1965: The Most Revolutionary Year in Music (11 page)

To a large extent country artists were in their own self-contained universe, though Nashville executives such as Chet Atkins and Owen Bradley strove to cross over with the “Nashville Sound.” They stripped out the banjo and replaced the fiddle with violins, as in the urban pop of New York. They moved away from cowboys singing in the nasal “high lonesome” style and concentrated on polished crooners, backing them with vocal groups such as the Anita Kerr Quartet. Eddie Arnold was the most successful with this formula, making it to No. 6 on the pop charts with “Make the World Go Away.”

The Nashville Sound did to country what Motown did to R&B: made it slick. Also, just as that slickness created a space for Stax Records as the gritty alternative to Motown, so Bakersfield, California, rose as the earthier rival to Music City.

In the Great Depression, Oklahoma was hit by drought, and many farmers left the Dust Bowl to become farmworkers in Bakersfield, 110 miles northwest of Los Angeles. Bakersfield was just north of Weedpatch Camp, the labor camp built by the federal Farm Security Administration immortalized in John Steinbeck’s epic novel
The Grapes of Wrath
. Bakersfield was close enough to Hollywood for session work but far enough away that the residents could develop their own unique form of entertainment. They embraced the steel guitars and fiddles Nashville had left behind and added the loud twang of electric Fender Telecasters. The music was designed for dancing in the clubs and fused Western swing and honky-tonk with rockabilly’s backbeat.

The king of Bakersfield, Buck Owens (born 1929), was originally a Capitol Records session man for rockabilly artists Gene Vincent and Wanda Jackson. In the mid-1960s he enjoyed a streak of fifteen No. 1 singles on the country chart and was the James Brown (“hardest working man”) of country, playing hundreds of shows a year. He had his own publishing company and booking agency, and started buying radio stations.

Owens kept the music flowing with sparkling singles such as “Buckaroo” and his March album
I’ve Got a Tiger by the Tail.
Its title song is a typically wry vignette about a guy struggling to keep up with his club-hopping woman. The album also includes “Crying Time,” which Ray Charles covered at the end of the year. A decade earlier, Charles had outraged purists by combining gospel with R&B into soul, but when that was no longer controversial, he turned his attention to an even more radical experiment: fusing soul with country. Charles took “Crying Time” to No. 6 on the pop charts, No. 5 R&B, and No. 1 easy listening. “I’m crazy about Buck,” said Charles, who won two Grammys for the song.
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Owens and the Beatles were label mates at Capitol Records, and Owens added the Beatles’ version of “Twist and Shout” to his set. He and guitarist-fiddler Don Rich would imitate Liverpool accents for between-song banter, and wore Beatle wigs when their band, the Buckaroos, played Carnegie Hall.
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The Beatles in turn picked up all Owens’s albums when they came to Los Angeles, and started writing their own country-rock songs, such as “I’ll Cry Instead,” “I Don’t Want to Spoil the Party,” and “I’m a Loser.” The pinnacle of the Beatles’ country exploration would be Ringo Starr’s cover of Owens’s “Act Naturally.” The song’s theme of movie stardom fit for the Beatles’ second soundtrack album,
Help!
, released in August.

When Owens acknowledged publicly that he liked the Beatles, he later recalled, “People would say, ‘You shouldn’t be sayin’ that. You should be talkin’ about country music.’ And I said, ‘Why not? It’s the truth! Why can’t I say I’m a Beatles fan?’ I used to get criticized for that.”
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When Owens covered Chuck Berry’s “Memphis, Tennessee” on
I’ve Got a Tiger by the Tail
, country doctrinaires began questioning his authenticity, again, in an echo of the attacks Dylan would soon endure for playing rock. But Owens took the opposite tack of the defiant Dylan. In March he bought an ad in the Nashville paper
Music City News
that read, “I shall sing no song that is not a country song. I shall make no record that is not a country record. I refuse to be known as anything but a country singer. I am proud to be associated with country music. Country music and country music fans made me what I am today. And I shall not forget it.”
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But like a skilled lawyer, he later clarified, “I see [the song] ‘Memphis’ as bein’ rockabilly. I didn’t say I wasn’t gonna do rockabilly. I just said I ain’t gonna sing no song that ain’t a country song. I won’t be known as anything but a country singer. I meant that, I still mean that. Listen to the lyrics. If they’re not country lyrics … the melody … if that ain’t a country melody. The only thing was, a black man was singin’ it, a black man who I was a big fan of. So, my famous saying for my little pledge—I didn’t date it. I really meant it at the time. I don’t mean for it to be taken lightly.”
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Merle Haggard was Bakersfield’s brooding flip side to Buck Owens’s crowd-pleaser. Haggard’s youth had been filled with the kind of tangles with the law that gangsta rappers would later try to make press releases out of. He was repeatedly sent to detention centers for truancy, petty larceny, writing bad checks, and burglary. He would often escape and live out his future hit “I Am a Lonesome Fugitive,” fleeing by train or hitchhiking to a new locale, where he would work odd jobs. After trying to rob a Bakersfield roadhouse, he ended up in San Quentin Prison. He was tempted to make one final escape—he’d heard his wife was pregnant by another man—but finally decided to stay put. The fellow convict he was going to escape with got out, shot a cop, and was executed. Haggard was further inspired to get his life together when Johnny Cash played the prison.

