The Turtles/Flo & Eddie, left to right, Mark Volman, Howard Kaylan

HOWARD KAYLAN: A TURTLE’S MARVELOUS, MUSICAL LIFE
By Paul Freeman [October 2014 Interview]

A Baby Boomer couldn’t imagine a life more fun, thrilling or fulfilling than that of Howard Kaylan.

Born in New York and raised in a Los Angeles suburb, he became the vocalist and co-founder of The Turtles, a brilliantly buoyant band whose hits have proven to be timeless.

Post-Turtles, the group’s masters of harmony, Kaylan and Volman, dubbing themselves Flo & Eddie, joined Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention. In addition to recording outstanding albums of their own, Flo & Eddie provided vocal support for such artists as Marc Bolan, The Ramones, Bruce Springsteen, Duran Duran, Keith Moon, Stephen Stills, Roger McGuinn, Alice Cooper, Blondie, The Knack, Psychedelic Furs, David Cassidy, Paul Kantner, Burton Cummings, Sammy Hagar and John Lennon.

Following 15 years of litigation, Kaylan and Volman were able to reclaim the name “The Turtles.” Their classic tunes have been heard in tons of commercials, movies and TV shows.

Now they have released “The Turtles Greatest Hits,” 45 RPM Vinyl Singles Collection.” The box set features such favorites as “Happy Together,” “It Ain’t Me Babe,” “You Baby,” “Let Me Be,” “She’d Rather Be With Me,” “She’s My Girl,” “Elenore” and “You Showed Me,” as well as lesser known, but equally exhilarating tracks.

Kaylan’s life would make a great movie. In fact, a small portion of it already has. He wrote the cult favorite “My Dinner With Jimi,” based on the early days of The Turtles. It includes a mind-boggling trip to England, during which a horrified Kaylan witnesses a wasted John Lennon humiliating Turtle rhythm guitarist Jim Tucker. Later sharing a meal, conversation and way too many drinks with Jimi Hendrix, Kaylan ends up hurling all over the guitarist’s splendiferous red velvet suit.

You can experience more of Kaylan’s colossally colorful adventures in his book: “Shell Shocked: My Life With The Turtles, Flo and Eddie, and Frank Zappa, etc...” For example, the time when The Turtles were booked to play the Nixon White House and Kaylan snorted coke on Abraham Lincoln’s desk. Honest, Abe - put that in your stove pipe hat and smoke it!

POP CULTURE CLASSICS:
The new 45 box, that’s such a fun idea. How did the concept come together?

HOWARD KAYLAN:
Well, you know what? We’ve owned our own catalogue for quite a few years, after having won our lawsuit against our original record company, White Whale, after not being able to use our individual names or use the name Turtles for many years. That’s why we were anonymous in Frank Zappa’s band for those years.

So that was the first chance we had to put out a Greatest Hits that wasn’t a White Whale recording, that was something that Mark and I could oversee. And that felt great to us. And we’ve been, every five years or so, going in and remastering and trying to make the technology of today apply to the music of yesterday and updating the sound of the stuff so that it was comparable to every other new album that was coming out. And trying to make it sound like, when you put out the record, it sounded like it was made in this century, not 50 years ago. So we started doing it several years back and selling the things in concert and online, leasing our masters out internationally. And it was quite rewarding and quite profitable for us, especially internet downloads and things like that. People figure, “My God! I haven’t owned that album in 50 years. I want it now in my iPod.” So they can have it. In fact, everything I’ve ever recorded, from the age of 14, on is available on iTunes.

PCC:
And is there something special about having it available in the 45 format?

KAYLAN:
It just seemed like the next step in the evolution of trying to go back in time and recreate a feeling when vinyl was more important, when it wasn’t just a matter of digital sound, when it was a matter of the air in the room changing the sound of the music. These days it’s not just CDs that are the culprit. It’s not just MP3s. It’s the fact that everybody listens with their earphones in. So you even miss the acoustic sound of your own bedroom or your own living room, when that happens. The sound is going directly into your ears. It was never meant to be recorded that way. It was never meant to be listened to in that way. We never mixed our albums with headphones. We always mixed through speakers. There was always a baffle of air between the music and the eardrum.

