Mark Volman, who founded the pop-rock band the Turtles in the 1960s with his high school buddy Howard Kaylan and sang harmony on the group’s many hit songs, including “Happy Together,” “She’d Rather Be With Me” and “Eleanor,” died on Friday in Nashville. He was 78.
His death was announced in a statement from his publicist, Ame Van Iden. She did not specify a cause, but Mr. Volman had been diagnosed with Lewy body dementia in 2020.
With his thick, black-rimmed glasses, bushy hairdo and propensity to swing instruments around wildly onstage, Mr. Volman embodied the Turtles’ feel-good sunshine pop sound, especially on the infectious “Happy Together.”
That song — which, like most of the Turtles’ songs, featured Mr. Kaylan on lead vocals — was released in 1967 and became the Turtles’ only single to reach No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100. It knocked the Beatles’ “Penny Lane” from the top spot.
“‘Happy Together’ has a little bit of an old-fashioned, oompah beat,” Ray Manzarek, the keyboardist for the Doors, was quoted as saying in Mr. Volman’s oral history of his own life, “Happy Forever” (2023). “They’re like a two-man barbershop quartet, with a happy oompah band playing. And the song was just such a natural, it just exploded.”
Called an “anthem of love and positivity” by The Houston Press, “Happy Together” (written by Gary Bonner and Alan Gordon) catapulted the Turtles to stardom.
They performed the song on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” “The Smothers Brothers Show” and, somewhat incongruously, at a White House party hosted by President Richard M. Nixon’s daughter Tricia.
“When we received the invitation to play at the White House, I was both excited and apprehensive,” Mr. Volman told Parade magazine in 1969. “After all, we don’t look like strictly Republican types — Strom Thurmond, Roman Hruska, George Murphy.”
Somehow, they fit in.
“Frankly,” he told Parade, “we expected to be treated like outcasts, or at least defensively. But everyone handled us with courtesy and gentleness, especially the Secret Service guys. They didn’t react one bit to our clothes, our looks, our jargon.”
The Republicans were rocking.
“Lot of congressmen’s sons were there,” Mr. Volman told Rolling Stone at the time, “and boy, were they wrecked!”
For the Turtles, fame was fleeting. The band broke up in 1970 after a dispute over money and creative freedom with its record label, White Whale.
Mr. Volman and Mr. Kaylan then embarked on a quixotic musical journey. Contractually forbidden to perform under their real names or as the Turtles, they reinvented themselves as Flo & Eddie. After touring with Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention and adopting much of Mr. Zappa’s often cynical humor, they performed and recorded as a duo, with a repertoire heavy on satirical songs. They also recorded as background singers for a range of artists, including Bruce Springsteen on his hit single “Hungry Heart” (1980) and Alice Cooper on multiple albums.
“Truly, two of the most talented guys I’ve ever worked with,” Mr. Cooper was quoted as saying in “Happy Forever.” “They had such pure voices. Everybody wanted to work with Mark and Howard because they were so much fun. They’d walk in a room, and it was party time. And I don’t mean drug party — I mean they were fun. ”
Mark Randall Volman was born on April 19, 1947, in Los Angeles to Joe and Bea Volman. As a boy, he played baseball and was a prankster.
“I realized very early how to get attention, and I loved making my family laugh,” he said in his book. “The words ‘Oh, Mark, stop’ were used a lot in our house.”
Music was constantly playing in the home, especially traditional jazz records his father collected by the likes of Louis Armstrong, Sidney Bechet, Bessie Smith and King Oliver.
At Westchester High School, where his classmates included the future Manson Family member Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme and the future “Saturday Night Live” cast member Phil Hartman, Mark sang tenor in the a cappella choir. Also in the choir was Howard Kaylan, another tenor.
Howard also had a surf-rock band, the Crossfires; Mark said he wanted to join.
“I said, ‘That’s great. What is it that you do?’” Mr. Kaylan later recalled. “He said, ‘Nothing.’ I said, ‘Wow, sounds terrific.’”
At first, Mark was a roadie.
“The first or second time he was schlepping our equipment at one of these gigs,” Mr. Kaylan said, “he literally dropped everything down a flight of stairs and fell down the stairs with it, and laughed the whole way down.”
Soon, Mark was singing alongside Howard. With his bushy hair, beautiful voice and clumsy tambourine play, he was an instant crowd pleaser.
“He got very proficient, not in the playing of the tambourine particularly, but in the spinning of the tambourine, and the tossing it over his shoulders, and even the dropping of the tambourine, which I believe even back then he was perfecting to an art form,” Mr. Kaylan said.
The Crossfires signed with White Whale Records and changed their name to the Turtles. Their debut single, a cover of Bob Dylan’s “It Ain’t Me, Babe,” was a Billboard Top 10 hit in 1965, the year Mark graduated from Westchester High.
“We were immediately pulled out of high school and flung into an entirely different world,” he said in an interview with ClassicBands.com.
Decades later, in 1992, Mr. Volman enrolled at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in communications and a master’s degree in screenwriting.
He then became a professor at Belmont University in Nashville, teaching classes on the music business. He also continued playing gigs with Mr. Kaylan, once again billed as the Turtles (they regained the use of the name after a protracted legal battle, although they also continued to call themselves Flo & Eddie).
“I’m touring while I’m teaching, so I’m a living part of this class,” Mr. Volman told the newsweekly Nashville Scene in 2005. “My students get to visualize it firsthand.”
Mr. Volman’s two marriages ended in divorce, but the announcement of his death referred to his former wife Emily Volman as his “significant other.” He is also survived by two daughters, Hallie Volman and Sarina Miller, from his marriage to Pat Hickey, which ended in divorce; and a brother, Phil. He lived in Nashville.
Looking back on his life in 2023, Mr. Volman told People magazine, “It all sounds like a dream now.” He added, “I’m just a groupie at heart.”
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