THE BEST ROCK memoirs are often not by the biggest stars (e.g., Keith Richards, Bruce Springsteen) but by those who instead were off to the side a little--Al Kooper's Backstage Passes and Ian McLagan's All the Rage, for example. Happy Forever is another such case.
Mark Volman was not a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame kind of performer, but he was certainly busy--first as founding member of the Turtles, who had several hit singles, including the still-beloved song alluded to in his title, then as the "Flo" of Flo & Eddie with fellow ex-Turtle Howard Kaylan, singing leads for the early-seventies Mothers of Invention and backing vocals for such luminaries as Marc Bolan and Bruce Springsteen. He knew loads of people and saw the whole dazzling late-sixties L.A. pop scene up close.
The book is not exactly written by him, though. Not that he had a ghost writer--instead, co-author John Cody has put together a kind of oral biography of Volman, compiling quotations from interviews he conducted with Volman's family, friends, collaborators, and so on. In other words, it is a great deal like Jean Stein's Edie.
This could have gone wrong in a great many ways, but the reminiscences of Volman's wide range of associates are so vivid and Cody is so astute an arranger of his mosaic of quotations that the book is a brisk and continually entertaining read (even, remarkably, when Volman becomes an academic).
Curiosity about the Turtles or even Frank Zappa is probably relatively slight compared to curiosity about Jim Morrison, Joni Mitchell, or his Bobness, but Cody constructs through these Volman-vignettes an evocative picture of the pop music business at a particularly interesting moment.
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