another prayer session, and we prayed for an album that would be better than
Rubber Soul.
It was a prayer, but there was also some ego there. We intertwined prayer with a competitive spirit. It worked, and the next album [
Pet Sounds
] happened immediately.
14

Wilson’s usual lyricist, Mike Love, was on tour, so on December 6, Wilson contacted a jingle writer named Tony Asher (born 1938), whom his friend Loren Schwartz knew. Wilson played Asher
Rubber Soul
and said they had to write material to top it. Asher took a three-week break from his ad agency. Wilson and Asher would talk about their love affairs, then Wilson would tape record brief musical ideas he called “feels,” which he’d play on the piano. “Once they’re out of my head and into the open air, I can see them and touch them firmly. They’re not ‘feels’ anymore.”
15
At the end of the day, Asher would take the tapes home and write lyrics for them.

On December 22, a year after his nervous breakdown on the plane to Texas, Wilson was back in the studio working on a song about the “worst trip” he’d ever been on, “Sloop John B.” It was a West Indian folk song about a shipwreck that the Kingston Trio had covered. Jardine had played it for Wilson earlier in the year, trying to convince him that the Beach Boys should cover it. They did, but Wilson didn’t let him sing lead on it. Wilson took the first and third verse for himself and gave the second verse to Love, because he thought Love’s voice was more “commercial.” Hal Blaine slammed the drums as hard as anyone in a year of hard-slamming drummers, and then locked in with Carol Kaye’s bass. To make it folk-rock, Wilson had an electric twelve-string delivered to the studio for Wrecking Crew session guitarist Billy Strange to play; afterward Wilson gave it to him along with an amp and five hundred dollars in cash.
16
The sax and flutes melded with the clarinet and organ until all the instruments fell away except the Boys’ vocal polyphony, so you could hear Wilson’s arrangement in all its resplendent glory.

*   *   *

On December 7,
the Supreme Court of Massachusetts finally decided the case of Georgie Porgie, a.k.a. George Leonard Jr., the musician who was suspended indefinitely from Attleboro High School because he wouldn’t cut his hair.

The Court decreed, “We are of the opinion that the unusual hair style of the plaintiff could disrupt and impede the maintenance of a proper classroom atmosphere or decorum. This is an aspect of personal appearance and hence akin to matters of dress. Thus as with any unusual, immodest or exaggerated mode of dress, conspicuous departures from accepted customs in the matter of haircuts could result in the distraction of other pupils.” If schools didn’t have the right to enforce their code, the Court said, they would not be able to handle “unpredictable activities of large groups of children.”
17

The ACLU took on a similar long hair high school case in Dallas the following year, and lost as well.
18
Leonard never did go back to high school, but continued on as a professional musician.

Johnny Cash also was in court that month. He returned to El Paso on December 28 and pleaded guilty to crossing the Mexican border with 1,143 pills in his luggage. Eventually he’d get off with a thirty-day suspended sentence and a thousand-dollar fine. But the December trip started a new chapter of drama for Cash when a photo taken of him and his wife, Vivian, on the courthouse steps was put to nefarious use by the National States’ Rights Party. They were white supremacists, quasi-Nazis, complete with armbands, and part of the Ku Klux Klan. Their national chairman had served three years for bombing the Bethel Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. In the South, three years was all you got for terrorism if you were white. The party’s newspaper, the
Thunderbolt
, ran the picture of the Cashes in their January issue with the headline “Arrest Exposes Johnny Cash’s Negro Wife.” The article railed, “Money from the sale of Cash’s records goes to scum like Johnny Cash to keep them supplied with dope and Negro women.” It also called Cash’s children “mongrelized.” When Cash toured the South, the Klan ran newspaper ads reading, “FOR CASH, CALL THIS NUMBER.” The phone number led to a recording that told callers to boycott Cash concerts because the singer was married to a black woman.
19

“If there’s a mongrel in the crowd, it’s me, because I’m Irish and one-quarter Cherokee Indian,” Cash snarled.
20
Vivian just wanted to ignore the issue, but Cash’s manager, Saul Israel Holiff, worried that the racist southern market would cancel shows, and felt they needed to address the accusation. Holiff sent the
Thunderbolt
documentation of Vivian’s genealogy, stating that she was Italian, Dutch, and English.
21

“How long? Not long!” Martin Luther King Jr. had roared nine months earlier, but the
Thunderbolt
brouhaha was just one of countless examples showing how far the country still had to go to achieve his dream of racial harmony. The Christmas before, when President Johnson lit the White House tree, he had declared the times to be the most hopeful since Christ was born. For a moment, when King gave his victory speech in Montgomery in March, maybe it was—until Johnson increased the draft call to thirty-five thousand a month in July, and Watts rioted in August. From then on, war and riots cast their pall over the rest of the decade. As the calendar flipped to January 1, 1966, the song at the top of the charts began with an eerie greeting to Darkness, the singer’s old friend.

