Mamas & Papas' John & Michelle Phillips (separately) on Bob Costas, 1990

thanks for staying up later this folks is john phillips who founded the mamas and the papas and it was still active within the last couple of years he wrote the big hit kokomo for the beach boys and the mamas and papas at least a later edition of it still on the road occasionally huh yeah i must add that uh scott mckenzie who uh sang if you're going to san francisco wear flowers in your hair yeah wrote part of kokomo as did mike love as did terry melcher so it was sort of a group effort lots to cover here very little time so let's just start arbitrarily when you married michelle phillips she was a teenager she was 16 17 years old right well when i started living with her she was at that age yeah we got married she was about 18. and you were in your in your mid-20s yeah and a lot of turmoil grew out of that sherman grew out of that and uh her father was a uh assistant he was the probation officer actually the juvenile probation officer for l.a county and i just playing with the hungry eye is there an irony here i don't know is there i mean so uh we had a little drink at the bar later and he said he's a huge man you know i saw him the other night in l.a and uh he said uh you know what my job is and i said yeah you're uh you know you were for a juvie hall there you know for runaways and things like that and he says yeah he says i guess you better be good to her hadn't you i said i guess i'd better head you know sir let's talk about some of the big hits california dreaming where'd it come from uh well uh well michelle was about 16 and a half 17 years old uh she came to uh new york with me and that she'd never been east before in her life i'd never seen snow and uh she awakened me one morning said look look out the window look there's white stuff falling everywhere you know and it was snow and i'll share with you like sneakers you know and things like that so we went for a while it's more of a narrative went for a walk actually it just sort of describes the day on a winter's day yeah and i'd be safe in the and you water and uh i wish i was in la you know california dreaming and uh that night i was playing all some chords and things and uh i woke michelle up and i said uh write this down i think this might be good you know she said leave me alone i'm trying to sleep okay just leave me alone so i said okay okay and about half an hour later i couldn't do both at once i couldn't remember everything at the same time i would i awakened her again and she said okay i'll write it down shut her down now to the stage she says it's the best half hour of my life and she gets a writing credit right half of the right way monday monday monday monday i have no idea what it's about i had to beg the group to record it we needed one more song on the album on the first album and i had faith in the song i didn't know what it was about and they had the nerve to ask me bob what's this song about and i said well what do you think it's about well it's one of these songs that everybody can just attach to yeah because you wake up you don't want to go to work it's monday again or it's your girlfriend or whose name it was monday you broke up on a monday your girlfriend broke up people stopped on the street and said it's about a girl and i say that's right this is about day of the week isn't it here's another song that a lot of people wondered about at the time that it was a hit because songs then were slickly produced and there wasn't a misstep anywhere along the way but i saw her again had a stop and a start in it yeah accidental that went as a matter of fact something like this was it meant to be that way or was it a mistake and uh it was a mistake uh didn't and i just sort of came in dennis doherty he was singing the mamas and papa's then uh came in uh and so did i uh accidentally and uh it sounded great we went to london and uh we played the uh the dub of the record uh for paul mccartney and uh paul said uh wait play that again federigan says that's a mistake he says no one's that clever that's a mistake i know that's a mistake cop out to it that's a mistake okay so it was what sort of woman was mama cass who dies at the age of 33 she chokes to death uh well she didn't really choke to death to start with uh that's sort of a pure man's uh thing in a uh release but uh she died of her own weight uh her involuntary uh muscle system just stopped going and she stopped breathing and uh um it was a shame cass i really wanted to be not mama cast but cass what she really wanted to be in the end you know and uh two nights before she had opened to talk of the town in london and had done very very well and uh had called me and she was very proud of herself and had a birthday party and all this stuff you know and i was really happy for her and then i was with dick cavett the next day and uh the phone rang and uh um this sort of paul came over dick's face and dick said you better sit down and talk to you about this and he informed me that uh it was lou on the other end loser i can't tell him you have to tell him and uh casa died and she was uh and sidecast was marilyn monroe really i mean she was really uh she was the cast was beautiful in every way she's one of the most unique voices i think you know we've ever had like a sweet song bird yeah she could just do anything she wanted with it she was completely in pitch was she unhappy well she got married a lot to guys who wrote children's stories and who were counts and things like that you know and you know she i asked her i said why do you marry all these people she said well i did the same routine you know i buy my motorcycle and leather outfit and put them in acting school and uh that's that you know so wasn't she always going on and off crash diets yeah they named the wing of cedars of lebanon after castle as a matter of fact the cast elite wing were they ever successful did she ever get relatively slim not really no as a matter of fact cass and i was out of friendly enemies like you know we were both like real wise guys in the sense of you know not wise guys but you know what i mean so uh i visited her once i see this i took her flowers and i said yes just so you know every time you lose