1965: The Most Revolutionary Year in Music (14 page)

TV’s
Ready Steady Go!
did the same. Hosted by mod Cathy McGowan, the program was freewheeling enough to let groups such as the Rolling Stones introduce Brits to their older blues idols such as Howlin’ Wolf. Many of the blues greats such as Muddy Waters and Willie Dixon had experienced difficulty supporting themselves because their genre seemed out-of-date to contemporary black audiences. It reminded many blacks of the American South they had deliberately left behind in their Great Migration north and west. So when bands such as the Stones and the Yardbirds popularized these artists with a new white audience, it helped revive the bluesmen’s careers.

But there were only so many American blues songs to cover. The savvier British groups began to realize they had to find original material, though only some would prove up to the challenge of writing their own songs. Of the pop-oriented groups, the Hollies and Moody Blues made the transition. The blues-based groups—the Rolling Stones, the Animals, the Yardbirds, the Who, the Kinks, Manfred Mann, and Ireland’s Them with Van Morrison—struggled to walk the line between staying true to their roots and releasing singles commercial enough to allow them to survive. The purist tension was most clearly exemplified when Eric Clapton left the Yardbirds because he felt their February release “For Your Love” was too pop.

Ironically, New York’s Brill Building actually ended up providing some of the greatest songs of the British Invasion. The Animals’ manager, Mickie Most, would fly from London to New York to visit Don Kirshner, listen to his latest tracks, and buy the best.
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“We Gotta Get Out of This Place” was an electrifying vow to make it, no matter what the cost, by Mann-Weil. Equally fierce was Roger Atkins–Carl D’Errico’s declaration of independence, “It’s My Life.” The Animals also recorded Goffin-King’s “Don’t Bring Me Down,” but felt they were too cool for Mann-Weil’s antidrug anthem, “Kicks,” and left that for Paul Revere and the Raiders. The Animals’ incendiary triumvirate of Brill-written hits made it briefly irrelevant that lead singer Eric Burdon was not evolving as a songwriter as rivals Jagger/Richards and Van Morrison were.

Though even Morrison benefitted from the Brill, when songwriter/producer Bert Berns gifted Them with the dynamic “Here Comes the Night,” released in March. Morrison’s raspy lament and Jimmy Page’s reverbed guitar were given panoramic punch by Berns’s production and underscored with moody organ. (Page was the king of the British session musicians, playing for Donovan, Herman’s Hermits, Petula Clark, Tom Jones, Marianne Faithfull, Jackie DeShannon, Nico, and even the early Kinks and the Who, before joining the Yardbirds and later forming Led Zeppelin.)

The other key to sustainability was moderation when it came to partying, but as Swinging London kicked into high gear, this would become a tricky row for many to hoe. Originally cabarets and casinos were the only places open late at night where bands could grab a bite and unwind after a gig or a night in the recording studio (hence the casino sequence in the Beatles’
A Hard Day’s Night
). But with the rise of the new class of pop stars, a string of super-“in” night clubs rose to cater to them, such as The Ad Lib and Scotch of St. James, where luminaries as varied as the Stones, the Kinks, Mary Quant, Julie Christie, and even on occasion Princess Margaret held court. Rock critic Nik Cohn wrote that the club scene was so addictive that many rockers never got it together to become world-famous because they enjoyed the high life too much.
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The Pretty Things admitted as much in “Midnight to Six Man.” In the song, they manage to drag themselves out of bed only after dark, in order to hit the club to hear some new sounds and score (in both senses of the word).

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Guitarist Pete Townshend
went to high school with bassist John Entwistle and vocalist Roger Daltrey, and the trio formed a band, eventually settling on the name the Who. But while Townshend and Entwistle were friends, their relationship with Daltrey was touchier. Daltrey was a hard-ass who didn’t let being only five foot seven stop him from settling arguments with his fists. He was ultimately expelled from school for smoking.

Of the London blues bands that went on to fame, the Who was the only one to dare cover James Brown, hence their slogan “Maximum R&B.” When drummer Keith Moon asked to sit in with them one night, he blasted them to the next level. A beyond-hyper speed freak, he synthesized the thunderous tom-toms of Gene Krupa with the surf-rock bedlam of the Surfaris’ “Wipe Out” into his own iconoclastic style, and was never afraid to deviate from the standard beat to embellish with outlandish drum fills. Sometimes his fills themselves became part of the melody.

