Scott McKenzie – The Voice of Scott McKenzie (1967)

The 1960’s were filled with memorable one hit wonders, and while they have ranged from well remembered staples of the era to favorite deep cuts of vinyl hipsters, only one of those one hit wonders managed to become a cultural anthem that defined an entire generation.  “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)” written and produced by “Papa” John Phillips, became the one and only hit record by his childhood friend, and former folk music collaborator, Scott McKenzie.  One of the most beloved and recognized songs of the era, “San Francisco” not only popularized the flower power movement that was coming out of the Haight-Ashbury area , but became an unofficial anthem of the entire youth generation of the later half of the 1960’s.  But despite its massive worldwide popularity, due to his fragile mental health and reluctance towards fame, the often elusive Scott McKenzie would never have another hit of the same magnitude.

Friends since they were teenagers growing up in Alexandra, Virginia, John Phillips and Scott McKenzie moved to New York City in 1960 to pursue music, and being seduced by Greenwich Village’s folk scene, started a folk trio called The Journeyman in 1961 (for a rundown on The Journeymen, check out my article on “New Directions in Folk Music (1963)”).  The trio, consisting of Phillips, McKenzie and Dick Weissman had a successful following amongst the folkies,  and cut three albums for Capitol Records.  But, by 1963, with the coming of The Beatles, Capitol Records dropped many of their folk acts as the musical tide was turning, and upon being dropped by their label, The Journeymen soon disbanded.

But, as early as 1962, McKenzie was having some mental health issues that were interfering with his life as a musician.  Prone to bouts of depression and paranoia, McKenzie began to suffer from stage fright, which caused him to have emotional breakdowns before and after performances and on a few occasions he never even showed up at the gig due to being paralyzed with fear.  The erratic behavior put a strain on his relationship with his bandmates and was a major factor in the breakup of The Journeymen.

Despite McKenzie’s emotional health problems, as the primary lead vocalist of The Journeymen, Capitol felt that they might be able to do something with him as a solo artist, and cutting Phillips and Weisman free, they resigned McKenzie to do a series of singles.

Although they had gone their separate ways, the bond between McKenzie and Phillips stayed solid.  When Phillips attempted to reform the Journeymen a year after their breakup, his first instinct was to reach out to McKenzie, but reluctant to work in a group again, he turned Phillips down.  Phillips, instead, went with another established former folk singer, Denny Doherty, formerly of The Halifax III and The Mugwumps, and they formed “The New Journeymen” which, eventually morphed into The Mamas and the Papas and international stardom. 

Flash forward to 1967.   By this time John Phillips was on the top of the world with The Mamas and the Papas and one of the most powerful men in the American music industry working not only as a singer/songwriter but as an arranger and producer.   Scott McKenzie, meanwhile, had pretty much dried up as a solo performer and had been dropped by Capital.  He went to release one single, called “Celeste” at CBS Records which also went nowhere and, reportedly, he auditioned to be a Monkee but was told that he looked too old to be 24.  So, while fortunes were flying for Phillips, McKenzie’s music career was seemingly over.

Well, at this time John Phillips got the offer to be a co-organizer of The Monterey Pop Festival with Dunhill Records producer Lou Adler.  A spin-off of the popular jazz and folk festivals that had been going on in the area for years, The Monterey Pop Festival would be the first festival that would celebrate and highlight rock n’ roll music as an artistic and cultural form.  Slowly but surely Phillips, Adler and their staff began to accumulate one of the most impressive line ups of talent ever brought together during a time when rock music was at its peak.  A wide range of performers from various subgenres were coming together including The Who, The Jimi Hendrix Experience, Big Brother and the Holding Company featuring Janis Joplin, The Byrds, Simon and Garfunkel, The Association, Otis Redding, The Jefferson Airplane, Canned Heat, The Grateful Dead, Laura Nyro, Ravi Shakir, Eric Burdon and the Animals and so many more.  To be held from June 16 to 18, 1967, this would be the rock festival that would go on to inspire all rock festivals to come, and one of the most important cultural events of the decade which would launch what future historians would call “the summer of love.”