And I think that’s really important. I’m still not a fan of headphones. I only use those when absolutely necessary. At any rate, vinyl was not necessarily meant for headphones. And it was meant to be played at 45 rpm. So I’m a huge fan of surface noise. I’m a big fan of pops and clicks. I used to know my records - as opposed to anybody else’s particular copy of “Sgt. Pepper’s,” I knew when mine skipped. I knew when mine made those weird noises. I could always tell when somebody else’s copy was being played - “Hey, that’s not mine! I want mine!! I want the tones I grew up with!”

And there’s a certain amount of pride that comes with vinyl, like a great pair of Levi’s that you can wear year after year and it doesn’t get old. It might get funky. But it gets funky in all the right places and for all the right reasons. An MP3 file - or a CD, for that matter - is never going to get funky. It it plays at all, it’s going to play as crystal clear as the day it was transferred in the studio. And, to me, music’s not necessarily about the studio. It’s about what happened inside the studio that day. It’s about the good vibes and the air that was passing through the room and just the feeling that you can’t really get 50 years later, when you’re trying to digitalize everything and release it in a new format. I think we’re coming a lot closer, doing it with vinyl.

And yeah, these are records that have been digitally mastered, because we want them to sound comparable to the music of this century. But the sound should be closer to anything that we’ve done, studio-wise, and released, certainly, in the past 40 years. So I think that people who buy this compilation will be pleasantly surprised by it. Bill Inglot, the guy who mastered it, has mastered every single Turtles song since the 1960s. So he knows what we sound like and he knows what the music of today sounds like. And he knows how to flip a switch and make it sound contemporary without losing any of studio sound that we had originally intended the record to be. So that’s a huge step in the right direction. You hand it off to somebody else or you try to do it yourself and I think you’re going to wind up in a little bit of trouble.

In our case, this is as close to the original, authentic 45s as we could get. And there’s something thrilling to me about a spindle and a 45 adapter. Our box set comes with a little adapter in it that says, “The Turtles” on it. And I think it’s a great kind of nostalgic trip, a great way to listen to the greatest hits that you want to listen to, not necessarily in an order that somebody else has selected for you, but the one that you want to listen to. And you want hear that one again? You play the record again. You want to flip it over? And no, it’s not going to have the original B-side. It’s going to have another hit on the B-side, of a lesser magnitude, probably, than the A-side that you’ve listened to. But to me, that’s half the fun of this thing. It’s 16 greatest hits, 8, 9, 10 of them were really big records. And the others could have been bigger - and maybe you never heard them. But this is your chance to hear “Sound Asleep” and “You Don’t Have To Walk In The Rain” and some of those great Turtles songs that never got the airplay that they deserved to get.

So it’s a two-fold process of pride for me. Being able to duplicate as closely as we could the original record company White Whale’s label and outer sleeves was something that gives me great satisfaction, too, because there’s the original blue on the label and then you look closely and it it doesn’t say White Whale on the label at all. It says FloEdCo. And you know right away that you’re dealing with a quality brand, when you’ve got the FloEdCo stamp of approval on your record. It’s fun. We want to have the same records that we’ve listened to for all of our lives and we wanted to make them fun to listen to, in this decade, when kids are going back to vinyl and are wondering what it would be like to own a greatest hits record of ours and seeing that they’re $300 to $700. That’s ridiculous. And I’m talking about the original White Whales now. And if you wanted to collect the singles, it would cost you even more. So this is kind of a tongue-in-cheek alternative to that, I think, that gives you something to do, gives you something to look at and wonder about, while you’re listening to the records that are currently on your spindle. And it’s a throwback. It’s a continuous Throwback Thursday/Friday, when you’re listening to our stuff. And we want to keep it that way. They were happy memories and they should remain happy memories.

PCC:
And was it part of the fun for you to match up the big hits with those interesting B-sides?

