Read 1965: The Most Revolutionary Year in Music Online
Authors: Andrew Grant Jackson
The Byrds ignite the Sunset Strip with their residency at Ciro’s in March and April, while Brian Wilson’s April LSD trip inspires the Beach Boys’ most archetypal single but haunts him with auditory hallucinations.
Before the Byrds,
Jim McGuinn was a young guitar and banjo player who accompanied folk acts such as the Limeliters, the Chad Mitchell Trio, and Judy Collins. When Bobby Darin wanted to go folk, he brought McGuinn into his band. Darin also gave McGuinn a job as a songwriter at his company, T.M. Music, in the Brill Building. One of McGuinn’s ditties, “Beach Ball,” cashed in on the surf music craze and was a hit in Australia; the Bee Gees sang backing vocals on it.
By day, McGuinn worked in the pop world; by night, he played the Greenwich Village folk clubs and then had jam sessions back at the Earl Hotel, where both he and John Phillips (later of the Mamas and the Papas) lived. Then the Beatles gave him an epiphany that he believed could bridge the two camps in which he existed.
McGuinn started adding what he called the Beatles beat to folk songs, speeding up classics such as “The Water Is Wide” to four/four double time.
1
It was a discovery not unlike the one made ten years earlier by Elvis Presley and his bassist Bill Black, when they sped up the country song “Blue Moon of Kentucky” and the blues song “That’s All Right Mama.” “Fine, man. Hell, that’s different,” Presley and Black’s producer, Sam Phillips, exclaimed. “That’s a pop song now, nearly ’bout.”
2
When different genres cross-pollinated, the hybrid vigor often inaugurated new golden eras, be it rock and roll (R&B plus country), soul (R&B plus gospel), grunge (metal plus punk), or folk-rock.
But the Greenwich Village purists didn’t like what McGuinn was doing, so the musician thought he’d give Los Angeles a try. The Troubadour club hosted regular hootenannies, and there McGuinn met a young folkie named Gene Clark, who’d been playing with the New Christy Minstrels. Clark suggested they form a twosome like the British pop duo Peter and Gordon. They were practicing in the stairwell of the Troubadour when suddenly another folkie named David Crosby started harmonizing with them unbidden. His tenor took their vocals to an entirely new level; without him, McGuinn and Clark’s voices were so close they blended into unison.
McGuinn had been trying to figure out how the Beatles got their sound. Then, when the trio went to a screening of
A Hard Day’s Night
, he spotted George Harrison’s brand-new twelve-string Rickenbacker. “That’s it!” he exclaimed.
3
Crosby recalled, “We knew exactly what we wanted to do. It probably blew my mind more than [the Beatles’ appearance on]
Ed Sullivan
. The whole movie was magic. I’m told that I came out of the theater, grabbed a stop sign and swung around it like I was pole dancing. I was just so happy. It was like, ‘Oh, man … I know how to do that! We can do that!’”
4
Folk singers were supposed to use only acoustic twelve-strings, but McGuinn went out and bought his own electric Rickenbacker.
Crosby had been working with a manager-producer named Jim Dickson, who now took on the whole group and brought in a Southern California bluegrass musician named Chris Hillman to play bass. The final piece of the puzzle was Michael Clarke (no relation to Gene). Hillman had chops, but Michael Clarke had a blond Beatle cut like those of Brian Jones and Yardbirds singer Keith Relf. At seventeen, he’d hitched from Washington State to San Francisco and played bongos in North Beach with the post-beatniks. Crosby had met him in Big Sur, playing the conga drums. So when the new group saw Clarke one day walking down Santa Monica Boulevard toward the Troubadour, Crosby said, “Hey, man, you wanna be a drummer?” and Clarke said, “Sure,” even though he’d never played a full drum set before.
5
They called themselves the Jet Set, then briefly the Beefeaters, to fool people into thinking they were British. Luckily they settled on the Byrds (misspelled, in Beatle fashion).
After their version of “Mr. Tambourine Man” was released on April 12, it went on to become the second-biggest worldwide hit of the year after “Satisfaction.” “Never had lyrics of such literary quality and ambiguous meaning been used on a rock record,” wrote critic Richie Unterberger.
6
With its lines about taking a trip on a magic swirlin’ ship and fading into one’s own parade, it was the weirdest No. 1 yet. By year’s end, though, the Beatles and Stones would have their own “tripping” singles.
