Book review: All the Leaves are Brown: How the Mamas & the Papas Came Together and Broke Apart

 

A deeply troubled, musically-inclined man enters the folk music movement of the late 1950s, divorces his wife for a teen groupie, connects with two other folk musicians via drug parties, writes folk songs, goes broke, learns that west coast folk-rock is replacing east coast folk, moves across the country, writes folk-rock songs, goes more broke, walks into a recording studio with his dirty, hungry quartet, records a song, watches it go platinum, catches his young wife in the arms of his best friend, writes more songs, does more drugs, makes more records, makes more money, does more drugs, organizes (and performs at) the Monterey Music Festival, then watches (and assists) his quartet disintegrate. As he does more drugs.

You might call that the timeline of John Phillips, leader of and songwriter for The Mamas & the Papas, a musical comet that sailed briefly and brightly through the folk-rock constellation of the 1960s. I requested a review copy of Scott G. Shea’s new biography, All the Leaves are Brown, because, like most Boomers, the lovely “California Dreamin’” has a permanent spot in my musical memory and I never tire of hearing it. I distinctly recall walking to the bus stop one wintery morning while the song—already in its seventh year of existence--played in my head. And one dull Sunday afternoon, my flautist sister was able to perfectly mimic the song’s flute solo after we listened repeatedly to my 45.

But enough with the personal connections and on to Shea’s book. I was initially thrown off by the amount of detail he includes, especially the opening chapter which lays out Phillips’s ancestry. However, by the third chapter I was completely hooked on his conversational, accessible writing style and the details are what kept me reading. Shea also provides a masterful arc of the 1960s pop music scene while relating how the Mamas & the Papas found their place in it.  Here, the details not only fascinate but illuminate the entire era. 

The interpersonal relationships of the four were unbelievably chaotic, which makes the creation of their two mega-hits all the more remarkable. How could such beautiful meldings of melody and lyric performed with perfect harmonies emanate from these four substance-addled friends/combatants/lovers/wannabe lovers? The irony embedded in that question is part of what makes the book so absorbing and why I finished it in a couple of days, skipping very little.

Shea’s writing has been criticized for its lack of robust editing, and I won’t necessarily disagree with that assessment but on the other hand, because the prose doesn’t call attention to itself, the reader can instead focus on a fascinating story, largely well-told. 

Highly recommended for anyone interested in the Mamas & the Papas saga and the world they briefly inhabited.

Book Review: The Great American Songbook: 201 Favorites You Ought to Know (& Love).

 

Before glancing through The Great American Songbook: 201 Favorites You Ought to Know (& Love): I naturally assumed I’d be familiar with a solid percentage of its contents. After all, I grew up playing the ubiquitous green Reader’s Digest Family Songbook; was a fan of old films before there was a TCM; and spent the past two decades researching and performing America’s classic songs.

But I only recognized 69 out of the 201. Either I’m not as well-versed in American song as I thought I was (pun not initially intended but deliberately left in), or author Steven Suskin did some serious digging. Perhaps both are true. And how he managed to squeeze the history of 201 songs into 254 pages is simple: most entries are only three paragraphs long. But he masterfully fills those entries with an entertaining blend of pop history and moderately simple music theory, the ratio depending on whatever seems to interest him most about any particular song.

Occasionally, the theoretical aspects of his entries can get a bit technical, but they’re always fun. For instance, towards the end of a lengthy paragraph describing the keys, bars, and melody patterns of “I Get a Kick Out of You”, Suskind writes that lyricist/composer Cole Porter “effortlessly spreads, like fresh-churned butter, a six-pointed rhyme…over a mere nineteen beats.”

The “The Man That Got Away” entry points out the song’s A-B-A-B (and a surprise C) form but here Suskind seems far more interested in the song’s compositional history. The tune had been written a decade earlier, paired with what composer Harold Arlen later described as a melody-depleting lyric. However, when united with the mighty pen of Ira Gershwin, the tune, said Arlen, suddenly “sounded like the Rock of Gibralter.”

“Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” had a similar genesis. Jay Gorney’s tune was originally written for a never-used torch song which included the following forgettable lines: “I could go on crying/big blue tears.” But when the same melody connected up with Yip Harburg’s lyrics, the song became a searing collective cry of an entire generation, struggling in the ravages of the Great Depression.

Speaking of the above song, Suskind also includes a plethora of entertaining anecdotes like this one: Gorney’s wife eventually divorced him and married Harburg, at one point quipping, “Oh, my dear, I wouldn’t marry anyone who didn’t write ‘Brother, Can You Spare a Dime.’”

If one can tell a great deal about a culture from an encounter with its popular songs (and one definitely can), then reading through this labor of love is an addictively entertaining way to access the golden age of Hollywood and Broadway.