When Haggard got out, he started writing his own tunes, and briefly served as Buck Owens’s bassist, giving Owens’s band the moniker the Buckaroos. Haggard recorded the duet “Just Between the Two of Us” with Owens’s ex-wife Bonnie—she and Owens had split back in 1951—a songwriter and country singer in her own right. The two won the Academy of Country Music Award for Best Vocal Group of 1965 and were married on June 28. Haggard also won Most Promising Male Vocalist and formed his own group, the Strangers, named for his Top 10 country hit of the previous year, “(All My Friends Are Gonna Be) Strangers.” Bonnie served as the group’s backing vocalist. The band’s self-titled debut album was released in September.

The most surprising country debut of the year was Charley Pride, a Mississippi-born black man whose sharecropper father thought the blues were immoral and turned his son on to the Grand Ole Opry and Hank Williams instead. Pride was a pitcher in the Negro League and other minor leagues when country artists Red Sovine and Red Foley heard him singing and hooked him up with producer Chet Atkins, who got Pride signed before telling the label that he was black. Pride’s manager, Jack D. Johnson, suppressed all pictures of the artist for two full years.

Pride’s first RCA session in August yielded “The Snakes Crawl at Night,” backed with “Atlantic Coastal Line.” The A side title sounded like it might be a polemic against the Klan, but it was actually in the country tradition of a man murdering his cheating wife. The B side was a beautifully detailed hobo song sung in Pride’s warm baritone.

When Pride walked out onstage in the redneck clubs, you could cut the tension with a knife. But the unflappable Pride would say, “Howdy, folks, I know I’ve got a mighty dark suntan, I got it picking cotton down in Sledge, Mississippi. I hope you don’t mind if I sing a few country songs for you.”
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And after launching into Hank Williams’s “Lovesick Blues,” he’d have the audience in the palm of his hand.

Pride’s big break would come the following year, when singer-songwriter Willie Nelson brought him on a package tour. Some club owners in Klan-heavy counties received death threats, and had to hire police officers to guard the stage. Nelson said that while facing down one rowdy crowd as he introduced Pride, “I knew something special was called for at that moment, so I grabbed Charlie and laid a big kiss on his lips, and once the crowd recovered they listened to Charlie and went crazy over him.”
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Nelson had written a number of classic country hits, including Patsy Cline’s “Crazy” and Faron Young’s “Hello Walls,” but his own singles couldn’t get higher than country No. 43. At the time, he still acted the hillbilly, but his music reflected a jazzy influence as he mostly talked the lyrics of moody pieces such as “Night Life.”

Nelson had cut his first record nine years earlier. One of the Nashville artists with whom he would later form the Outlaw country movement, Waylon Jennings, had been kicking around almost as long, but Jennings was lucky just to be alive. In 1958, fellow Texan Buddy Holly had produced Jennings’s “Jole Blon” and “When Sin Stops (Love Begins)” and then picked him to play bass for his Winter Dance Party Tour. Holly arranged for a tour plane, but Jennings gave away his seat the night the plane went down and claimed the lives of Holly, the Big Bopper, and Richie Valens. “The day the music died,” Don McLean called it in his elegy “American Pie.”