an ounce your price goes down yeah you were you were very emotional at her funeral weren't you very yeah i didn't realize how attached i was to cass uh and how i'd grown up with her and known her for so many years and all that you know until uh it was over and it was too late to to say anything about it you know this is the story of my life you know that i don't realize how important things were to me until they're it's like to make amends really you can't play catch up with emotions you know continuing out with john phillips of the mamas and the papas there's a story about you and roman polanski which might prove interesting to put it mildly well after the horrible you know gruesome murders that took place in california where sharon tate roma's wife lena was murdered you know gibby folger and boyd tapatowski and all friends of mine very close friends of mine roman was in england and uh i was among the group of people who were picked to call room in roman and tell him uh that you know this had happened forgive me for interrupting me just for those who might not know these are the manson murders these are the mansomer's right yeah and uh so roman got on the next plane came back and he said our place is the beach uh at malibu and uh secretly for some unknown reason i thought roman had done it had sort of set this up somehow from another country i don't know why it was like very paranoid of me and roman thought i had done it why would he think you had done it well because he had an affair with michelle and although i was trying to get back at him perhaps through jealousy or i was very convoluted you know this whole thing uh roman went so far as to uh go to the lapd and uh get a blood sampling kit and go to all my cars and you know look for blood samples on my autos and things like that which i didn't find out for what 20 years later that he had done this while he was houseguesting in my house you know sharon loved him very much and he loved sharon very much and uh one night roman uh confronted me and said why did you kill my wife and i roman i i loved your wife i never killed your wife and uh he had a he was we were making dinner cooking dinner you know and uh i threw this cleaver across the room and hit the wall and stuck in the wood there and quivered back and forth like this in the wall and uh i knew he was very serious about the whole thing i guess it suddenly struck me how serious he was about you know the fact they really thought then i found out he'd gone to lapd and got the blood testing kit and all that you know so he throws this cleaver across the room how close does it come to you well he had it at my neck first and then then across the room the next thing you know you've got a meat cleaver at your throat yeah and then then uh i deny of course any you know involvement in this at all although even a guilty man would have denied it under those circumstances i believe would not have been a good idea to confess not to roman was built like this strike a match on his body you know and he's a downhill skier it seems like a bullet he has the meat cleaver right you're adam's apple mm-hmm which is quite an uh montan and you're you're feeling that he's trying to frighten you or do you think there's every chance he's gonna lop off your head no i didn't think i was in danger really other fact that he was just frustrated by all the bad luck an ill fortune that had come his way through his life you know and this sort of the topper the whole thing you know uh and uh because he had had an affair with michelle uh he thought that perhaps i was involved in some way with this you know and since i knew all the people who were there and i was out of the house the whole summer he was in europe um and uh i i didn't think he would kill me or heard me but i i did think it was like one from well seen one of his films you know like where he you know someone would hold the guy like this you know and just demand the truth you know that kind of thing you know so i took it that way you know maybe would be serious you could have just taken a little slice of your nose like he did the knickers i was in chinatown that would have yeah after he's thrown that thing into the wall okay then what happens it was never mentioned again you didn't leave no we had dinner and he was never mentioned again he just and and he was there everyone took it out of the wall you know when you chop some onions you know he was there after convinced you you had nothing to do with it i don't know if he's convinced or not but he never brought it up again and i never and you continue the hype wasn't you continue to assume you know you continue to associate with him oh yeah absolutely i still like roman very much so you're still in in contact with him no i'm not i've seen roman 10 years since london do you think he ultimately came to believe that the explanation was pretty much as it's been given that it was manson no question about it had you ever seen or spoken with charles manson had he ever passed through any of these circles dennis uh um dennis wilson who was in the beach boys at the time before he died drowned call me said these wonderful guys game guys and girls came from san francisco on this bus you can't believe the way it's painted all psychedelic colors you know they're all swimming in the pool a swimming pool will shape up the american flag and his house uh out near malibu and uh he said come on over i'll have this great time swimming and drinking all night and this and that and i just have this really strange feeling i said no i think i'll pass dennis thanks a lot you know and about three days before uh the murders actually occurred of wajak uh fratowsky who was a friend of warren of romans from poland was also a filmmaker uh came uh as he did regularly to my home knocked him in the door and i opened the door and uh had this chilling feeling came this coldness sort of came through it sounds like unknown mysteries but it really did and i said he said uh i come in i said uh i can't let you come in and i had you know young children in there and things like that and that and uh he said why so i don't know voice i just can't uh i can't check him in so for three days in a row he came back and he knocked on the door and