RIP, Denny Doherty

Great stuff.
Particularly like the dancers/cheerleaders coming out of the bathtubs

 

On th Ed Sullivan Show:

Nice hat, John.

 

Saw the slugline BC-Obit-Doherty on the wire and thought Dean and Roy really, really, REALLY wanted to punish ol' Matt for sending the Tar Heels into the toilet.

 

Someone posted a Lovin Spoonful youtube but I guess yanked it. They and the Mamas & Papas still remind me of summer during my university days.

This video of "Summer in the City" is amazing both as a musical video and political statement about the late '60's.

 

That was me. Technical difficulties. This is one of my favorite 60s songs, too.

 

One of the Spoonful was Zal Yanovsky (the guy with the hat in the foreground of the video), a Canadian who eventually got booted from the band because he named the drug dealer after he got busted.

He opened up an extraordinarily popular restaurant in Kingston, Ontario, Chez Piggy which is still around.

Great restaurant--kind of Birkenstock meets Cordon Bleu.

Zal died a few years ago.

 

Zal and Denny Doherty were both members of the Halifax Three. The two of them later joined Cass Elliott in a group called the Mugwumps. Some of that history is addressed in the Mamas and Papas' autobiographical hit "Creeque Alley."

 

And here's the video of "Creeque Alley":

 

AP, to its credit, did pretty quickly correct the Mama Cass choking reference in the obit.

 

Good. They should. It was sloppy reporting. The only proven facts in that original story about her death were the year, the location and the cause: heart attack. Nobody can know if she choked and had a heart attack, sneezed and had a heart attack, whistled and had a heart attack or yawned and had a heart attack. But hey, everybody says it happened, and it makes for great fun to say a fat person choked on a ham sandwich and died, so why not report it?

And anyway, I thought everybody knew that myth was debunked years ago.

 

Was that first video (with the bathtubs) from Shindig or AB?

Duh. Hadn't watched the video all the way through. It's from Hulabaloo, another long-lost show from my rock 'n roll youth.

 

Agree California Dreaming one of the greatest pop songs ever.

The Mama's and Papa's had the best harmony I've ever heard in a group. I still miss them. John Phillips was a musical genius.