The song also inaugurated “jangle pop,” the subgenre that has intermittently resurged throughout rock’s history, both with the sound of the guitar and the “jingle jangle morning” lyric. In the mid-1960s the jangle was embraced by everyone from the Beach Boys, the Hollies, Paul Revere and the Raiders, to even (occasionally) the Stones.
Though the Wrecking Crew played on “Mr. Tambourine Man,” the Byrds took over playing their own instruments for their two albums of the year, which included six Dylan covers between them. Gene Clark wrote many superb originals, while McGuinn found classics to cover such as “He Was a Friend of Mine,” molded into a eulogy to JFK. Chris Hillman covered Porter Wagoner’s country hit “Satisfied Mind,” hinting at the country-rock direction he’d lead the band in a few years.
Not only did the Byrds discover a new sound, but also their scene gave birth to the West Coast hippie dance style, kicking off the golden years of the Sunset Strip.
The band rehearsed in a room where underground hipster–dance instructor Vito Paulekas held a clay-sculpting class. A marathon dancer in the 1930s, Paulekas spent four years in prison in the 1940s for trying to hold up a movie theater, and then moved to LA and amassed a coterie of proto-hippies. He had a dance troupe and a tree house commune that functioned as a crash pad for runaways. When the Byrds began their residency at the Sunset Strip nightclub Ciro’s in March, Paulekas’s troupe was almost as much a part of the scene as the Byrds were.
Author Barry Miles (a close friend of the Beatles) called Vito and his wife Zsou’s group of approximately thirty-five dancers “the first hippies in Hollywood, perhaps the first hippies anywhere … Calling themselves Freaks, they lived a semi-communal life and engaged in sex orgies and free-form dancing whenever they could.”
7
Zsou ran a clothing boutique and outfitted the women in see-through velvet and lace (often worn without underwear).
Vito’s right-hand man, Carl Franzoni (a.k.a. “Captain Fuck”), said,
The Byrds were, in my estimation, the best dance band that Hollywood ever saw, because they made people dance with that kind of music. Those guys were forever fighting with each other, but when they got up there, they really cooked. [The group] Love weren’t the dance band that the Byrds were, and neither was Frank Zappa. The combination of [the band members], the different factions of what kind of music they came from, it just was such a fantastic blend that it was so folk, from all different parts of the United States. I always think of dancing to “The Bells of Rhymney” and like, it’s a church, you know? So when they brought that kind of music in to Minnesota, Iowa, places like that, those kids were just: “Wow, where did
you
come from?” They could have started their own church with that kind of music they were playing.
8
In
Girls Like Us
, author Sheila Weller writes,
Paulekas and Franzoni trained a troupe of young “freakers” in the sensual body movement that soon became synonymous with late-1960s dancing. When you walked into Ciro’s in 1965, heard the music, and saw the (stoned) dancing, you were jolted by its radical fluidity, gentleness, and introspection. “You knew a new world had arrived,” says one habitué … The dancing style … was sensual and languorous, a welcome replacement for the corny, thumping Twist-era dances that had prevailed for seven years.
9
Paul Jay Robbins in the underground
Los Angeles Free Press
, wrote, “Dancing with the Byrds becomes a mystic loss of ego and tangibility; you become pure energy someplace between sound and motion and the involvement is total.”
10
On March 26, Dylan joined the band onstage for Jimmy Reed’s “Baby What You Want Me to Do.” As teenagers crowded the sidewalks outside, Ciro’s quickly became the favored scene of Hollywood’s burgeoning acid contingent—Peter Fonda, Jack Nicholson, Bruce Dern, and Dennis Hopper—who in two years would team to write and star in Roger Corman’s LSD feature
The Trip
. Also present were musicians such as Jackie DeShannon (whom the Byrds covered on their first album), singer/producer Kim Fowley (later creator of the band the Runaways), and Sonny and Cher (who would scoop one of the Byrds’ upcoming Dylan covers, “All I Really Wanna Do”).
The Byrds turned their amps, treble boosters, and compressors up to the max to become the loudest band on the scene, and also worked to perfect their image as the new vanguard of hip.
11
Gene Clark rocked the Prince Valiant haircut while banging the tambourine. Crosby mugged in his green suede cape. McGuinn, who’d first seen rectangular specs on John Sebastian in Greenwich Village, got his own set made with cobalt lenses in wire frames. The producer of the TV show
Shindig!
told him that everyone needed a gimmick, and the glasses became McGuinn’s.