he called my phone and i said i really can't talk to you and uh two days later he was murdered and i never i put it all together as to what actually happened as to why these feelings came over me how's your daughter mackenzie phillips doing she was obviously she's with the band and she was in one day at a time a very successful show but it was well documented that she had difficulties with drugs yeah which which can be traced to the difficulties you had with drugs right yeah well it turns out that uh you know finally uh the the doctor who was treating me uh said uh you know none of this will stop until uh you stop because everyone is trying to emulate your behavior to get your attention and if you don't call a halter it'll be a very tragedy will happen in your family well that i never realized that of course either so i've had a drug since that day which was when about 10 years ago how bleak did it get for you before you turned the corner it got pretty bleak bob you know it was a i weighed about 300 pounds and uh uh you know i don't know i i had my own drugstore in manhattan you know and things like that and it wasn't much fun how much creative energy do you think went into thin air i would say about four or five years just went probably longer actually you know i'm probably about eight years old together i went to uh rehab for 30 days i stayed there for three years i worked as a as a volunteer work with other drug addicts i think i saw i've known people who've gone through the program eight or nine times and still are going through the program uh if you don't stay close to it and uh and work on it all the time it took me three years to stop having dreams about cocaine yeah you give me a quick capsule a thumbnail sketch exactly just just like that mccartney mccartney probably the best pop song writer in the world how about lennon john lennon john uh i don't think john ever really knew who who who he was you know how important he was john was like a street kid he would dress in jeans and just hang out you know and sort of like dionne you know not warwick right you know but you know a very important guy and uh as uh leonard of course was a very important man uh but uh he didn't want to be really he wanted to you know get his point across but not uh crush your skull with it you know how well did you know dylan not very well bob was always trying to buy my guitar from me you know first time bob played in new york was the first time we played new york uh called the journeyman scott mckenzie uh dick weisman and myself and uh we played at uh gertie's folk city and uh with lightning hopkins and uh bob and uh ourselves you know and uh bob man has managed to borrow about 20 bucks at night and he's never paid you back any of the people what up i know i don't know maybe they're buying a memory who knows you know could have what about elvis what about elvis what a guy well there was a real natural guy that's one of my well i have two great memories of us i guess uh one was when we were living in palm springs we had houses that were close proximity into each other and uh the colonel colonel tom parker used to call michelle and i are genevieve and i the hippies you know and elvis and i had identical harleys you know then we met on on the desert trails and stuff you know except he had 20 guys with him i was on myself so i used to cheesy but these i was southern anyways i was a southern hippies i was okay you know he was like a a guileless 16 or 17 year old kid right oh yeah he took me outside to the pool and said gee i want to show you something john look at this i said yeah it's great it's a kidney-shaped pool you know like you see a lot of palm springs everywhere and they said the grass the grass i said uh yeah the grass and he said uh you never have to cut it it's called the astroturf it don't even grow don't get a southern boy think about having to cut the grass you know he wrote high atop the charts for several years in the late 60s and early 70s you just heard him talk about roman polanski holding a meat cleaver to his neck he knew elvis and lennon and mccartney and jagger so i guess being here tonight was quite a thrill for you huh hey this is the big time john phillips see you later okay thanks bob all right bob's guest tomorrow will be lonnie anderson thanks for staying up later we're joined tonight by michelle phillips and you know these days as ann matheson on knott's landing not a particularly likable character something of a vixen tormenting her daughter and everyone else around her but we'll table that for a while come back to it uh in a bit but let's let's compare notes because your former husband john phillips was on the show a while back talking about the heyday of the mamas and the papas you were still in your teens and he in his mid-20s when you first met how long after that were you married we were married when i was 18. uh just about a year later a little about a year and a half later because i had just turned 17 when i met him and then we we got married when i was 18. and how long after that uh did california dreaming become a colossal hit and the mamas and papas become household names we were married in the uh december of 61 i guess something like that or 62. hey well california dreaming was 65 the uh december of 65. so just about uh about four years i guess he told us that he had a dream in which the notion for california dreaming came to him and he woke you up and said quick write this down because i'm going to go back to sleep and i'll and i'll lose the threat of it write this down and in the morning it'll be there for us well maybe he did have a you know a dream but he was up playing the guitar which was a very uh what was something he did all the time he would stay up at night and play the guitar and write songs and and then he woke me up and said help me write this song and i said well let's do it tomorrow he said no wake up you'll thank me for this someday and so i got up and we wrote california dreaming and i know because i saw the show uh john's version of the story is apparently a new twist that he wrote it by himself well you know i think that john is having i know that that's what you were getting to yeah but um i think that that uh and john is having