John Phillips was born on August 30, 1935. As a member of The Mamas and the Papas, Phillips was one of the most successful singer-songwriters of the mid-1960s. His career after that was more frustrating, as heavy drug use and addiction kept him from reaching similar success.
Phillips formed his first band in the early 1960s. The Journeymen were a folk trio of Phillips, his childhood friend Scott McKenzie, and Dick Weissman. The Journeymen were modestly successful, recording three albums and several singles for Capitol records. When they split up, Phillips formed the short-lived New Journeymen with his wife, Michelle Phillips, and Marshall Brickman, who was quickly replaced by Denny Doherty. (You needn’t feel too bad for Brickman, by the way; he went on to co-write the screenplays for some of Woody Allen’s most successful 1970s movies, winning an Academy Award for Annie Hall.)
The New Journeymen didn’t last long, but the three singers continued to work together as part of a new group, The Mamas and the Papas. They were joined in that group by Cass Elliot, who had sung with Doherty in another short-lived folk-rock group, The Mugwumps.
Phillips was the principal writer arranger for The Mamas and the Papas, and his mix of folk harmonies with the bright jangle of mid-60s pop was enormously successful. Their first three albums—If You Can Believe Your Eyes and Ears, The Mamas and the Papas, and Deliver—all made it to the top five on the charts, and generated six top ten singles, including “California Dreaming” and “Monday, Monday.” (If You Can Believe isn’t individually available in our streaming collections, but its twelve tracks can be heard in order at the beginning of the compilation All the Leaves Are Brown.)
During this period, Phillips also had success outside The Mamas and the Papas as a songwriter, writing a song that would be the biggest hit for his old friend Scott McKenzie. “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)” spent four weeks at #1, and has become an anthem of the “Summer of Love.”
In June of 1967, The Mamas and the Papas performed at the Monterey Pop Festival, which Phillips had helped to organize. It was generally thought to be a poor performance. Phillips’ organizational responsibilities had taken time away from rehearsals, and Doherty was drinking heavily after having had a brief affair with Michelle Phillips. They rebounded by August when they performed for 18,000 people at the Hollywood Bowl with Jimi Hendrix as their opening act; it was a highlight of their career, and Phillips later said, “There would never be anything quite like it again.”
As the group prepared to record its fourth album, Phillips built a recording studio in his home. His motives were partly to give the group more time to work without the pressure of paying for studio time, but he also acknowledged that having a home studio allowed him to “stay high all the time.” Between Phillips’s drug use and his perfectionism, the recording process went slowly. In an October 1968 interview, Cass Elliot complained that it had taken a month to record a single song for the new Mamas and the Papas album, compared to the three weeks she’d taken to record an entire solo album. And her album, she noted, had been recorded live with the band, rather than layering individual vocal tracks over pre-recorded instruments.
When the new album, The Papas and the Mamas, was finally finished, it was a commercial disappointment. The biggest hit from the album was “Dream a Little Dream of Me,” which was so much a Cass Elliot solo that it was officially billed as “Mama Cass with The Mamas and the Papas;” Phillips hadn’t wanted it to be released as a single, but was overruled by Dunhill Records. The success of “Dream a Little Dream” only added to Elliot’s desire for a solo career, and tension among the group continued to grow. They announced their breakup in late 1968, though Dunhill reminded them that under their contract, they still owed the label one album.
Phillips recorded a solo album, John Phillips (John, the Wolf King of L.A.), in 1970. The single “Mississippi” was a minor hit, and the critics generally praised the album, but it didn’t sell well.
The Mamas and the Papas recorded their final contractually required album in 1971. Very little of the album was recorded by the group as a whole; individual vocal tracks were recorded, one singer at a time, as new songs were written and each member of the group was available. People Like Us was the group’s only album to fall short of the top twenty.
In 1973, Phillips moved to London and began work on a second album, produced by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. He worked on it for two years, during which time he was using cocaine and heroin “almost every fifteen minutes,” as he later said.
Phillips moved into a new musical arena in 1975, co-writing the Broadway musical Man on the Moon with his new wife Genevieve Waite. The musical was produced by Andy Warhol, and it was an utter failure, running for 43 preview performances and only 2 performances after officially opening. The Newsday review called it “the kind of show that ought to be reviewed on the obit page.” No official cast recording was ever made, but in 2009, a collection of Phillips’s demo recordings of its songs, along with a few recordings from the dress rehearsal, was released.
In 1981, Phillips attempted to return to his greatest moment of success, forming The New Mamas and the Papas. Denny Doherty was back, and two new women joined the group—Phillips’s daughter Mackenzie Phillips, and Spanky McFarlane, who had been part of another 60s vocal group, Spanky & Our Gang. Phillips would tour occasionally with some version of this group for the next twenty years. The New Mamas and the Papas never recorded a full album, but they did make some demo recordings (included on this posthumous collection of various Phillips recording projects), including the earliest version of a song that would be Phillips’s final success as a songwriter.
That song, originally written by Phillips and Scott McKenzie, was called “Kokomo.” In 1988, The Beach Boys were asked to contribute a song to the soundtrack of the upcoming Tom Cruise movie Cocktail. Their producer, Terry Melcher, contacted Phillips, who sent “Kokomo.” Melcher and The Beach Boys’ Mike Love made some changes to the song, which became a #1 hit for The Beach Boys.
Aside from occasional appearances with some version of The New Mamas and the Papas, Phillips wasn’t heard from much in his final decade. The (original) Mamas and the Papas were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1998, and Phillips died of heart failure on March 18, 2001, shortly after completing recording sessions for a new album. That album, named Phillips 66 for his age, was released a few months after his death; his 1970s Jagger/Richards-produced recordings were also released as Pay Pack and Follow.
In a disturbing coda to his career, Mackenzie Phillips published a memoir, High on Arrival (e-book | e-audio | print) in 2009. She claimed that her father had sexually abused her, that they had a decade-long incestuous relationship beginning when she was 19, and that she and her father freuqently used cocaine and heroin together for many years beginning even earlier than that. Phillips’s ex-wives and his other daughters (Mackenzie’s half-sisters) were not unanimous in their opinions, but most did not believe Mackenzie’s allegations. Denny Doherty’s daughter, on the other hand, said that her father had told her about John’s abuse of Mackenzie at the time.
John Phillips published his autobiography, Papa John, in 1986.