FACE THE MUSIC —Unabridged
MARK VOLMAN
By Mimi Johnston

Mark Volman is a living Wikipedia definition of American pop music. His career has spanned some 40-plus years and shows no sign of slowing down. In fact, for a man who came to Nashville four years ago to retire, he has more irons in the fire than many musicians half his age. I met with him on a rainy Friday morning at the rural Franklin home he shares with wife Emily Volman, Managing Director of Improv Nashville. He was gracious and generous with his time, talking with me till the moment he had to leave for the airport and a concert in Connecticut that night.

Hills & Hamlets:With someone with a career as long and storied as yours, it’s hard to know where to start. Why don’t you just give us a brief history of Mark Volman.

Mark:I grew up in the suburbs of Los Angeles. My parents were not musical but I discovered that music was a way to meet people. When I was nine years old, I went to the Shrine Auditorium and witnessed the opera Madame Butterfly and I cried. It was really embarrassing because I was with my schoolmates, who were all making fun of the whole thing.

When I got home, I explained to my mother that I had gone through this emotion when Butterfly had killed herself and sung this huge beautiful aria at the end. My mother totally understood and she walked me into the front room, where she opened up the doors to their record collection and said, “This is yours.” That was the first time I realized that there were other things to do than baseball.

I also discovered my brother’s record collection; he was older than me by eight years. I started playing clarinet and discovered my dad’s Dixieland jazz collection – the music of Sydney Bechet and Jack Teagarden and Louis Armstrong. I wanted to emulate Sydney Bechet but just didn’t have the chops for that.

In high school, Fridays were music nights in the gym. One night a band called the Crossfires was playing and I was just mesmerized. On Monday I went up to the fellow who seemed to be the leader and I asked if I could join the group. And he said, “What do you do?” I think kind of mocking me, and I said, “I don’t really do anything.”

So he took me to the guitar player and said, “Tell him what you told me” and I said, “I want to join the band.” He told me that they had an opening and that I could start that Friday. So I went to his house and basically became the roadie. I carried the equipment for them to a frat party they were playing at UCLA.

That become the weekend thing for me and pretty soon I was standing on the side of the stage banging on a tambourine. Within a month or two I was onstage singing with them on a few songs and then started playing tenor sax. I served as the stage clown for them – they didn’t really have someone to communicate with the audience and make a connection and that was something that I always found easy to do, so I became the mouthpiece of the band.

By 1964 the English invasion was starting and we had spread out of our community, won a battle of the bands in the South Bay area, and got a job as the house band at a nightclub in Redondo Beach, where celebrities who came to Los Angeles for radio promotions would play. We played with the Coasters, the Drifters, the Righteous Brothers, Sonny and Cher, and many other artists.

The nightclub was owned by a disk jockey from KRLA, a very big radio station in Los Angeles. Our fan base came out of our high school and was pretty strong. We kind of changed our sound as the Beatles hit, adding more singing and more parts. In high school, the four members of the Crossfires were all in the choir, so when we started singing with the band we immediately went to our four parts. It was a real natural extension to bring it to the stage, singing the Beatles’ songs and other British invasion music that was permeating radio at that time.

Then a record company heard us and paid for us to go to Hollywood and record. I graduated from high school in February of 1965 and our single was released by April. We needed a new name and the disk jockey named us the Turtles. We hated it, because we thought he was making fun of the fact that we were very nerdish in our looks but we couldn’t think of anything else, so we were the Turtles.

The first thing we recorded was a Bob Dylan song. He was really hot at the time and we decided to electrify his song “It Ain’t Me Babe.” The true story is that they used to debut the Top 40 songs every Friday night. We were playing at our house band job, monitoring the Top 40. We debuted at number three in Los Angeles, higher than Bob Dylan’s current song, “Like a Rolling Stone.”

From that moment there was no turning back. In June, we were invited to join the Dick Clark Caravan of Stars on a bus tour. Here we were, I had just turned eighteen, and we were riding on a bus with people we admired so much – the Shirelles, Tom Jones…

Hills & Hamlets:You were living a life you hadn’t even dreamed of yet.

Mark:We didn’t even know what it meant – we hadn’t had time to prepare emotionally. I mean when you’re eighteen all you’re really doing it for is to meet girls.After that we had another top 20, then another top 5, called “You Baby”, which was a pop hit for us. At that time, singles came out very quickly, so by 1966 we had three top ten records.