some emotional problems right now i i i don't think that after 25 years of uh of it being common knowledge that we wrote the song together that that um anyone in their right mind would would dispute that what were the general creative components of the mamas and papas if there's such a thing as the typical song who who wrote it who was the guiding light john was definitely the guiding light and uh i mean john was definitely the experienced writer john was definitely the experienced arranger and uh and john was our leader he was and he was uh incredibly talented and cass and denny were the voices and uh and i was the least experienced in the group i had never recorded before i had been i had sung but i had never recorded all of you as a group and this is probably too much of a generalization but there's some truth in it that to somebody who might have seen the four of you on the ed sullivan show or something this was an idea in their head of what hippies were like rightly or wrongly they figured these i think these people sort of live together and who knows if they st if they're sort of like romantically involved in in strange configurations and who knows what they do but people thought in in a way that was sort of benign because they liked the music oh there are some hippies well you know that itself was was kind of contrived uh cass always wanted to put those falls on and wanted to put on her lashes and john wouldn't let her and i i always wanted to wear my hair up and do some you know look look a little more sophisticated and john would not let us he said you will go on stage barefoot and he knew he he knew that that was what we should look like that we should look like these new kids that were getting a lot of attention you know and hate ashbury and and los angeles new york kids with hair down to here and then and that's it it was almost like a business decision this is the way we're going to look and it wasn't representative it wasn't representative of your own sensibilities or lifestyle necessarily listen if cass could have fit into a chanel suit that's what she would have worn and and i i you know i wanted to look like kim novak or you know um but it was okay because in fact this was the way we actually looked this was this was really without any pretension at all cass you know usually had a moo moo on and and um and i usually had my hair just down and straight and so he john was was trying to get us to to be to not be contrived on stage and to be ourselves how do you feel generally when you're driving down the road and mama's and papa's song comes on the radio how does it make you feel great i'm very uh i'm i'm very proud that it's part of my history and i don't i i would never want to be doing that now it was the hardest work i ever did it was the most demanding time of my life but when i hear it i'm i'm overwhelmed with pride from your perspective what were the key uh factors in the breakup of the group some would say premature breakup because you were still it would seem in full creative flower no we weren't in full creative flower we were we had exhausted uh the the creativity at hand and i think that it was unfortunate that uh it was there was just too much asked of us at that point you know that they needed too much material uh from us in a very short period of time you know the mamas and the papas only did four albums but we couldn't we didn't have more we didn't have any more to write about they should have given us a few thousand dollars and told us to go back to the virgin islands you know and come back when we had another album ready but that's not what happened and i think that the success also uh separated us when we were poor and living on the beach and um and when we needed each other uh we wrote a lot of songs but when we became rich and successful everyone lived in separate houses and then of course it didn't help that denny and i had an affair and and uh that that kind of uh upset everybody cass especially yeah well john too cass and john were not happy with i guess i took for granted that john wouldn't be thrilled um yeah yeah cass was particularly heartbroken about it and i and i ended up of course and denny and i ended up you know betraying everybody you know i betrayed john and i betrayed cass my best friend and denny be betrayed his best friend and he betrayed cass who was in love with him and it was a very messy cass was in love with denny but they were never romantically involved because he did not feel the same way toward her right but they were very very close they had a very unusual relationship they were like an old married couple that had stopped having sex [Laughter] you know there are a thousand possible lines here and i'm not uttering any of them so obviously when when you and denny wound up having an affair cass could never feel the same way toward you again that that had to hurt her well in fact cass and i became very close again after the group but uh not not not while the group is still together uh and and there were a lot of a lot of uh problems between john and cass too they were always going head-to-head and they had a lot of a lot of conflicts how well the cast understand her own talent in your opinion she uh her tastes were different than uh i mean she loved the mamas and papa's material i'm not saying that but that's not really where her tastes uh were she really had always wanted to go to broadway she she wanted to do dinah shore you know she wanted to she wanted to be on the carol burnett show she wanted you know she wanted to wear chiffon dresses and and her hair up and her lashes and um that's what she ended up doing before she died she was she was definitely on on the road to having her own her own show and uh and you know she hated being called mama cass she hated it and as a matter of fact her first album was called don't call me mama anymore i understand that before the final breakup you got temporarily fired at one point yes yes well won't you share with us how that happened michelle well when john and i were separated because we did eventually separate and he moved in with danny and and john and danny had this this um bachelor pad up in the hollywood hills floating gardenias in the pool you know and and i