The band’s first manager, Pete Meaden, decided to make them
the
band of the mod subculture. Mods were usually young people who worked in offices and spent all their money on stylish clothes, obsessed with cutting-edge Italian suits, vests, and shoes. Their ideal weekend was to take amphetamine pills and stay up for days dancing to R&B and soul.

Mods’ rumbles with the rockers became legend. Typically, rockers were from the tradesmen class. They were the descendants of the Teddy Boys, the first teenage subculture in post–World War II Britain, and their motorcycles and leather were in sharp contrast to the mods’ Vespas and parkas.

In the beginning, the rockers and mods didn’t fight—it was actually the mods and the police—but sensationalistic newspapers changed it to “mods versus rockers,” and soon, life imitated art.
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During the spring holiday of 1964, both sides massed to brawl on the beach in resort towns such as Brighton, Margate, Hastings, and Broadstairs, though how different this really was from typical post-football game hooliganism is open to conjecture. Still, it was enough of a newspaper story for a journalist to ask Ringo Starr in
A Hard Day’s Night
if he was a mod or a rocker. He’d been a Teddy Boy as a teen, but the Beatles’ manager had remolded the band with a proto-mod look. Starr deftly answered that he was a “mocker.”

The Who took the mods’ style and, equally important, as author Nicholas Schaffner writes in
The British Invasion
, channeled the spirit of the mod-versus-rocker feud into their music.
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Townshend was the first guy on the circuit to use two amps at the same time, which made his distortion and feedback richer. He rubbed his guitar on his mike stand and shook the guitar in front of the amp to get a throbbing pre-psychedelic cacophony. He created a Morse code effect by flipping the pickup of his guitar off and on, and then hitting another switch to make it sound like he was gunning the audience down, pointing the end of his guitar at them like an Uzi, making his way murderously from one end of the stage to the other.

When Townshend opened for the Stones, he saw Richards warming up by windmilling his arm. When Townshend realized it wasn’t part of Richards’s act, he took the pose for himself onstage, one of many he would develop to compensate for his nose, which he felt was too big.
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A few ballet lessons taken as a kid helped his natural grace as he jumped and bent down on his knees, transforming himself into one of the great posers of rock.

One night, while the band played “Smokestack Lightning” at the Railway Hotel in West London, Townshend lifted his twelve-string over his head and it went through the venue’s low ceiling. It broke his guitar, but he acted like he’d meant for that to happen, and continued slamming the guitar into the ceiling over and over. The crowd loved it, but next week he didn’t have an extra guitar to smash, so he pushed over his amps. Not to be outdone, Moon shoved over his drum kit.
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(Later, Moon took to stocking his bass drum with explosives to detonate at the climax of their sets.) The press, who had started coming by, told the band that if they did it again, they’d put them on the front page. So Townshend would ram his guitar into the speaker, throw it in the air and catch it, then bring it down over his shoulder and smash it on the ground.

In art school, he had seen the “auto-destructive” work of Gustav Metzger, who would spray hydrochloric acid onto nylon sheets to make the nylon disintegrate, as a symbol of the destructive power of nuclear weapons.
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Townshend branded his instrument smashing an “auto destruction” happening, which went along with the band’s Pop Art clothing, such as Moon’s bull’s-eye T-shirt and Townshend’s coat made out of the Union Jack.

The destruction was also Townshend’s catharsis for an abusive childhood. He had been left in the care of his cruel grandmother, who spanked him excessively, possibly as a result of dementia. In Townshend’s memoir, he writes of being haunted by a few foggy, horrible incidents with her and her boyfriends, though the experiences were traumatic enough that he still couldn’t write about them in therapy in 1982.
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Then, when he joined the Sea Scouts, scoutmasters sexually abused him in the showers. He and a friend developed a penchant for setting fires.

When the Who recorded their single “I Can’t Explain,” Townshend didn’t feel he could push the producer to let him include the feedback tricks they were exploring onstage. But when the Beatles’ scooped them by using feedback at the beginning of “I Feel Fine,” Townshend decided to make the effect the centerpiece of the Who’s next single, May’s “Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere,” perhaps the most avant-garde song to hit the U.K. Top 10 to date.

