Name: Mamas & Papas' John & Michelle Phillips (separately) on Bob Costas, 1990
Uploaded: 2021-03-19T05:09:04.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Mamas & Papas' John & Michelle Phillips (separately) on Bob Costas, 1990' from Don Giller on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-03-19. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Mamas & Papas' John & Michelle Phillips (separately) on Bob Costas, 1990' from Don Giller on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-03-19. Transcript available.

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 he 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 Scott McKenzie,
who sang If You're Going to San Francisco, Wear Flowers in Your Hair,
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 about that age, yeah.
We got married, she was about 18.
And you were in your mid-20s.
Yeah.
And a lot of turmoil grew out of that, it's fair to say.
A lot of turmoil grew out of that, and her father was a assistant.
He was the probation officer, actually, the juvenile probation officer for L.A.
County.
And I was playing at the Hungry Eye in San Francisco.
Is there an irony here?
I don't know, is there?
So we had a little drink at the bar later, and he said, he's a huge man.
I saw him the other night in L.A.
And he said, you know what my job is?
And I said, yeah, you were for a juvie hall there, you know, for runaways and
things like that.
And he says, yeah.
I said, I guess you better be good to her, hadn't you?
I said, I guess I better had, you know, sir.
Let's talk about some of the big hits.
California Dreamin'.
Where'd it come from?
Well, when Michelle was about 16 and a half, 17 years old, she came to New York
with me.
And she'd never been to the East before in her life.
I'd never seen snow.
And she awakened me one morning and said, look, look, out the window, look.
There's white stuff falling everywhere, you know.
And there was snow.
All she had was, like, sneakers, you know, and things like that.
So we went for a walk.
It's more of a narrative.
We went for a walk, actually.
It sort of describes the day.
On a winter's day.
And I'd be safe and warm if I was in L.A.
Stopping to a church and all that stuff, you know.
And I wish I was in L.A., you know, California Dreamin'.
And that night I was playing on some chords and things.
And I woke Michelle up and I said, write this down.
I think this might be good, you know.
And 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 awakened her again and she said, okay, I'll write it down.
She wrote it down.
And now, to this day, she says, it was the best half hour of my life.
And she gets a writing credit, right?
Half of the writing credit of California Dreamin'.
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 their own meaning
to.
Monday, Monday, you wake up, you don't want to go to work, it's Monday again.
Or it's your girlfriend whose name is Monday.
Or you broke up on a Monday.
Your girlfriend broke up with me on a Monday.
People stop in the street and say, it's about a girl, isn't it?
And I say, that's right.
It's about the day of the week, isn't it?
Mm-hmm.
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.
I Saw Her Again
Was it meant to be that way, or was it a mistake?
It was a mistake.
Denny and I just sort of came in, Dennis Daugherty, who was singing the Mamas
and Papas then,
came in, and so did I, accidentally, and it sounded great.
We went to London, and we played the dub of the record for Paul McCartney.
And Paul said, play it, play that again.
Play it again.
He 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.
I said, 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?
Well, she didn't really choke to death.
To start with.
That's sort of a pure man's thing, you know, release.
But she died of her own weight.
Her involuntary muscle system just stopped going.
She stopped breathing.
And it was a shame.
Cass, I really wanted to be not Mama Cass, but Cass Elliot.
What she really wanted to be in the end, you know.
And two nights before, she had opened a talk of the town in London,
and had done very, very well.
And 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 the phone rang, and sort of
Paul came over Dick's face,
and Dick said, you better sit down and we'll talk to you about this.
He informed me that there was Lou on the other end.
Lou said, I can't tell him.
You have to tell him.
And Cass had died.
And she was, uh, inside Cass was Marilyn Monroe, really.
I mean, she was really, uh, Cass was beautiful in every way.
She had one of the most unique voices, I think, you know, we've ever had.
Like a sweet songbird.
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.
You know, I asked her, I said, why do you marry all these people?
She said, well, I did the same routine.
You know, I buy them a motorcycle and a leather outfit, and put them in acting
school.
And, uh, that's that, you know.
Wasn't she always going on and off crash diets?
Yeah, they named a wing of Cedars of Lebanon after Cass, as a matter of fact.
The Cass Elliot wing.
Were they ever successful?
Did she ever get relatively slim?
Not really, no.
As a matter of fact, Cass and I were sort 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 at Cedars.
I took her flowers, and I said, Cass, just so you know, every time you lose an
ounce, your price goes down here.
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.
I'd known her for so many years and all that, you know, until, uh, it was over.
And it was too late to say anything about it, you know, since with the story of
my life, you know, that, uh, I don't realize how important things were to me
until they're, it's too late to make amends, really.
You can't play catch-up with emotions, you know.
Continuing now 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, uh, where Sharon Tate, Roman's wife, you know, was murdered, you
know, Gibby Folger and Boyd Tafratowski and, uh, all friends of mine, very
close friends of mine.
Uh, Roman was in England and, uh, I was among the group of people who were
picked to call Roman and tell him, uh, that, you know, this had happened.
Forgive me for interrupting me, but just for those who might not know, these
are the Manson murders.
These are the Manson murders, right, yeah.
And, uh, so, Roman got on the next plane, he came back, and he's at our place
at 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 had an affair with Michelle, and he thought, 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.
And he had done this while he was house casting, 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, uh, 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, threw this
cleaver across the room, and I hit the wall, and stuck in the wood there, and
quivered back and, like this in the wall.
And, uh, I knew he was very serious about the whole thing.
I guess.
He suddenly struck me how serious he was about, you know, the fact that he
really thought, then I found out he'd gone to the LAPD, and he got in 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.
He came up?
From behind, yeah.
He came up from behind, and the next thing you know, you've got a meat cleaver
at your throat.
Yeah, and then, then, uh, I denied, 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.
No, it wouldn't have been a good idea to confess.
Not to a Roman, it was built like this, to strike a match on his body, you know.
I mean, he's a downhill skier, he's like a bullet.
So, he has the meat cleaver at your Adam's apple.
Mm-hmm.
Which is quite a, uh, a montan.
And you're, you're feeling that he's trying to frighten you, or do you think
there's every chance he's going to lop off your head?
No, I didn't think I was in danger, really.
I thought that he was just frustrated by all the bad luck and ill fortune that
had come his way through his life, you know.
And this sort of, was 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
there the whole summer, he was in Europe.
Um, and, uh, I, I didn't think he would kill me or hurt me, but I, I did think
it was like one, from, I seen one of his films, you know.
Like where he, you know, someone would hold the guy like this, you know, demand
the truth, you know, that kind of thing, you know.
So I took it that way, you know, I said, Rome would be serious, come on.
Could have just taken a little slice of your nose like he did to Nicholson in
Chinatown.
That would have helped all of us a bit.
So now, after he's thrown this...
Chinatown was great when you did that, wasn't it?
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 it was never mentioned again, he just...
And, and he was there...
I went and took it out of the wall, you know, went and chopped some onions, you
know.
He was there after convinced you, you had nothing to do with it.
I don't know if he was convinced or not, but he never brought it up again, I
never...
And you continue...
I wasn't...
You continue to associate...
I used to pursue the subject, you know.
You continue to associate with him?
Oh, yeah, absolutely.
I still like Roman very much.
So you're still in contact with him?
No, I'm not.
I haven't seen Roman in 10 years.
Since London.
Do you think he ultimately came to believe that the explanation was pretty m