started to have a little quiet romance with with gene clark remember gene clark from the birds yep he was he lived down the street for me and and john and i were separated at this time and he was dating everybody he was seeing a lot a lot of girls but you know that old double standard really did exist between us as you know i i mean i i understand it he he did not know about me and gene because i didn't go out with gene but when gene mentioned that he had never seen a mamas and papa's concert i made the fatal mistake of saying well i'll get you some tickets to the show and i call the office i said you know gene clark is going to pick tickets at the door we were playing at melody land in in in anaheim and uh it was the theater in the round so when we came out and got on stage gene was sitting in the front row with a big red shirt on and but by this time john had already heard that i was dating gene he didn't have any proof of it but so when cass and i came on stage and saw that gene was there we took that side of the stage and the boys were facing the other way and um we're singing along and we're about three quarters of the way through the concert but we're turning no it wasn't a revolving stage but uh we we were singing and um and and and cass and i were kind of flirting with gene and having a really good time and all of a sudden over the over the intercom week i mean over the um the um sound system the sound system we hear john get over to this you know get over on this side of the stage he yells at us and he had seen us of course you know singing to gene and everything so we moved over on the other side and uh i was fired that day it was my birthday too rude tell us about your character on knott's landing i mean is that one that you can play with uh with all the relish of grand farce sort of yes the mother from hell she is a fabulous character and uh she is uh yeah i kind of created a backstory for her i i know who anne matheson is she was she was emotionally uh traumatized so she was controlled by her father it was never any love in her family it was all money money money money so that's how she is with her daughter how much of the group's material was written at least in some part under the influence of drugs what drugs i mean what what drugs you name them grass grass well well first of all we have to start with the marlboroughs let's be fair okay we we all smoked marlboroughs and we smoked a lot a lot we all drank we used we drank seagram's crown royal all day and all night we smoked pot and uh and we took lsd but we didn't write i mean that you know you didn't john probably wrote on lsd um i i didn't this this seems like it like thank god there was no cocaine around in those days i mean because we we experimented with just about anything that came down the pike but that would have been the beginning and the end of it for us it seems an imprudent thing to say in the present climate but there are people who would contend oh it's late at night there are people who would contend that that they were influenced in a positive way in terms of creativity at least in the short term by their involvement with drugs a lot of people uh that has a lot to do with who you are help to create an atmosphere in which they could work they may be deluding themselves by saying that but they did feel that way i think that that there was nothing wrong with us taking acid um us and everybody else in the world at that time took it it it did it was it was uh very helpful to our creativity it was inc it it was uh a real it brought us very close together and uh it's not the kind of thing that you get addicted to you know it's it's here's the sort of thing that could kill you though in the wrong dose in the wrong circumstance well i suppose i don't i have never heard of anybody dying of an overdose of lsd although maybe it has dying from their actions you go out the window yes i've heard of that i i never could understand that i i have never had a bad trip on lsd but many many people did i mean i said i've never used acid myself but i saw people but a lot of people can't drink i say that i saw absolutely nothing no one's contending otherwise right but but i saw people at uh in the throes of bad acid trips it was kind of a horrifying thing well they'll know better next time when when you when you say that there was nothing wrong with using lsd uh you may want to stick by those words but i'd give you a chance to amend it understandable in that climate or do you really mean nothing wrong no i think it was understandable in the climate and also nothing wrong uh it wasn't even illegal it wasn't like we were doing any legal drug um and even when it became illegal i mean i think that's ridiculous to uh i think that uh people are gonna do what they're gonna do anyway and uh i i um i don't think that that it hurt us if we're just talking about the group i don't think it hurt us at all yeah that there's a point of view that goes something like this and usually it's not said pointing a finger of blame at any entertainer it sort of goes like unwittingly in the atmosphere that existed in the 60s and early 70s the music industry the entertainment industry in general glorified and created a permissive atmosphere concerning the use of drugs and now the chickens have come home to roost partly because of that well i'll say this about that i think that musicians in the 20s the 30s the 40s and the 50s all use drugs it just seems to go hand in hand you know guitar in one hand a joint in another i mean it's just it it just has always been that way i don't think that it's the 60s the 60s musicians were any different than anybody else [Music] some impressive pop rock lineage there on that one yeah it is isn't it brian wilson's two daughters uh and chyna it's kearney and wendy wilson and chyna phillips and what advice did you give china when she embarked on a recording career i understand that that as we as we tape this that record is 30 with a bullet on the billboard charts that's right i told her don't give up your publishing and she didn't michelle phillips we're out of here see you later bob's guest monday will be meredith baxter bernie

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Published: Thu Mar 18 2021