After that we had a record that didn’t do well and two band members left. We were ready to break up, when we discovered a song called “Happy Together.” We went into the studio with that song, along with the beginnings of some other songs and it became a home run – that was the beginning of a whole other place for us. It was not only the first number one record for us in the U.S., but it also became an international record.

We got our own airplane and lived on two floors of a suite hotel in downtown Chicago, and we did upwards of three hundred dates a year. We made four records in a row that made it into the top ten and we toured constantly, particularly in the Midwest, where our fan base was.

Also, around 1968 we started a business to develop young artists and discovered a couple of really good singer/songwriters. So now we had become an industry and were no longer just a high school band. We made some changes during the next couple of years and made our final album “The Turtles Present the Battle of the Bands” in 1969 and had two number one records off of it, “Eleanor, Gee I Think You’re Swell” and “You Showed Me.” Those became our final Turtles statement.

After that an audit found a discrepancy in the record company and we filed a $2.5 million lawsuit against them. In return, they locked us out of the studio and prevented us from using the band’s name or our real names as musicians until the dispute was settled, which took four years. That lawsuit stopped us from touring as a band, and that’s when, without any hoopla, the Turtles broke up.

We were given the chance on one of those early weekends after the breakup to see Frank Zappa at the Pauley Pavilion, playing with the L.A. Philharmonic, conducted by Zubin Mehta. We were invited backstage after the show and Frank asked us if we would like to join his band to go to Europe for eight shows. While we were in Europe he asked us to stay on, which we ended up doing for close to three years.

Hills & Hamlets:Did you become official members of the Mothers of Invention, then?

Mark:Yeah, we recorded about seven albums with Frank, including the motion picture “200 Motels”, which was a double-record set. We did “Chunga’s Revenge” and “Live at the Fillmore East”, on which John Lennon joined us and that became part of his career; they used the music of the Mothers to back up John Lennon on “Some Time in New York City.” And then we did “Billy the Mountain” on “Just Another Band from LA.”

On “Chunga’s Revenge”, the first album we did with Frank, the lawsuit prevented us from using our names. When he asked what we wanted to call ourselves, we decided on Flo and Eddy and we stayed Flo and Eddie through “200 Motels.” That movie was sort of based on a story we told Frank about some groupies coming in and telling us they’d do anything for us if we would just sing them our big hit song “Happy Together.” We told Frank the story and he thought it was such a great idea that he wrote the movie around rock stars on the road and their groupies. The predominant overview of two years of touring with Frank was wrapped around the satirical humor of making fun of rock stars. We stayed with Frank up until 1972 when we were traveling in Europe and there was a fire at one of our shows.

Hills & Hamlets:I was going to ask you about that. I interviewed the lighting designer Jonathan Smeeton this summer and he told me the story of “Smoke on the Water” and how he dove out a window in order to escape the fire during the “200 Motels” tour.

Mark:That’s right; he was with us at that show. We were playing the Montreux Casino in Switzerland. The concert venue was on the second floor and the back of the stage was all glass, looking out over Lake Geneva.

During the show somebody took a flare gun and shot it into the ceiling as a response of excitement, without considering the fact that it would go straight up and catch fire two floors above us. It began billowing smoke into the theater, which caused a rush of panic because there weren’t many exits out of the second floor. One of the things that happened was that they threw our amplifiers through the glass windows to blow the smoke out. That’s probably where Jonathan leapt; it was about ten or twelve feet down. We got out of there but the whole theater burned to the ground with all of our equipment.

That was at Christmastime, 1972. We had a meeting across the river and actually sat down watching the smoke. Frank wanted to come home and the band fought him. We had eight shows in England that were all sellouts, including three shows at the Rainbow Theater, so we talked him into going to Paris, where we picked up a bunch of instruments. When we went to London, we had the equipment of the Who, Yes and Led Zeppelin, who all loaned us their back line so we could play the shows.

At the end of the first Rainbow Theater show a young man ran up onto the stage and pushed Frank into the orchestra pit. He slid on his back nine feet and fractured his skull, broke his back and his leg. It was the end of a week that you just couldn’t believe.

My partner Howard and I stayed to see Frank because that night was pretty tenuous as to whether he would survive. Once we learned that he was going to live we decided to stay in London with him a couple of days through his surgery and then came back to the U.S. When he came back, he made it clear that he was going to take a break for as long as it would take, so Howard and I decided at that point we needed to do something.

Flo and Eddy had developed enough of a name with Warner Brothers that they signed us to a two-record deal. We took the Mothers band with us because they were all out of work, and we made them our band. Howard and I wrote the songs and we took it out on tour, which took us through 1975, when we signed a two-record deal with CBS, the first of which was “Moving Targets.”

