You can boo, but booing’s got nothing to do with it.
Bob Dylan, 1963
The first decade of the 21st Century was a golden age of reality TV. We saw Rock of Love, in which rock chicks competed for the love of Brett Michaels, the Poison singer/guitarist, whose penchant for raw jamming on the show somewhat made up for his commercial hits. There was Flavor Of Love, in which buckwild women competed for the love of Flavor Flav, rapper (and comedian) from Public Enemy. Both of these shows, which ran to more than one series, were more-or-less shams that resulted in sexual shenanigans but no dynastic matches. There was Pretty Wild, in which documentarians followed the Beverly Hills family of a teenage girl going off the rails until she was arrested as a member of the Bling Ring, a denouement which surprised even the film crew. If you stayed up late enough, you were treated to guided tours of the brothels and strip clubs of Amsterdam, Sydney and Budapest on Sin Cities. What went wrong? Is it more moral to be screening shows about needlessly renovating homes in order to put the rent up in the middle of a housing crisis, or just more dispiriting? Somehow the descriptive - finding or creating an interesting situation and documenting it - become the prescriptive - these are the things to do and buy and the kinds of people who do and buy them, within limits.
But perhaps the high point of lost naughties reality TV was Celebrity Rehab, which showed us the hellish punishments reserved for famous people who like drugs too much. That plausible quack Dr Drew, who had made his name on the MTV sex advice show, would shower the inmates with coercive concern and psychiatric drugs which, on the evidence presented, seemed no better for them than whatever it was that, given the chance, they’d be falling face down on. I wasn’t sure that any celebrity on the show could ever get better on that regime, but the likes of Shifty Shellshock (the Crazy Town frontman who rapped ‘Butterfly’, best pop record of 1999), Gary Busey (at his best in the movie Straight Time), and the late Tom Sizemore (Scagnetti in Natural Born Killers) could at least be relied on to entertain us. But Celebrity Rehab had its tragic side, represented by the people brought there by greater traumas than fame, and in season 3 (2010) Mackenzie Phillips brought us back to reality. The daughter of “Papa” John Phillips and his first wife, Susan Stuart Adams, Mackenzie had disclosed in her 2009 autobiography High on Arrival, and in subsequent interviews with Oprah, Larry King, and others, that not only had her father been her drug buddy from a young age, and injected her with cocaine, but that she and he had had a sexual relationship that began when she was 19, and on the eve of marrying her first husband, Rolling Stones gofer Jeffrey Sessler. She’s brave and straightforward in these interviews and what she’s describing no-one back then wanted to hear; there’s no good reason to doubt her story.
When a musician does something truly awful, my natural response is to look for clues in their music. Results are mixed. Lost Prophets were a huge disappointment, Burzum and Awake The Rapper less so. In the case of John Phillips, there’s rather a lot to go on. But the history of The Mamas & The Papas is already well told, and I’m not really interested in scouring their catalogue of commercial pop for traces of the oncoming darkness. Anyway, Luke Haines did that impeccably in an article for Record Collector a while back – he loves the 1968 overindulgence album The Papas & The Mamas.
“It’s my favourite The Mamas & The Papas album. Full of eve-of-the-Manson-age dread. In the magnificent single, Twelve Thirty, we learn that “young girls are coming to the canyon” (whether they are coming back home from the canyon is not stated). Dread is all over this album, no more so than on their greatest single, Safe In Our Garden, a protest song made by people too stoned to move.”
When you go out in the street
So many hassles with the heat
No one there can fill your desire
Cops out with the megaphones
Telling people stay inside their home
Man, can't they see the world's on fire
Somebody take us away, take us away
But we do need to discuss the hit Papa John wrote for his childhood friend Scott Mackenzie (whom, come to think of it, he possibly named his daughter after?), ‘San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)’. Phillips wrote this era-defining hit (it went to number 1 in New Zealand for 5 weeks - as with the success of ‘Totally Wired’, we have a history of buying music that celebrates the social changes we’re being denied) to help sell the Monterey Pop Festival he was promoting with producer Lou Adler.