12
* * *
In April, Brian Wilson’s friend
from the William Morris Agency, Loren Schwartz, gave him LSD for the first time. In the midst of the trip, Brian suddenly yelled that he was afraid of his parents and fled to his room to hide his head under a pillow. He pulled himself together, though, by riffing off Bach on the piano, an exercise that evolved into the introduction to the Beach Boys’ ultimate anthem “California Girls.” The next day, he tried to recount his trip to his wife Marilyn. He began crying and hugged her, saying, “I saw God and it just blew my mind.”
13
She became deeply upset that he was using drugs and moved out, but when he begged her to come back, she returned.
After the trip, Wilson began experiencing auditory hallucinations. “Oh, I knew right from the start something was wrong. I’d taken some psychedelic drugs, and then about a week after that I started hearing voices … All day every day, and I can’t get them out. Every few minutes, the voices say something derogatory to me, which discourages me a little bit. But I have to be strong enough to say to them, ‘Hey, would you quit stalking me? Fuck off! Don’t talk to me—leave me alone!’ I have to say these types of things all day long. It’s like a fight … I believe they started picking on me because they are jealous.”
14
Wilson plowed forward with “California Girls,” recorded on April 6. Both it and “Mr. Tambourine Man” had intros inspired by Bach. Though “Mr. Tambourine Man” wasn’t officially released until six days later, Wilson had probably already heard it. The Byrds’ manager, Terry Melcher, had been in a number of bands with the Beach Boys’ newest member, Bruce Johnston. On April 9, Johnston took over from Campbell as Wilson’s permanent replacement on the road, and would soon be an integral member. (As a thank-you to Campbell for his help, Wilson gave him “Guess I’m Dumb.” Campbell sang over a Wrecking Crew instrumental track that had originally been recorded for the Beach Boys. Campbell’s version was released on June 7, and its cinematic orchestration set the blueprint for his future hits.)
The “California Girls” session was Wilson’s favorite of his career, and he thought his intro was the finest piece of music he had written. It was recorded on eight-track, the cutting edge in studio technology at the time. Wilson wanted to create an introductory segment that was completely different from the rest of the song. After Wilson’s intro, Mike Love took it from there with a celebration of all the different types of women the band had met in their travels across the globe. The track made it to No. 3.
Love was an unusual front man, balding at a young age and compensating by going shirtless on album covers; singing the “Monster Mash” hunched over onstage in the band’s candy-striped shirts. But he wrote numerous classics with Wilson, such as “Let Him Run Wild,” the B side of “California Girls.” His passion for performing kept the band onstage through Wilson’s many ups and downs, but tension was growing as Love became wary of Wilson’s more avant-garde impulses.
Both Love and Capitol Records thought Wilson’s mellow, minor-key music on
Today!
was uncommercial, and they wanted more of the Beach Boys’ old, happier style. So their next album,
Summer Days (and Summer Nights!!)
, features tracks such as “Amusement Parks USA” and the ode to “Salt Lake City” (the latter because Mormons were big fans of the group’s wholesome image).
Still, Wilson continued to explore more subdued, melancholy moods. He wrote “Girl Don’t Tell Me,” to be his younger brother Carl’s first lead vocal. (Carl looked a bit like a mini-Brian, sometimes leading the casual observer to wonder who was who on album covers.) The song concerns the singer’s bitterness that a girl never wrote him after their summer romance, and it is the youthful gawkiness of Carl’s voice that makes it especially convincing. The song itself re-appropriates the melody of the Beatles’ latest No. 1, “Ticket to Ride,” right down to the “i-i-i” vowel elongation. Lennon shared Wilson’s introspective side and enjoyed the homage. They were going through the same trip—in more ways than one. Two of the Beatles were given LSD on the other side of the Atlantic within ten days of Wilson’s introduction to the drug, but unlike his experience, theirs was not by choice.
The Beatles get dosed with LSD on March 27 and release “Ticket to Ride” on April 9. The Brits hold eight spots in the U.S. Top 10 on May 8 as art schools, pirate radio, and Carnaby Street fuel Swinging London. The Who release “Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere” on May 21. Them, the Animals, and the Yardbirds all score as well, but the Kinks almost implode with their disastrous tour through the un-swinging United States, beginning June 17.