In 1981 our record contract had run out and we went to Kingston, Jamaica and made an all reggae album called “Rock Steady with Flo and Eddy”, with Family Man Barrett, Augustus Pablo and Leslie Butler – all great reggae stars, and we recorded it at Bob Marley’s house. It’s is a really great record that didn’t get released in the U.S. but was released around the world on a reggae label Epiphany Records.

Hills & Hamlets:Can you find it anywhere? I would love to hear that!

Mark:Fans can find it through Amazon and I’ll give you a copy so that you can tell people that somebody was doing it before Kenny Chesney (laughs).

About this time we got into what we laughingly call our Survival Years. We got an opportunity to work in children’s music with the people who did the animation for “200 Motels” to do the music for television for a character they called Strawberry Shortcake. That led to a company hiring us to do records for children – we did ten of those, not only Strawberry Shortcake but also the Care Bears.

In 1984 a company came out of the woodwork and asked if we’d like to do a tour as the Turtles featuring Flo and Eddy, so we worked with this company out of New York and put together a show called “Happy Together.” It was four acts from the 60’s, with us as headliner and it was so successful that we decided in 1985 to do “Happy Together Again.” It ended up being 285 cities over an 18-month period. That rebooted the Turtles into the minds of people and by 1986 we were doing about 100 shows a year.

During that time Howard and I moved to New York and became afternoon drive time disk jockeys as Flo and Eddy. We did syndicated as “Flo and Eddy by the Fireside” and then got hired by NBC to work as comedy writers, which we did for about a year.

Then we did our own show on CBS, where we had a storefront on Broadway and interviewed people on the street, as well as bands like Kiss and Twisted Sister. Every week we interviewed a new act. We continued to tour and about 1992 people started to realize that our career was sort of bigger than the oldies thing.

With our Flo and Eddy records, our Zappa music and our Turtles hits, our show has become a history of our lives. It’s about a two-hour and fifteen-minute presentation from the beginning of a band to where we are today.

Hills & Hamlets:You’ve sung with other artists in this time period, too.

Mark:Right. On some of the early records we worked with Linda Ronstadt, Richie Furay from Poco, Roger McGuinn. We did the record “Hungry Heart” with Bruce Springsteen off “The River.” We did five albums with a band called T-Rex, which included the single “Bang a Gong (Get it On)”, with Howard and me doing all the voices.

We worked with Ozzie Osborn and the Psychedelic Furs, Todd Rundgren – the list is pretty generous. And it’s funny – we have some connections through Tennessee, with some artists that we grew up with. The guys from Cheap Trick, who live here, people who we toured through our life with who make their homes here, like Michael McDonald. My wife Emily and I are late bloomers to Tennessee, but we have a pretty good foundation.

Howard and I have a strong family base of musicians who have stayed with us for twenty or thirty years and enjoy the process of doing forty to fifty shows a year. We don’t really have to rely on the touring business anymore; one of the things that came out of that legal problem back in 1974 is that we were awarded ownership of our tapes. We are one of the few groups that own their master recordings, so when they use “Happy Together” in movies like “Freaky Friday” or “Adaptation” or just about every commercial I can think of, those songs have to run through our company and they have to pay us to use the original record.

Hip-hop artists have sampled our songs, including a couple of pretty big hits. We have a million-seller with an artist called D-Nice, and another one called “Jackin’ with the Boys” that’s on Ice Cube’s Greatest Hits album. It’s very curious how things like that happen, how your songs get discovered by another layer of people that you’d just never imagine.

Hills & Hamlets:Let’s talk about what you’re doing right now.

Mark:I was in a divorce in 1989 and at the time I decided to go back to college. I was still touring and managing the Turtles, which kept my hands full, but I went to community college and then moved on to Loyola Marymount, which is a Catholic Jesuit school in L.A. At age 44 I wanted to see what I was about other than smoking pot and being a Beatles fan, so I went to Catholic school, where they made me do more than just think about it religion and spirituality. I had to read about it and study it.

I graduated from Loyola Marymount with my bachelor’s degree in 1997 and pitched to them the idea of starting a music business class. I also decided to go for my master’s degree in fine arts. So from 1997 to 1999 I was teaching two classes at Loyola Marymount and going for my master’s degree. I based my teachings on a book by a professor at Belmont University, Dr. Larry Wacholtz.