According to Wikipedia, according to Paul Ingles of NPR "...local authorities in Monterey were starting to get cold feet over the prospect of their town being overrun by hippies. To smooth things over, Phillips wrote a song, "San Francisco (Be Sure To Wear Flowers In Your Hair)." Wiki also says “The song is credited with bringing thousands of young people to San Francisco during the late 1960s.[citation needed]”
The citation wiki needs is a book called Ringolevio by one Emmett Grogan (born Eugene Leo Grogan, 1942-1978), the anarchist co-founder of the Diggers movement, a radical theatre troupe best known for feeding these thousands of runaways, whose lot in San Francisco was little better than that of illegal migrants today once the acid wore off. Grogan hated Phillips’ song for adding to the existing burden of Haight Ashbury’s overcrowding, its health crisis of STDs, bad trips and hepatitis, the tensions between the Black and Hispanic communities and the newcomers more likely to get their jobs, and he detailed the kids’ inevitable exploitation by drug dealers and, his special bugbear, the local commercial interests represented by HIP, (the Haight Independent Proprietors), who put them to work in sweatshops for lousy rates making the hippie tat they sold in their shops.
In any case, John Phillips lived in Los Angeles, almost 400 miles away. But his 1969 solo album, John Phillips (John, the Wolf King of L.A.), could be seen as an attempt to step away from his slick commercialization of everything, like Bob Darin’s work around the same time. Certainly, it’s covered in beautiful tunes, but the lyrics are often harshly confessional (“brutal” - Luke Haines), or disturbingly opaque, and the music is arranged in a Nashville Dylan back-to-basics style. Track one, ‘April Anne’, discusses his friend Ann Marshall’s private life:
April Anne with the red bandanna round her head
Pretty Anne with the peacock feathered fan said
That the sash around her waist had turned to lead
And her jingle-jangled faggot friend was dead
And the wine he spilled stained her pillow red
And the midnight cowboys came but quickly fled
Oh the whole thing was bringing her down
Lady Anne, we danced the fandango on your bed
Anne, the Gypsy Woman once said:
Let an Easy Rider share your bed
But you chose the drunken gigolo instead
How were you to know he was ill-bred?
Then you sat and cried and hung your head and said
That the whole thing was bringing you down
‘Drum’ is a cinema verité piece about having a set of drums stolen from his car while visiting his drug dealer:
Those junkie bums, they're gonna steal my Blackbird drums
You know they took them from my car
And then they put them in their arms
‘Genevieve’ refers to Phillips’ third wife Genevieve Waite having a miscarriage while Papa John skin-popped heroin with another woman elsewhere in their home.
Genevieve lay bleeding in my basement
Misconceiving life again
Up on the sidewalk, her replacement
Waiting to be skinned
Bobby wants a lady from the low lands
And I'd like to have one too
Paul said, "One in the bush worth two in your hand"
Even then you'll find there are too few
I think we’re beginning to see why Roman Polanski would soon become obsessed with the idea that John Phillips was responsible for the murders of Polanski’s friends, his wife, and his unborn son. There’s an irony there, because, had Polanski asked the private detective he hired to look at the other half of Wilson Phillips, The Beach Boys, instead of The Mamas & The Papas, he could have found the killers before the police did.
‘Someone’s Sleeping"‘ includes this verse
From a second story window caught a glimpse of someone's life
And it was mine
And my face was dark and dirty
And I'd been crying
Which echoes the first verse of ‘Twelve Thirty (Young Girls are Coming to the Canyon)’
I used to live in New York City
Everything there was dark and dirty
Outside my window was a steeple
With a clock that always said twelve-thirty
As if his escape from New York was just a dream, as if he sees his moral compass sinking out of reach into the depths and knows he’ll be sailing on without it.