But in the next spot below Simon and Garfunkel’s “The Sound of Silence,” the Beatles sang that we could work it out. At No. 3, James Brown yowled that he felt good. At No. 4, the Byrds sang that it was not too late for peace.

And there was a new song making its way toward the Top 20, from the fifteen-year-old kid at Motown, Stevie Wonder. They’d told him at the school for the blind that all he’d be able to do in life was make potholders, but he got signed for his harmonica playing, even though Berry Gordy wasn’t too sold on him.
22
The live chart-topper “Fingertips (Part 1 and II)” had him touring nonstop for two years. “How are we supposed to follow him?” everyone else on the Motown Revue cursed. The young Wonder was the mascot at the Motown house, fooling people with his perfect imitation of Gordy over the intercom, getting away with pinching butts, joking he was going to take a car out for a drive.
23
He was a permanent fixture in the Snake Pit, where the Funk Brothers recorded. Sometimes he’d burst in while they were taping because he couldn’t see that the red “Recording” light was on, but they wouldn’t have the heart to tell him. He picked up everything he could learn from them, and gave drummer Benny Benjamin the nickname Papa Zita.

But Wonder’s voice had begun to change, and Gordy was thinking it might be time to let him go. He hadn’t had a hit since “Fingertips,” two and a half years before.

Wonder had an idea for a song, something with a beat like “Satisfaction” (in which drummer Charlie Watts imitates Benjamin). Maybe Wonder got the phrase “Uptight” from the line in Brown’s “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag.” Writer/producers Sylvia Moy and Henry Cosby helped Wonder with the lyrics—about a poor kid who is “Uptight” because his girlfriend is rich; but “Everything’s Alright” because she loves him anyway. When they recorded it, they didn’t have the lyrics in Braille, so Moy whispered each line into Wonder’s ear a beat before he sang it.
24

James Jamerson plucked with his right index finger, a.k.a. the Hook, infusing the bass with the same attitude he had when a mugger tried to rob him—Jamerson yanked out his gun from his waistband, pistol-whipped the thief, and took
his
money.
25
Benjamin brought it home for the kid like he was beating “on a bloody
tree
,” as Lennon had it.
26
Things would get a lot more uptight in the next couple of years, but with artists such as Wonder and the Stones trading beats back and forth, there would also be moments that were pure outta sight.

EPILOGUE

Strike Another Match, Go Start Anew

By the end
of the year, many parents had caught on to the fact that long-haired musicians were singing to their children about drugs, premarital sex, and questioning authority. With ever-growing frequency, mothers and fathers looked on in horror as their children began emulating their heroes and experimenting with mind-altering chemicals, which sparked innumerable parent-child fights and led to a surge in addiction. Many would later maintain that the arrival of the Beatles and the Stones marked the moment when Western civilization began declining. Evangelical writer David A. Noebel stated in his 1965 pamphlet
Communism, Hypnotism, and the Beatles
that folk-rock was devised by the Soviets to brainwash teens, and then followed it up with the book
Rhythm, Riots, and Revolution.
LSD was made illegal in California on October 1, 1966.

The backlash came down hard on the musicians who served as the most prominent PR men for cultural change. Dylan continued to be booed nightly for going electric, was denounced as Judas. He tried to make a joke out of it with the chorus to “Rainy Day Women #12 and 35,” lamenting that everyone must get stoned, both with pot and with rocks, as was done to sinners in biblical times. But it wasn’t a joke in May when a knife-wielding Glasgow hotel waiter denounced Dylan as a traitor to folk music. Dylan’s bodyguard/chauffeur forced the man out of the room, but was scarred in the process.

When Lennon’s paramour Maureen Cleave interviewed him for a March 1966 newspaper profile, he made an offhand comment that the Beatles were more popular than Jesus. The remark was reprinted in a U.S. teen magazine in August, and in one fell swoop, the Beatles managed to enrage more people than the Rolling Stones could ever hope to. Reactionaries who had been largely silent for the first two years of global Beatlemania snapped. Cities in the South banned the group’s music, and a Texas radio station organized a Beatle bonfire, recalling both the Nazi book burnings and the Ray Bradbury book
Fahrenheit 451
, whose movie adaptation was released that fall. The pun of the Beatles’ recent album title,
Revolver
, stopped being funny when the KKK issued death threats, as did Japanese conservatives angered when the group played the Budokan martial arts hall built on sacred ground, near the Yasukuni Shrine. Also that summer, the Beatles issued an American compilation album,
Yesterday and Today
, with a cover featuring decapitated baby dolls and slabs of meat. Lennon commented that the cover was “as relevant as Vietnam,” which further alienated many conservatives. The Beatles and Dylan both stopped touring for the rest of the decade.