“I was inspired by listening to Charlie Parker, feeling that this was really a free spirit, and whatever he’d done with drugs and booze and everything else, that his playing released him and freed his spirit, and I wanted us to be like that, and I wanted to write a song about that, a spiritual song.”
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Townshend came up with the title; macho Daltrey toughened it into a universal ode to self-confidence, asserting that he could go anywhere and live any way he dared; nothing could stop him. Moon’s hyperkinetic drums synched with Townshend’s guitar as if the band were speeding through hyperspace like the Silver Surfer dodging asteroids. They incorporated all their stage tricks: machine-gunning, surf-rock drum rolls, rim shots, jazz lines, Morse code insanity. Onstage, Daltrey began swinging his microphone above his head like a lasso.

*   *   *

Originally, Townshend had written
“I Can’t Explain” as an imitation Kinks song. He loved the Kinks’ sound so much he wanted their producer, Shel Talmy, to produce the Who as well (which he did). Kinks’ guitarist Dave Davies discovered the sound after his girlfriend’s parents said he couldn’t marry her. He was so angry that he slashed the speaker cone of his crappy amplifier—inflicting damage that resulted in the fiercest, most distorted guitar on record in “You Really Got Me,” from whence heavy metal and punk eventually sprang.

It seemed that the Kinks were destined to make it big on American shores. “You Really Got Me” and its follow-up, “All Day and All of the Night,” had both made it to No. 7 in the States the previous year. They slowed things down for the jangling “Tired of Waiting for You,” which made it to No. 6 (No. 1 in the United Kingdom) in February. Lead singer–rhythm guitarist Ray Davies wrote all but two of March’s
Kinda Kinks
tracks, at a time when the Stones were still primarily a cover band. “Everybody’s Gonna Be Happy,” backed with “Who’ll Be the Next in Line,” continued the run of strong singles. The band also had the perfect uniform for the U.S. Anglophiles: red riding jackets and frilly shirts.

But they almost blew apart before they even made the trip overseas. On May 19, when an onstage fight escalated in Wales, Kinks drummer Mick Avory knocked Dave out with his hi-hat stand in front of five thousand people. Avory hid out from the cops while the group auditioned Mitch Mitchell (who later joined Hendrix) to replace him on drums. Eventually, however, the charges were dropped, Avory returned, and the group remade “Tired of Waiting for You” as “Set Me Free” for their trip across the Atlantic. The B side, “I Need You,” had more power chords in the “You Really Got Me” vein.

Dave led the single rocker lifestyle, but Ray was a married homebody whose first daughter was born just a few weeks before their first tour. Thus he wasn’t in the best frame of mind when they arrived in the States on June 17 and the JFK customs agent asked, “Are you a boy or a girl?”

“That’s right, I’m a girl, and so is my brother,” Ray replied, a retort that held up the band and delayed their press conference.
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On NBC’s
Hullabaloo
, Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello introduced the band, and Ray and Avory danced cheek to cheek, which alarmed various homophobic powers that be. But Ray believed the incident that resulted in their ban from the States occurred during their appearance on Dick Clark’s TV show
Where the Action Is.
A man who may have been a union official in the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (AFTRA) asked Ray if his wife, who was Lithuanian, was a Communist. Ray pushed him, and the man fell over.
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The band also failed to pay their dues to AFTRA. After that, they were denied permits to reenter the United States for the next four years, the period when English artists made the most money touring overseas.

Still, perhaps they were lucky even to have made it back to Olde England. After playing a concert in Illinois on June 23, the Kinks were invited to the home of a member of the local branch of the Jaycees, a civic organization. He plied them with drinks, but something unnerved the guys about him, so they left abruptly. Later, they discovered that the man was John Wayne Gacy, who was executed in 1994 for killing thirty-three young men and boys.
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Back in Britain, they released “Till the End of the Day,” an ebullient remake of “All Day and All of the Night” that celebrated their freedom to do whatever they wanted. Along with the Stones’ “I’m Free” and the Who’s “Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere,” it was the year’s happiest statement of youthful empowerment. But the B side, “Where Have All the Good Times Gone,” reflected Ray’s worries about the group’s future in the shadow of the American entry ban. He would go on to write many songs about dead-end streets over the next few years. Yet the ban was what would transform him into the most quintessentially English lyricist, nostalgic for the simpler traditions of old Britannia in the face of social upheaval.