On the CD reissue of Wolfking Of L.A. there were a few bonus tracks, one of which, ‘16mm Baby’, a demo from 1970 where you can hear the producer cough and where the lyrics continue as an afterthought after John’s guitar stops, is obviously about a porn actress. I think the point being made is that Papa John is a sex addict as well as a drug fiend, and that he has a commitment to documenting the world he’s drawn to. It won’t be his saving grace, or his redeeming feature; as a man, he’s too far gone for that, but it makes his music as hard to ignore as those reality TV shows I mentioned earlier were. I know biopics are hopeless enterprises, but in an ideal world Paul Schrader would make this one.
The Mamas & The Papas’ 1971 album People Like Us is almost unlistenably bland, because Phillips pulls his punches on his “band” songs (looking up the date I was shocked, because People Like Us sounds like some burned-out reunion album from much later - I’d forgotten that Mama Cass died in 1974). There’s still one gorgeous tune on it, ‘Snowqueen Of Texas’, which is like a kinder ‘April Anne’.
But cocaine, being an upper, does have its jagged edge, and not every producer can airbrush it out. John Phillips was asked to compose the soundtrack for The Man Who Fell To Earth (1976), a film starring another famous cokehead, David Bowie. Things went badly when the composer kept hearing a noise on the tapes that wasn’t really there and demanding the engineers remove it. Here’s his demo for the title song, never used in the film (except as an instrumental version, ‘Window’), and I think it kinda captures that mood.
It's well known that Mick Jagger was a loyal friend of Phillips, to the extent of rescuing him from crack houses and dragging him to NA meetings.1 Less well known is that Papa John and The Rolling Stones (that is, Mick, the other Mick, Ron Wood, Keith, and friends) made an album together in 1976, released in 2001 as Pay Pack And Follow (a quote from the 19th C explorer and sexologist Richard Burton), and, remixed, in 2008 as Pussycat.
’She’s Only 14’ is a lurid account of Mackenzie’s life at the time, with Jagger singing along, to a very lazy, sleazy and uninspired Stones vamp. We hear that “she’s so high” and “she’s so sexy”, but what we feel in response to this shouldn’t blind us to the human tragedy in process - John, one of the most successful entertainers of his day, is his daughter’s role model, and she’s going off the rails because he has. And now, he’s giving his approval, and she’s keeping his all-too-easily distracted interest, so why would she stop?
As for Phillips’ songwriting method, Pop Matters’ Rob Horner nails it in his album review: “Phillips seems to find this approach irresistible, pitilessly recounting his own foibles as if putting the memories up for sale in song excuses his behavior”. The song that works best on Pussycat is ‘Pussycat’ itself.
My pussycat’s closed up nice and tight
they closed my porno shop last night
Guess I’ll stroll down to my topless
Have a little lunch and watch the kids undress
I know them all, I know their names
I know their plans, I know their games
But if I had a million hearts to give
I’d give one to every kid who lives
On the runway beyond the bar
See her dancing, but she’ll never ever be a star
Macho anarchist Emmet Grogan, angrily detailing the exploitation of runaways on Haight Ashbury in Ringolevio, somehow ignored their sexual exploitation; decadent song merchant Phillips, prowling along Sunset, doesn’t. Corrupt and complicit as he is, he can’t help feeling empathy, he needs to bear witness, in the only way he can, by entertaining us to tears. It’s fucked up, and there’s nothing else like it.
There are two Mick Jagger biographies in our house, and neither mentions John Phillips except as the source of Keith Richard’s methadone during some historic detox. In Ringolevio, Emmet Grogan described how he introduced methadone to the heroin addicts of New York before its adoption as an opioid substitute by doctors. Grogan would die of a heroin overdose on a New York subway train in 1978.
i never finished ringolevio, it had some interesting parts in it for sure but that guy came across as an epic tosser