I tracked him down through Belmont and he helped me put together the curriculum at Loyola. I finished my masters and continued to teach at Loyola until 2004. I was also teaching at Los Angeles Valley College, so I was teaching four classes. . I was a full-time professor, while going for my masters and touring and managing the band. It was a pretty heavy load.

I met Emily at Loyola Marymount; we were both in the choir and became friends. We graduated together in 1997. I finished my masters and Emily and I were married in 2000. We started talking about getting out of L.A. and I started thinking about retirement. Emily’s family lived in Chattanooga and she had relatives in South Carolina and Georgia.

We found this house on a Friday, made an offer on Saturday and by Sunday they had accepted it. When we moved to Tennessee, at first I didn’t tell anyone I was here. I finally called Larry Wacholtz at Belmont and he invited me to go to the university, meet some people and have a tour. It’s an awesome small college right in the middle of Music Row.

Larry asked me to substitute for him from time to time and I agreed. I ended up teaching almost half a semester. At the end they invited me to teach two classes, and then Jim Van Hook who was the president of Provident Music Group and now serves as the Dean of the Music School, asked me to come on fulltime. They were looking for more people who had actually been in the business and the fact that I had a masters degree, something they don’t often get from musicians, made it even better.

After that I was offered the chance to run the Entertainment Industry Studies program, which is an emphasis of study within the Mike Curb School of Entertainment and Music Business. All those things I had done to survive were what they wanted to teach students - animation and radio and television. Since then I’ve created the class load of the core of study and have hired professors to teach classes. I’ve got a Creativity and Career course, that will teach kids how to beat writer’s block and procrastination; how to stimulate creativity for a lifetime rather than just for a project.

I’m also doing a course on Ethics in the Entertainment Industry, which takes a look at the spirituality of trying to exist in an industry that doesn’t really have its center on that. There’s another course called So You Wanna Be in the Movies, which deals with agents who work with models and actors, directors and corporations, and how to work within different areas. I want to open up courses that help students feel confident enough to not worry about the success or failure of the music business. The music business is a part and parcel of it all but there are so many layers to it now, with film scoring and music supervision, music for videogames, and having some knowledge of all of these areas will prevent you from feeling overwhelmed if your record doesn’t sell or you don’t get a cover by Trace Adkins.

Hills & Hamlets:So unlike our generations who studied music or acting in college, these kids aren’t just learning to be players or writers, then graduating only to say to themselves, “Okay, now what”?

Mark:In fact I just had a music major who has a full music degree in guitar just transfer to Music Industry. We actually have four areas of emphasis a student can study – Music Business, Audio Engineering, Entertainment Industry Studies, and Songwriting. At the core of it is business, understanding finance and acquiring management skills with a little business law and history of it all coming in. At the other side of it is learning about writing, screenwriting and the tactics you need to survive.

I came here to Nashville thinking I would just be here and relax through however long the Turtles want to continue touring. Unlike other groups, owning our music has allowed us to pick and choose in terms of how much work we want to do. I’m very busy with what I’m doing, which doesn’t give me the chance to write, though I’ve realized I’m not finished with writing. I don’t expect to put out a record – I didn’t come to Nashville to be a songwriter but I’ve been able to meet great songwriters like Jon Bettis, as well as great musicians and industry leaders through Leadership Music, people like
Tony Brown, Mr. Bradley, Dolly Parton, and Marty Stewart, who remembered that he and I had both played the Miami Pop Festival when he was about fifteen years old.

Frank Zappa gave me a really good perspective, which is that my judgment is in what I will be able to accomplish over my lifetime. I want people to look back over everything that I have done. Many people don’t know about our work with Muscular Dystrophy and Field of Dreams and the Make a Wish Foundation and Muscular Sclerosis and St. Jude Hospital. The things that the Turtles have done through their lifetime, not because it was hip to do, but because it made us feel like we were doing something bigger than our records. We may not get the publicity that some artists like Sting get for what they do, but we were never preoccupied with that.

Many people have written me after they learned about what I’ve done, to say that they’ve gone on to college or finished their degree – it raises people’s hopes that if you can do it, they can do it. I mean I was a 1.9 GPA in high school, the class clown. And I graduated magna cum laude from college. I was the valedictorian at Loyola Marymount in 1997 and I’ll never forget going out to give my speech to my 1,200 peers, when they stood up and sang “Happy Together.” It was like a motion picture – when the movie ends, I’m standing there with tears in my eyes. And you realize that the accomplishment is in the work you do, not from what you get back from the work. The work itself is the reward.