KAYLAN:
It was. It was great. I’m sure we took more time ruminating about it than we deserved to. But it’s the little things like that that make for vinyl collectors. I’ve collected vinyl all my life. I think it’s a real important thing. I don’t dismiss it. I never sold any of my 45s... ever. I had a big auction, years ago, where I sold off a bunch of albums. And I kind of regret that, because I had thousands, literally thousands of vinyl albums that I had to put into lots, because nobody appreciated how wonderful it was to put on a vintage Bloodstone album and listen to it. Maybe nobody but me appreciates that. But that’s the wonderful thing about being a record collector all your life - you’ve got all of those memories, all of those triggers that are like sense memory activators. And I can remember generally, when I hear any song, not just my own, where I was when that song was first on the radio, what I was doing, who I was going out with, what kind of car I was driving.

Memories are really important for that kind of stuff. And I’m not sure that the kids today are making memories, necessarily. I’m thrilled that they’re going out and buying our stuff, because we can give them our memories and, in a “Twilight Zone” way, transfer our knowledge or our appreciation to them. But, you know, years and years from now, I can’t imagine, at anybody’s senior prom, that they’re going to be all dancing to “Thrift Shop.” I just can’t picture it. I don’t see it in the cards. Maybe they will. Maybe I’m wrong. But maybe the music of the 60s was the greatest era around. Maybe the 80s was the second best era around. I can’t even comment anymore. I’m way too close to it.

All I know is, I’m still thrilled to be a part of what I consider a very worthwhile generation to be from. And I wish I could impart what that feels like to everybody who’s wondering what it was like. This is one step closer. I think if you read the book that I wrote or watch the movie that I put out, maybe there are two other glimpses into The Turtles and the life in the 60s and what it was like growing up in Laurel Canyon and all that kind of stuff. But sonically, as close as you’re going to get is this 45s collection, absolutely. This is as close to sitting down, cross-legged on my rug on Lookout Mountain Avenue in Laurel Canyon and listening to the records the day they came out, wondering if they were going to be hits.

PCC:
At the time, did you realize there was something enduringly magical happening in music? Something that might never happen again?

KAYLAN:
Well, we knew from day one, when we were 17 years old and “It Ain’t Me Babe” came out and did well that this was something that was probably never going to happen again. We weren’t sure that we were ever going to have a second record. But we did, and then a third record and a few in between, before we even found “Happy Together.” That was like our second coming. And by the time we reached 1968, ‘69, “Elenore” and “You Showed Me” and “Battle of the Bands” and the Ray Davies album, was like our third coming onto the charts. I really couldn’t believe that believe any one of those three passes, quite frankly. They were all magical.

And it wasn’t my imagination. There was something magical going on, not just about the records we were making, but about the music in general and about the feeling in America. It was a really special time. And it was a wonderful time to be involved in the music of it, because we were just a part of a much bigger thing. And the movement was taking us, more than we were carrying any of our followers along to the movement. I mean, we were really getting swept up in it as much as they were. We wanted to be The Beatles. We were as close as we could get to being The Beatles without literally changing our name to be spelled the same way.

We did everything that they did. If they put horns on their records, our next records were going to have horns on them. It was just that simple. We weren’t the only ones that were doing it. But we felt really kindred to them in some respects. And I’m really glad we did. We grew up to those guys. And I think the music reflects it. And you can hear our adulthoods creeping up on us, as you listen to those records, one after another.

PCC:
The Turtles’ fabulous harmonies - did those come naturally? Did you have to really work hard at that, especially in the beginning?

KAYLAN:
You know, it was always really natural to us. And I attribute that to Mr. Robert Wood, who was the choir director at Westchester High School, where Mark and myself and Chuck Portz all sang in the same a cappella choir together... and Al Nichol, too [all original Turtles]. Four of us were in the same choir together, under the tutorship of this brilliant music director, who taught us how to sight-read, who taught us very intricate harmonies. I stayed in that class and worked with him for most of the time I was in high school, and really learned more from him than any other teacher I’ve ever had. So I have him to thank for those harmonies.

