Review: Papa John

Papa John by John Phillips
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is a detailed, sordid, and lengthy survey of Phillips' rise with The Mamas and The Papas and descent into drug addiction. Phillips does very little to defend his actions from "fag rolling" (blackmail for queerbashing) as a juvenile to cheating on his pregnant wives including talking one into an illegal abortion where the he believed the feared molestation by the doctor occured. Of interest for music history, we hear the times and contexts for writing "Kokomo", "Go Where You Wanna Go", "California Dreamin'", "Monday, Monday", "I Saw Her Again", "Words of Love", "Twelve Thirty (Young Girls Are Coming to the Canyon)", and more. Phillips says Mama Cass died of an over-worked heart and no drugs or lunches were involved while his own drug habit quashed his food and sex appetite while developing into a trafficking operation brought down by the feds.

John's career and live seems to parallel the major arc of history there: early 60s folk revival that was progressive socially even if it didn't want to be, The Summer of Love and the Monterey Pop Festival of 1967 that Phillips was behind as a give-back event, the violent and dispiriting summer of '68 as love began to fade into the lethal '69 including the Manson murders where Phillips claims to have been invited to the Tate house that fateful night and through Cass Elliot knew of Wojtek Frykowski as one of her druggie hangers-on and drug running diplomat boyfriend (unnamed) Pic Dawson. Phillips does drop a lot of names, including doing drugs with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and others beyond the usual suspects on the rock scene. '71 brought the drug-related deaths of Jim, Jimi, and Janis and Phillips was one that continued on with the drugs and, in his words, would have been a casualty had he not been arrested.

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