Papa was stoned

The life of John Phillips of the 60s group The Mamas and Papas is also the story of the hippie revolution gone out of hand, when sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll became a plight on the American landscape.

Papa was rolling stoned

The life of John Phillips of the Mamas and Papas exposes a hippie revolution gone haywire, blighting America with its dose of sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll.

IN 1965, when I was in Secondary 4, a school mate introduced me to the song I Left My Heart In San Francisco, a hit recorded by Tony Bennett three years earlier.

I liked the song, but found it difficult to learn to sing. The minor seventh jazz chord progression was also too complex for me to learn to play on the guitar.

Two years later, when I was in Pre-University 2, I had a San Francisco song which I could sing easily, and strum the guitar to. It was the hit by Scott McKenzie called San Francisco (Be Sure To Wear Flowers In Your Hair).

John Phillips, leader of the group, the Mamas and Papas, composed the song on a 12-string guitar together with McKenzie, a former band mate of his in New York, in half an hour. They cut a record of that song in one night in a studio in Los Angeles.

It is ironical that this song, which became the anthem for 1967's Summer Of Love, was written really as a commercial ditty, to help publicise the Monterey Festival which Phillips was organising.

As it turned out, thousands of young people from all over America did descend on San Francisco and Monterey in California, with flowers in their hair. The three-day ""love-in'', as the song billed it, was a huge success, launching the careers in America of artists like Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and the Who, among others.

The Mamas and Papas Phillips, his wife Michelle, Cass Elliot and Denny Doherty would break up in the following year, but by then, the group, which was formed in 1966, would have left an indelible mark in a generation of babyboomers, including someone like myself who lives on the other side of the globe.

California Dreamin', Monday, I Saw Her Again Last Night (all Phillips' compositions) and the old 1950s number, Dream A Little Dream Of Me, which Cass Elliot made into a worldwide hit these songs still resonate with the vestigial hippie trapped within me.

The Monterey Festival and Woodstock in 1969 were the cornerstones of the 1960s hippie revolution. Between the time of Bennett's San Francisco in 1962 and Phillips' in 1967, America had gone from innocence to the beginning of decadence.

The 1970s would turn dark, when sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll became a blight on the American landscape and ruined countless young lives.

Cass Elliot died in 1974 from obesity. She was 225 pounds (102'kg), almost twice the average weight for a woman of her height. Some of the muscle tissue in her heart had turned to fat and weakened it, according to the pathologist who examined her. But certainly, her heavy consumption of drugs and liquor had has tened her death.

Her death followed those of Janis Joplin, who swilled the cough syrup codeine from Southern Comfort bottles, Jimi Hendrix, and Rolling Stone Brian Jones, all of them drug casualties.

Meanwhile, the money men had moved into scene, and rock very quickly became corporatised. By the time the young Cameron Crowe, now a Hollywood director, joined the Rolling Stone magazine in the 1970s, it was no longer an anti-Establishment rag publishing ""All The News That Fit'', a play on The New York Times' ""All the News That's Fit To Print''. It had become a money-making fanzine and made a fat cat of its founder Jann Wenner.

Crowe's currently-showing movie, an autobiographical fantasy called Almost Famous, about a 15-year-old kid who toured with a heavy metal band across America in 1973 as a rookie rock reporter, is just too sweet to be true.

It is sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll sanitised for the Disney generation. The movie's soundtrack could just as well be Bennett's I Left My Heart in San Francisco, performed by a pretty boy?
band.

Back to John Phillips. His downward spiral through the 1970s and 1980s is emblematic of the counterculture's free fall from the sunshine of the Age of Aquarius to the dark side of the moon. His 1986 chronicle, Papa John, ghost-written by magazine writer Jim Jerome, is a harrowing, cautionary tale. He was a gifted songwriter, but he squandered his gift on drugs, from acid to cocaine to heroin. He spent most of his days in a drug haze.

He says at the end of the book: ""When I abused, then abandoned, my own creative gifts, I lost the way out; I lost the magic and I lost myself. I lost the respect and affection of my peers and the public and myself and there was nothing to replace it until I found smack.

""It was a long and brutal trip down from the main stream of pop to the main line of junk.''

Phillips resurfaced briefly in the late 1980s, and wrote the Beach Boys' 1988 No 1. hit Kokomo,featured in the Tom Cruise vehicle, Cocktails.

Giving up smack or junk (heroin), he hit the bottle. His liver gave way and he had a transplant in 1992. He died last Sunday of heart failure. He was 65; it is a wonder he lived this long.

The London-based Eagle Records is reported to be releasing in a few weeks' time an album he recorded with Mick Jagger and Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones some 25 years ago. It can't be a good record since, as he confessed in his book, he was so out of it during the recording sessions that the Glimmer Twins gave up on the project.

I went to San Francisco for the first time in 1983. But I went far too late. As the gonzo journalist Hunter Thompson ? he's still alive! He had said, ""San Francisco in the middle 1960s was a very special time and place to be a part of.''

I did get to meet the Beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti in his bookshop City Lights though, but that's another story.

These days, when I find myself in a karaoke joint and am obliged to sing just one song, it's often San Francisco (Be Sure To Wear Flowers In Your Hair). Sometimes my eyes mist when I'm singing it, and my young companions wonder why.