All the Leaves are Brown: How the Mamas & the Papas Came Together and Broke Apart by Scott G. Shea was a substantial and weighty biography of 373 pages. It was published last year and as a fan of the group I looked forward to reading it. I wrote numerous notes to check YouTube for television appearances by pre-Mamas & the Papas incarnations and to check Discogs for their earliest recordings. Shea established in detail the convoluted paths that led to the formation of the group, starting with a biography of its founder, John Phillips. From the start, John was portrayed as an oversexed drug addict who never cared for his first wife and their two children. He remained a junkie philanderer his entire life. Shea profiled Michelle Phillips next, who by the way is the only member of the Mamas & the Papas whom I have met in person. She steered clear of becoming a drug addict but was always unfaithful, professing her love it seemed to all the men who came into her life, including fellow Papa Denny, former Byrd Gene Clark, their producer Lou Adler, Roman Polanski and other musicians. And all of this under husband John’s nose. She was the muse who provided John with so much of his writing material:
“What he did know was that his world was falling apart before him and he couldn’t do more than sit home and pine away for his wayward bride through songwriting.”
Shea then gave biographies of Denny Doherty and Cass Elliot, the latter of whom was the last to join the group and the one who made them famous.
John may have been the main songwriter and arranger responsible for creating the harmonies that define the Mamas & Papas sound, yet he was jealous and cruel to Cass. I was impressed by the way Shea presented Cass, whose personality and drive for stardom was stronger than John’s taunts to belittle her. Cass had star power and was a natural on television, often serving as the group’s spokesperson in interviews. She was the only one who had a successful solo career after the group’s breakup, which was cut short by her untimely death.
The Mamas & the Papas lived the rock and roll lifestyle, indulging in sex, drugs and alcohol which accelerated their demise. Their record company always seemed to be chasing after them for new material. John was instrumental in organizing the Monterey International Pop Festival in June 1967 and the Mamas & the Papas as main headliners closed the three-day event. However since they were so disorganized with Denny being AWOL and having had no rehearsal time, their closing set was a disappointment. In comparison to the acts who immediately preceded them like the Who, Grateful Dead and the Jimi Hendrix Experience, the Mamas & the Papas seemed on the way out.
Insider revelations are prevalent throughout this work and it was obvious to me that Shea wouldn’t have learned any of them from the people he interviewed. Three of the Mamas and Papas are deceased, and he did not acknowledge Michelle as a source. I concluded fairly early on that, the Mamas and Papas fan that I am, he must have gotten his dirt from other sources, such as the autobiography by John and memoir by Michelle, which both came out in 1986. I could pick out passages that I recalled from Michelle’s California Dreamin’: The True Story of the Mamas and the Papas. To be fair he did cite each of these books in his bibliography.
Unfortunately the text was sullied by sentences with duplicate verbs and run-ons, and some sentences didn’t even make sense. I had to pause and reread sentences to figure out what was going on. Shea could have caught his errors with a simple proofread, as I am sure he meant to write when instead of was as the word before Cass, below:
“The circumstances were incredibly unbelievable, and spirits got even higher was Cass presented them with a vial filled with liquid Sandoz LSD.”
However, to place incredibly next to unbelievable is redundant and elicited an eyeroll. That is just bad writing.
The following sentence was the worst example of the unedited text yet I didn’t bother to record any more in my notes. I still don’t understand what Shea meant:
“After recognizing all the havoc she’d helped sow by looking around and seeing everybody except she and Scott had left the hotel, she groveled her way back into John’s good graces and traveled with him, Peter Pilafian, Abe Somer, Ann Marshall, Scott, and his girlfriend to Paris and on to Belgium.”
Denny’s second wife was named Jeanette yet Shea spelt it Jeannette on page 362 and on the very next line right underneath it, spelt it Jeanette. You can’t not notice this, and it’s sloppy. Just as bad is his misspelling of Denny’s daughter’s name Emberly. Her name does not have an E between the L and Y.
I appreciated the references Shea made to Billboard magazine and I pored over historical issues on-line to find the group’s first trade ads and chart appearances. For example, before “California Dreamin'” hit the Hot 100, it bubbled under for two weeks at #116 (on December 25, 1965) and rose to #103 (on January 1, 1966) before it entered the chart at #99 on January 8. It vaulted to #74 on January 15 and the hitmaking parade began.
Find this book in the Mississauga Library System's on-line catalogue