Plus, you’ve got to remember, we grew up about four-and-a-half miles away from The Beach Boys. So we were very, very into the so-called L.A. sound and the California harmonies. They were just up the street. We didn’t think anything about it. We always sang everything in three-part harmonies... or four-part. Or five, if we could find the notes. We would naturally lurch into harmonies, at the drop of a hat. That was the easiest part of making records for us. It still is.

PCC:
Hitting with “It Ain’t Me Babe” - wasn’t it still a bit avant garde for a rock band to cover Dylan at that time?

KAYLAN:
I don’t know about avant garde. The Byrds had done it. And we had gone to see them, as a group, about a week-and-half before we went into the studio with “It Ain’t Me Babe.” And it was the big new thing. And we bought an electric guitar, a 12-string Danelectro guitar, literally a day-and-a-half after we saw The Byrds perform on the Sunset Strip. And before the record company came to our next rehearsal and heard us doing all these folk-rocky songs. And they were the guys who said to us, “Oh, my God! This is your niche. You guys should be doing folk-rock music. You’ve gotta be singing protest stuff. You’ve got to find the right protest songs.” Well, we had been a folk band in high school, as well as a surf band, and we had written a whole bunch of very folky songs that we had stashed away in a drawer, because we just figured The Kingston Trio era was well over and there was nothing going to come along again and do that kind of folk thing for America. And then Dylan did.

And all of a sudden, we were ready to go. We had a drawer full of folk-rock songs. They were just folk songs, when we wrote them. But now we had a drummer, so they were folk-rock songs, damn it! And literally, that’s all we did was rock some of them up a little bit and we had all of the B-sides we needed. In fact, we had most of our first two albums already written and in the can, when we were signed. We just didn’t know it. We just had no idea that folk-rock would be our direction. But we were ready to go.

And we went through all of the Bob Dylan records that we could. And Phil Ochs. And everybody who was a voice in folk music at the time - Tim Hardin, Tim Buckley, people we admired, out of Greenwich Village for the most part. And we went back to the early Dylan stuff and found “It Ain’t Me Babe” and didn’t realize that it was a country hit for Johnny Cash. I didn’t listen to country music. I didn’t have any idea. So we did a different arrangement on it that was angrier. It was a different sort of interpretation. It was almost a threatening “It Ain’t Me Babe.” And I took that from The Zombies, really.

I was a huge fan of Colin Blunstone and I really enjoyed the way he sang “She’s Not There.” And I thought we could apply that very principle to “It Ain’t Me Babe” - to do very soft verses and then to break into the four/four chorus that wasn’t minor anymore, that was a major chord and that sort of flipped the song around a little bit and then went back into minor and did it all again. So the pattern was very much the same as “She’s Not There.” And that soft-loud pattern continued through most of our career. And if you look at “Happy Together” and even “Elenore,” it’s the same. We really stuck to the same pattern for most of our career. We just disguised it from record to record. But we found something. We found a formula that worked for us. And now, when I hear people, even to this day, copy the formula, it’s great. You see Beyonce or somebody do a record like that and it’s based loosely around what we did, I smile. It’s kind of like, “Yeah! Somebody was listening. Somebody gets it!”

There was a reason that “Happy Together” was one of the top 50 records of the last century. That’s a very prideful statement from a mouse like me. I don’t get off many prideful statements. I’m not really boastful about anything. But that one, I’ll boast about. That’s a biggie.

PCC:
Yeah, especially since so many artists had rejected “Happy Together,” before it came to The Turtles and you transformed it into something so special. Why do you think it had been turned down repeatedly?

KAYLAN:
I don’t think anybody’s got an imagination out there, Paul, to be honest with you. I still don’t. I feel like they hear what’s on the demo record and if that’s not exactly close to what they feel is the finished product, they don’t have the imagination to picture themselves changing it or singing it differently. There are a lot of people like that who are big, big stars, that haven’t really changed the record much from the demo version that they got.

