Hitmakers The Turtles, 5 other '60s acts on tour

Who wouldn't be "Happy Together," thanks to a slew of hit records and a performing career that began in the mid-1960s? It's a career that has earned Mark Volman and Howard Kaylan, better known as Flo & Eddie of The Turtles, 50 years of fun, fame and fortune writing, singing, recording and playing music for the masses.

"Happy Together" was The Turtles' only No. 1 single on the Billboard Hot 100 chart -- dislodging The Beatles' 1967 hit "Penny Lane" in the process.

"Howard and I grew up in the suburbs of Los Angeles and met in 1962 and started The Crossfires," Volman, the one with the frizzy hair, recalls. "It was much more of an instrumental surf band, where we might have sung a few songs in a four-hour show. It was rock 'n' roll, Chuck Berry style, and I was even in the West Side Surf Club!"

Band members came and went, with Volman and Kaylan the only constants, and The Crossfires evolved into The Turtles and soon found success. The group distinguished itself by becoming one of the earliest bands to record its own version of a Bob Dylan song ("It Ain't Me Babe"). By recording Dylan's song in 1965 (after versions by Joan Baez and Johnny Cash), The Turtles joined The Byrds; Sonny & Cher; and Peter, Paul and Mary among the earliest pop/rock acts to score hits written by Dylan.

Other Turtles hits included "You Baby," "Elenore," "You Showed Me," "She'd Rather Be With Me," "Let Me Be" and "She's My Girl."

As the times changed and the hits no longer kept on coming, Volman and Kaylan came to discover that their contracts did not permit them to go their own way as The Turtles, nor could they even use their own names. Frank Zappa recruited them to join the Mothers of Invention, and they began calling themselves the Phlorescent Leech and Eddie, soon shortening that to Flo & Eddie and going on to record nine albums with Zappa and the Mothers and another nine albums under their assumed names.

By the early 1980s, they had regained the rights to call themselves "The Turtles featuring Flo & Eddie" and began assembling package tours with other veteran acts. They also found work in the world of moviemaking and providing session vocals to T. Rex, Steely Dan, Stephen Stills, Bruce Springsteen, Alice Cooper and others.

"Our forte was not so much as songwriters, but as good arrangers of our voices," Volman says. "And we knew we could do dynamite versions of the 125 songs we did write. I never went to college when I was young, since we had the band and we were making hit records, but eventually I slowed down and in 1992, I started college at Loyola Marymount in Los Angeles," Volman says. "When I graduated in '97, I was the class valedictorian, and for a time, I considered going to law school with my oldest daughter, but I figured out it wasn't exactly what I wanted to do. So I got a master's degree at Loyola. I chose instead a path of connecting with 150 students every semester that I can mentor. That's given me satisfaction I never got in the Top 10."

With changes in the family, Volman and his wife decided to leave California and move to Tennessee, where he was first asked to substitute teach and then hired full time to impart some of the hard-earned lessons he had learned while a musician.

"So now I'm a professor at Belmont University in Nashville ... trying to build a program where we prepare students for careers in music. I teach them about ownership and copyright registration and things like that -- things I didn't have anyone to teach me about back in the 1960s."

And like college students and teachers have traditionally done, Volman takes a break when summer arrives. He leaves and goes on the road with Kaylan as The Turtles, plus a shifting cast of other veteran acts of the 1960s in package tours, like their Happy Together Tour 2015, which will make a stop at Oaklawn's Finish Line Theater on Friday.

"I enjoy parts of the summer tours a lot," he says with a laugh,"and there are days I wouldn't trade, but there are days when I'm prepared to throw in the proverbial towel. I guess I'd say I'm in the 'career maintenance' business. When I was younger, I looked forward to being away from home and 10-to-12-hour bus rides, but there are too many things that happen out on the road that you don't have control over.

"But I still love doing the shows and concerts."