But as things started to gel with the festival, the city officials in Monterey were getting cold feet.  Carefully watching the situation in San Fransisco, where thousands upon thousands of young people were seemingly migrating to the Haight-Ashbury area of Golden Gate Park, the “establishment” was starting to have concerns.  These young people, remembered today as “the hippies” or “flower children,” were looking for a new way of living other than the often oppressive traditional values of their post war generation parents via rejection of conformism and indulging in different ways of being including experiments with drugs, sex, meditation and eastern philosophy.  Highly creative and politically minded, the movement rejected the escalating Viet Nam War, while focusing on peace and love.  Although liberating for those who had “dropped out,” it became a concern to lawmakers, politicians and an aging population who were feeling the world was going mad.

With Haight-Ashbury buzzing, the Monterey city officials knew that the Pop Festival was going to attract the Haight’s populace to their area, and suddenly San Fran’s problem were going to be their problem, which started to put the heat on the Monterey Pop organizers. 

Although they were LA based, The Mamas and the Papas were favorites of the hippie crowd, and with their bohemian appearance, mod attire and colorful personalities, they became sort of unofficial ambassadors of the scene. As a result, the group had spent a lot of time in the Haight, and Phillips had a good firsthand idea of what exactly was going on there.   When faced with the issue of Monterey’s establishment coming down on the festival, Phillips wondered if he could write a song about what was going on in San Francisco that would not only romanticize the situation but ease the fears of the city officials.  It might not be the thing that fixes everything, but maybe it could smooth over the tensions and irrational fears, if only temporarily.  According to Phillips, it only took him twenty minutes to write the song, which was, essentially, a marketing jingle for the Pop Festival, and indirectly, the entire flower power movement in general.  That song, of course, was “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)” and in only a few verses Phillips managed to sum up San Francesco’s political and social situation in a nutshell:

“If you’re going to San Francisco
Be sure to wear some flowers in your hair
If you’re going to San Francisco
You’re gonna meet some gentle people there

For those who come to San Francisco
Summertime will be a love-in there
In the streets of San Francisco
Gentle people with flowers in their hair

All across the nation
Such a strange vibration
People in motion
There’s a whole generation
With a new explanation
People in motion
People in motion

For those who come to San Francisco
Be sure to wear some flowers in your hair
If you come to San Francisco
Summertime will be a love-in there

If you come to San Francisco
Summertime will be a love-in there”

Now with the perfect anthem for the Haight-Ashbury situation, John Phillips needed a singer.  You’d think that it’d naturally be given to The Mamas and the Papas, but it was not.  With the festival only weeks away, the organizers had to get the song out asap, and The Mamas and the Papas were basically on a sort of a hiatus.  Although the situation within the group had not gone nuclear yet, it was already pretty bad and they were barely holding things together.  The year earlier John, with the support of Cass and Denny, had kicked his wife Michelle out of the band, only to allow her back in weeks later due to poor fan response.  With the emotional pressures mounting within the group, after their promotional obligations of their third album “Deliver,” Denny took off to the Virgin Island to try to put his head back together but spent much of the time drinking and didn’t come back until hours before the actual festival.  Cass, meanwhile, was keeping her distance from John and Michelle, who were throwing themselves into the Monterey Pop organization as a sort of distraction from the issues within the band and their own marriage.  So The Mamas and the Papas were in no position to get this song out in the time it was needed.  John needed a great singer with a good sound, and he needed him now, so he called his good pal Scott McKenzie.

At this time Lou Adler was setting up his new label, Ode Records, and he brought in Phillips as producer and a team of musicians from the Wrecking Crew to support McKenzie and they cut “San Fransisco” in April 1967 for immediate release.  The track would be the first single released by Ode Records and,   dropping in stores on May 13, 1967, it hit at a perfect moment in cultural history and instantly blew up.  With all eyes on San Francisco, the song went from being a jingle to a cultural anthem, and instantly started racing up the charts not only in the United States, but all over the world.  “San Francisco” was the number one song in the UK, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and Germany.  Ironically, the song didn’t make it any higher than the number four spot on America’s Billboard Charts (The #1 song was The Association’s “Windy”) but would sell more than seven million copies worldwide, and reportedly inspired millions or more wayward youth to flood to San Francisco in what was estimated to be one of the biggest mass migrations within North America in the 20^th Century.