I mean, you listen to the original demo of Patti Smith’s “Because The Night” and it sounds an awful lot like the Springsteen record. Certain things are so good that they don’t need to be changed. And some things you do have to figure out what makes them relevant in this decade, what makes them relevant to the Millennials or the people after that, in this generation. Why is the music of 50 years ago relevant at all today? Why should anybody be listening? It wasn’t just because it was the Vietnam War. It wasn’t just because it was the answer to Beatlemania. It was damned good music.

And if no damned good music has been written since - and I’m not saying that - I’m just saying the proportion of music that I get to hear, that is terrific, is not necessarily as cumulative as it was back in the day. There aren’t that many great songs, that I’ll stop the car and turn up the radio to listen to anymore. And it’s because I’m old, but it’s also because the records don’t take a lot of thought these days. You know? They really don’t. And if you want to listen to records that mean something, if you want to listen to the lyrics by people who write lyrics, if you want to listen to a Bruno Mars song for instance, or a Taylor Swift song, you’ve got to figure out what station you need to listen to, if you want to hear it. It’s not like you can turn on a hit radio station like we used to do back in the day and get Otis Redding and The Supremes and The Turtles and The Beach Boys and The Cryin’ Shames and whoever else was on the charts all at the same time and then decide who we liked. Now you’ve go to know what you like before you even turn the radio on. And I think that’s kind of a shame. I think kids are missing about three-quarters of the music they’d really enjoy, if they were giving it a chance.

PCC:
In addition to the imagination, you had to have a lot of patience and perseverance to go through the process of months and months of finding the right arrangement for “Happy Together.”

KAYLAN:
Back in the day, you had labels that would support you for that amount of time, that would pay your rent or at least stick with you while you were trying to get that next record. It wasn’t a matter of, “Hey, you don’t have a second record right out of the box, you’re out!” Nowadays, nobody can support a group for more than two records, if they don’t have a hit right off the bat. And if you’re indie and you have a hit right off the bat, then your label’s going to be purchased in five minutes and you’re not an indie anymore anyhow.

PCC:
What was the process of finding so many great tunes? You tapped into a number of great songwriters early in their careers.

KAYLAN:
Well, it wasn’t as hard then as it is now. When you had a hit record in the 60s, 70s, you would get bombarded by outside material. We would receive maybe 100 to 200 discs every single week, that we would have to plow through, from writers. Some of them were Brill Building, very famous guys. And some of them were just coming up and had never had a hit before. And we listened to every one of them. Every one of them. And to be honest, we found more records from unknown than we did from famous ones. But we found Bob Lind and a lot of very progressive folk guys for that era - Rupert Holmes, just people who were kind of off the grid or were just beginning their songwriting career around that time. People were starting to submit records to us that were making more sense to us musically.

As the 70 came in, and our time with Frank Zappa drew to an end, we had to kind of select what kind of a band we wanted to be all over again and come up with a career for Flo and Eddie. And that was a whole different can of worms.

PCC:
When you recorded the “Outside Chance” song, which is on the new 45 collection, that must have been one of first covers of one of Warren Zevon’s compositions.

KAYLAN:
Yeah, I think it was. If not the first, then certainly it wa among the first of the Warren Zevon covers. And I was thrilled to know him. He was a really great guy. And before we knew that he was a brilliant and talented writer and singer, he was a great guy first. So we used his song. In fact, we recorded a couple of his songs as B-sides, as well as “Outside Chance” as an A-side. And we felt bad for him that it didn’t work, that “Outside Chance” wasn’t a hit, so much so that we put a song of his on the B-side of our record, “Can I Get To Know You Better.”

And when that didn’t work we put the same B-side on the back of “Happy Together,” which was probably the biggest mistake we ever made, business-wise, just because we wanted Warren to make a couple of bucks. He really, really needed it. He was really, really down on his luck and very depressed. And he hadn’t made a record yet. He was trying to get a duo off the ground. It was him and a girl singer. And they were having terrible luck. And he was living in squalor. And we thought, “We’ve got to help this guy.” So we did. I don’t regret it. I just think, business-wise, it was one of the stupidest things anybody has ever done. You get a record like “Happy Together” and you decide to put the same song on it that you put on the last B-side, just because you like the writer - you’re insane. And you’re also giving away, potentially, hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars... which we did.

