The Mamas & The Papas
As remembered by Michelle Phillips:
Michelle PHILLIPS remembers 1963 as a year of bone-chill and profound homesickness. The Long Beach native, then 19, had married John Phillips in late 1962 and the two had shuttled off to New York to seek fame with their folk group, the New Frontiersmen. “We were staying at the Albert Hotel, near Washington Square. It was a fleabag. I had never seen snow before, I had never been to the East Coast. I was miserable.”
One blustery day, the couple were strolling by the marble spires of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. “I wanted to go in just to see what it looked like, but John wouldn’t go with me,” Michelle recalled. “He had been sent off to a parochial school when he was 7 and, well, he just had very strong negative feelings about the church. So I went in alone.”
That random moment took on new meaning a few weeks later. It was the middle of the night when John, guitar in hand, woke his wife up.
“He undoubtedly had taken a few bennies. I wanted to go back to sleep, but he said I would thank him someday if I got up and worked on it with him.” A few years later, with the Phillipses singing as half of the Mamas & the Papas, that late-night sketch of a song became the evocative pop masterpiece “California Dreamin.’ “All the leaves are brown“He had the lyrics for those first eight bars that night,” said Michelle Phillips, the only surviving member of the Mamas & the Papas. “I added the next few lines about the church. He hated it. Just hated it. But he didn’t have anything better.” That portion of the song -- “Stopped in to church / I passed along the way / Well, I got down on my knees / And I began to pray” -- has an interesting history. Not everyone hears the same lyrics, and that includes the people who sang it.
And the sky is gray
I’ve been for a walk
On a winter’s day
I’d be safe and warm
If I was in L.A.
California dreamin’
On such a winter’s day . . .
“We were on the road after the song was a hit and I was a doing a sound check with Cass [Elliot], and I sang the lyric. She looked at me and said, ‘Wait, what did you say? I thought the lyric was ‘I pretend to pray.’ That’s how she had been singing it all along!”
As recalled by Denny Doherty:
As Doherty tells it, it goes like this: Cass loved Denny who loved Michelle who loved (mostly) John.
It was Cass who first met Denny in New York’s Hotel Albert and saw the musical future after hearing The Beatles. And it was John who was the musical genius who never truly cottoned to Cass.
Still, the four worked musically, bringing a lyrical lilt to folk - until their feuds exploded and they broke up.