Jennings moved to Arizona and formed the rockabilly Waylors. He got signed by Herb Alpert’s A&M Records but was ignored because he wasn’t folk, the hot trend of the moment. Things started rolling once Chet Atkins signed him to RCA and he moved to Nashville; his first recording session in Music City was on March 16.

June Carter had brought Johnny Cash to see Jennings play in Arizona. Both men had worked in the cotton fields, and knew all the same obscure music by country guys from the 1920s. Cash wanted a place to crash when he was in Nashville, so he and Jennings got a one-bedroom with two king-size beds. They’d always forget their keys, lock themselves out, and have to kick the door in. Jennings hid his pills behind the air conditioner; Cash hid his behind the TV.
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In his autobiography, Jennings wrote of Cash,

We were so much alike in many ways, it was scary. We both dressed in black … It’s a worn-out word, but we were soul mates … We flipped over each other from the moment we met, though at first we stood back. It was so sudden we were kind of afraid of each other. John and I were both manly men, and we liked to walk macho and talk macho; but after a while we learned we could be ourselves … We’d just get giddy and silly around each other, and laugh a lot. That would be when I’d be calling him John. Or Maynard. He had a lot of names. “Johnny Cash” was formal, as in “Mr. Cash.” There was Johnny when he was just lounging around. And then there was Cash. Sometimes you couldn’t tease John or he would become Cash. He was very seldom Cash with me. Cash was usually when he was mean, or when he was on drugs.
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Jennings’s first country hit, “That’s the Chance I’ll Have to Take” opens with a lonesome harmonica that echoes like the wide-open spaces of Arizona and Texas. A little folk seems to have rubbed off on it. In fact, his first Nashville album was called
Folk-Country
, recorded from March to July. Like Cash, Jennings dug Dylan and had covered “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright” live; later he’d tackle Dylan’s “I Don’t Believe You” and the Beatles’ “Norwegian Wood.” Another of his singles, “Anita, You’re Dreaming,” was based on the same traditional Mexican folk melody Dylan had used for “To Ramona.”

After Jennings’s rocking “Stop the World (and Let Me Off)” made it to No. 16 (country), a film tailored around Jennings, called
Nashville Rebel
, went into production and was released the following year.

Johnny Cash had started the year on a positive note by performing the Impressions’ “Amen” on the American musical variety show
Shindig!
, on January 13, and then covering three of his friend Bob Dylan’s songs on his album
Orange Blossom Special
the following month. He then proceeded to go off the rails. In a fit of amphetamine-stoked rage, he smashed the floor lights of the Grand Ole Opry with his mike stand and was blackballed for years. Unable to sleep, he’d break furniture in hotel rooms long before the Who and Led Zeppelin would make it part of their PR. At home in Casitas Springs, California, he’d drink beer, pop pills, and pace around his room listening to music and feeling alienated from his wife, Vivian, while yearning for June Carter, member of the storied Carter Family folk/country group and often his backup singer on tour. Cash and Vivian would argue, and he’d squeal off into the desert and get into a car wreck.
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He flipped a camper after falling asleep at the wheel and crashed a car after thinking someone was tailing him with a gun. He’d disappear for days, not eating until his pastor came to find him. (It was ironic that his bass-baritone drawl was as slow as it was, considering he was so addicted to speed.) On May 11 he got arrested for picking flowers while intoxicated and wrote “Starkville City Jail” about spending the night in a cell. (In 2007 the town held a Johnny Cash Flower Pickin’ Festival.)

The next month, while fishing in the California backcountry, his camper truck’s muffler split from the exhaust pipe. When he tried to start the auto, the heat set the grass on fire. Wasted, he staggered around trying to put it out with his leather jacket, but the blaze quickly spread into a five-hundred-acre forest fire that burned the foliage off three mountains and drove away forty-four endangered condors.
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“I didn’t do it, my truck did, and it’s dead, so you can’t question it,” he told the judge, later adding, “I don’t care about your damn yellow buzzards.” Cash paid a penalty of $82,001.

He got himself in the hottest water yet just a few months later. On October 4, while crossing the Mexican border from Juarez into El Paso, he was arrested by federal narcotics agents with no fewer than 688 Dexedrine speed capsules and 475 Equanil downers hidden in his guitar case. Out on bail, he spent the rest of the year recording comedy songs for his next album,
Everybody Loves a Nut,
trying to put a funny spin on a year of drug busts, fires, and Ole Opry freak-outs.