PCC:
So you really knew as soon as it was recorded that “Happy Together” was going to be huge?

KAYLAN:
In the case of “Happy Together,” we did. It was the only time ever, that we came out of a studio, even before the record was done, even before the horns got added, from the first vocal sessions, we knew exactly that it was a number one record. It was the only time that we’ve ever felt it, the only time that I’ve ever known it to be a fact. Any other number one records that I’ve been a part of, I have not heard that at all. I have never had that feeling.

I didn’t even have it coming out of the studio after “Hungry Heart” [the Springsteen smash] I didn’t feel anything. We just looked at each other and went, “Well, that’s not going to work.” Really, we thought it was a stiff.

PCC:
[Laughs] What about T. Rex’s “Bang A Gong,” did that register?

KAYLAN:
Yeah, it registered, but only because I loved Marc Bolan so much. I mean, I was positive it was going to be a British hit, because he could have farted and and put it out as a record and had a British hit at the time. But you could have knocked me over with a feather, when it became a U.S. hit. That I was not expecting. Then I really thought he’d be able to follow it up and the fact that he couldn’t follow it up, that his record company wouldn’t really allow him to follow it up... and he did it to himself by saying that he didn’t need American radio and all that stuff. He made a couple of really dumb public statements. It kept him out of the big leagues. But I loved that guy.

PCC:
As far as the labels, is it true that “Elenore” was kind of a mischievous reaction to the record company wanting a “Happy Together” clone?

KAYLAN:
Mischievous is a very tame word. I would say it was a venomous response. A very venomous response. I gave them the most teenaged, cliched, hackneyed song I could possibly imagine. And I did it so it was as close to “Happy Together” as I could get it, because I was so sick and tired of these guys. We were coming out with Top 10 records, every record out of the box. And it wasn’t enough for them. They kept saying, “Give us another ‘Happy Together.’” “Well, what’s the difference?” “Well, that was a number one, that’s the difference.” “Jesus, don’t you think we’d be doing number ones, if we could? We don’t want to making number fours. We want number ones, for God’s sakes.”

So just out of frustration, I locked myself in a room and wrote “Elenore” with the most teenaged lyrics I could - “pride and joy, etcetera.,” which was originally “fab and gear etcetera,” even more teenaged than the one we used. But I wanted to show them how inane songs could be and how childish they were in trying to get us to record another teenage lament. But instead of seeing the stupidity, they listened to it and went, “This is the best song you’ve ever written.” And they spared no expense and promoted the thing.

And the record, to be honest, was a beautiful-sounding record. It was a great-sounding thing. Then it was part of the bigger “Battle of the Bands’ album, in which all of the songs were impeccable, as far as I was concerned. But I didn’t expect “Elenore” to be as big a hit as it was. And I certainly didn’t expect it internationally to be the record that it turned out to be, because “Elenore,” as a girl’s name, translates into any language. And you can’t believe the royalty checks I get from the countries I never heard of in my life, where that record was a hit.

PCC:
“Battle of the Bands” was such a cool concept - adopting so many different musical styles - did you see that as daring at the time? That must have upset the label, I would imagine.

KAYLAN:
Yeah, it did upset them a little bit. It was daring at the time. However, if they had known what to do, they could have sold it. The fact is, they didn’t have the confidence in the album that they should have had. That was part of it. I blame the second part on ourselves. I think that, had we been smart enough to flip the graphics, to put the outside of the gatefold of the album on the inside cover and vice versa, we would have sold a lot more records, because the inside of the album was us as 12 different groups, in 12 different costumes, dressed as all of those guys in the battle of the bands. And when you couldn’t see it, because the cover was just us in tuxedoes, welcoming everybody inside, to the record, then you didn’t really get the joke. And I think we were too close to it to understand that people need to whacked upside the head with a fish every once in a while.

PCC:
Do you think the humor of the band was one of the reasons you were able to so smoothly segue from shows like “Shindig” to shows like “Merv Griffin and “Mike Douglas”?

