I was the driving force behind the Mamas & the Papas but before i was writing sunny flower-child anthems with ear-pleasing harmonies and my first stop was focusing all my energy on my successful folk band The Journeymen. Well, not all of my energy…i made sure to save some for the groupies including 17-year-old Holly Michelle Gilliam who i married and now went by the name Michelle Phillips.
I put her into singing lessons and before long, we were making beautiful music together alongside Cass Elliot and Denny Doherty as the Mama & the Papas.
As the Mamas & the Papas produced hit after hit, life was getting messy behind the scenes. Michelle couldn’t keep her hands off our bandmate Denny Doherty and we were both having affairs but the 60s were a time of blurred lines in the name of free love, baby.
Our house was party central with mind-altering substances available on every surface, and in vases and bowls but another one was Roman Polanski's place and i pulled out of one particular to go to the beach and get high instead so missed the massacre, drugs actually saving my life that time.
The world at large was pretty turbulent in 1969 and so was we as the Mamas & the Papas disbanded, Michelle and I divorced and I was not in a good place.
I had a go at a solo career but that stank so i just took even more drugs but mind-altering substances weren’t cheap and i owed close to a quarter of a million to the tax man so i left the US and moved to the UK and lived just down the street from Mick Jagger and Keith Richards of The Rolling Stones which never helped as they got me addicted to the really hard stuff.
Not surprisingly, all of my hard living was hard on my bodies organs, and my heart and liver teamed up on me and both failed.
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