But despite “San Fransisco” becoming a cultural phenomenon, somewhere in the eventful Summer of Love, Scott McKenzie seemed to get lost in the shuffle.  Adler, Phillips and everyone at the barely operational Ode Records were not prepared for the massive success of the single, and no follow up project was planned.  Between setting up the company and the running and aftermath of the Monterey Pop Festival, everyone involved was kept otherwise busy and by the time they got organized enough to get McKenzie back in the studio to record a full album of material, the heat of the single had rapidly cooled off.  With so much happening in music at that moment in time, McKenzie was in fear of getting lost in the musical chaos.  That didn’t stop Alder and Phillips from producing Scott McKenzie’s first full solo lp, “The Voice of Scott McKenzie,” which found its way on music store shelves near the end of the year.  It was accompanied by the release of a second single written and produced by Phillips, “Like an Old Time Movie,” which did fairly well on the charts getting to the #24 spot on Billboard.  But by the end of that year, Scott McKenzie would all but disappear from the music scene.

A part of the reason why McKenzie disappeared was that despite the fact that he had a massively successful record and a supportive team consisting of some of the biggest names in the music industry, he still had a reluctant nature towards performance and feared a relationship with the public.  Still dealing with the mental health issues that haunted him in the past, it was difficult to get McKenzie to do public or television appearances, and while he loved making music, he had a fear of live performance.  His reluctance to perform put a shadow over his visibility and, in time, the record buyer had moved on.

But from time to time, Scott McKenzie would come out of the shadows and, with the support of his friends, make music again.  In 1970 Lou Adler produced a second solo project with him.  Titled “Stained Glass Morning,” McKenzie had moved towards country, and despite including friends like Phillips, Barry McGuire and Ry Cooder on the album, it failed to find an audience.  This would be the final time McKenzie ever put out an album.

While he was never known to be a song writer, McKenzie would find success writing for other artists. He gave Canadian songstress Anne Murray her first international hit by penning “What About Me” which launched her in the US in 1968.  Decades later, in 1988, McKenzie was part of a team of writers including Phillips, Adler, Mike Love and fabled producer Terry Melcher who, for better or worse (depending on how you look at it) wrote one of pop music’s most insufferable earworms, “Kokomo” which became an unescapable hit for The Beach Boys.

Finally, in an odd twist of fate, when Denny Doherty once and for all parted ways with John Phillips in the 1980’s in what they were calling The New Mamas and the Papas, it was actually Scott McKenzie that stepped in to replace him, which was the exact opposite of what happened when Phillips was forming The New Journeymen.  However, the less we say about The New Mamas and the Papas is probably for the better.  Some stories don’t need to be retold.

In 2001 Scott McKenzie once again performed as a solo performer for the first time in decades at a special concert organized by Lou Adler at the Los Angeles night club he owned, The Roxy.  The concert, called “Dear John” was put together as a memorial service for John Phillips, who had died eleven days earlier.  Despite the stormy and often abusive relationship John had had with so many people in his life, many of his colleagues and members of his family were there, and Scott found him surrounded by familiar faces and friends from his days at the top in 1967.  Denny and Michelle were there, as well as Barry McGuire and Spanky McFarlane and Mike Love and Bruce Johnston.  That night Scott closed the show by saying goodbye to his lifelong friend with one final performance of “San Francisco.”  It would be one of the last times he’d make a public appearance.  Reluctant of fame until the very end, Scott died on August 18, 2012, at the age of 78.

Still today “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)” remains to be one of the most recognized songs of the 1960’s and has gone into music history as an important cultural anthem of the era.  It is a song that continues to live in our hearts and our minds, and is a forever living symbol of the 1960’s.  But the world barely got to know Scott McKenzie, who shied away from the spotlight despite the musical gifts he had to offer.  As a result, we only have a few handfuls of recordings by this talented performer.  Thankfully his lifelong friendship with John Phillips managed to bring him occasionally out of his shell so that he would share his voice with the rest of the world.  The voice of Scott McKenzie continues to be a musical gift.