KAYLAN:
Yeah I do. The fact that we didn’t have a teenage idol in the band, the fact that we had no threatening members, that we weren’t a dark group at all, that we recorded happy music, that we could sit on a panel and talk to Mike Douglas and Truman Capote and Mary Tyler Moore and Leslie Uggams and people who were outside of our sphere, was something that television producers really welcomed. They had not seen too many articulate rock groups come through. So all of a sudden, we were doing a lot more panels than other bands were. And we were getting laughs and people were remembering us and booking us back again.

I can’t imagine the amount of times that we did “The Mike Douglas Show.” I can’t even compute it. But I know it was more than 10 - maybe 15 or 20 times, certainly every time we put out a record, whether it was a hit record or not, or every time we swung through the East Coast, whether we were on tour promoting something or just in the neighborhood, we would always do “The Mike Douglas Show” It was just something that you did. And it was a wonderful era in fact, for groups, in the 60s, because everybody had a television show. Everybody. So we got to know everybody from Johnny Carson to Joan Rivers. It was great. And we still know a lot of those people. And it still comes in handy every once in a while, to pull out the names.

PCC:
You’re still performing with Mark Volman these days. How have the satisfactions changed for you?

KAYLAN:
We do great. We do great on the road. I’m sure if we did more than three months at a time, we would have a lot more profitable business than we choose to maintain, but with Mark doing teaching nine months a year, at Belmont University in Nashville - he teaches music business - it kind of precludes us from touring. And that’s great, as far as I’m concerned. It was never anything that I particularly enjoyed. Once I get to the auditorium and I’m on stage doing the show, I really, really enjoy it. But the travel part of it has gotten a lot more difficult in the last few years. Security, and the waiting in the lines and all that stuff - it kind of takes the fun out of it.

So this last time around, we did everything in buses. We had three giant tour buses. And I’ve been trying to avoid doing tour buses for as long as I can remember. And I couldn’t this year. So, for the next couple of years, as long as this tour continues, on a summer basis, I guess we’ll be doing buses and seeing how it goes.

PCC:
With all you’ve achieved, any unfulfilled musical dreams?

KAYLAN:
Unfulfilled musical dreams... you know, I don’t think so. At least not as far as performance is concerned. There’s always that threat looming over your head of finding that perfect song that would make the perfect record for 19-whatever... or 2000-whatever. And that’s always there. But you really stop and think about the realities of the situation, to go into a recording studio, at the age of 67 years old, and trying to make a record that will compete against a 15-year-old kid who’s really got the hunger, A - it’s something I wouldn’t take away from the 15-year-old. B - I believe that my relevance, when it comes to making singles, is ludicrous at this age. C - it would really not be a fulfilling thing for me, even it did work, just because I’ve gone through that process before. It’s been a lot more rewarding for me to release a book that sold quite a few units and to put out a movie that did really well on the festival circuit, do that kind of thing.

I’m much more intrigued with something new, that I haven’t had success or failure in, quite frankly. So I’m willing to fail next time around with a novel or with a dramatic script. But I want to do something new. Doing something I’ve already done at all, including something musical, I think would just sort of be extra, something that I don’t really need to do, nor do I crave to do. I don’t want to act. I don’t want to produce. I don’t want to direct. I don’t want to teach. I don’t want to do any of those things. Maybe the bottom line here is I’m incredibly lazy and I don’t want to do anything.

PCC:
It’s got to be gratifying to look back and see all you’ve accomplished in so many areas of music, such a variety.

KAYLAN:
It really is. That part of it’s wonderful. It’s a legacy for my children and my grandchildren. I feel that I’ve done what I can to walk heavy on the planet and to leave at least light footsteps, wherever I've been treading, so that the name may be forgotten, but the music will not. And that’s all anybody can hope for in a lifetime on this Earth. And that’s all I think I ever wanted to achieve, from the age of five years old. So that dream has been accomplished and I’m feeling very good about my life at this time. And I really don’t want to plan anything, because everything that’s gone well for me has been unplanned.

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