ABOUT FLOWERCHILDREN:

flowerchildren is about the music and turbulent private lives of The Mamas and The Papas between their sudden rise to fame in 1966 and their effective death as a group in 1970. The songs, written by John, all reflect (usually explicitly) their emotional entanglements - John was married to Michelle, who had an affair with Denny, who was the love of Cass’s life. These things destroyed them, but they also drove John’s writing and the creative energies of the group.

John brought to the group his genius as a composer/arranger, and a guitar. Denny brought a heartbreakingly pure tenor sound. Cass brought a gutsy voice and, in every way, a massive presence. Michelle, who looked good and sang reasonably, but had no great musical or other talent, was the cool presence that held them together and then blew them apart. Cass died in 1974, John in 2001, Denny in 2007. Michelle, in every sense, survived them all.

The focus is on these distinctive people, on their complex and passionate interactions, and on the way the inner history of the group illuminates the major hits that are their legacy. The richness of the story is grounded in the uniqueness of the Mamas and the Papas (there were few other groups in the 60s with the 2 males/2 females balance, hardly any with only one visible instrumentalist, and none with their multiple harmonies or deliberate diversity of personality and look). But it’s also about the times. flowerchildren is about a kind of innocence that went hand in hand with forms of corruption, about how ‘California Dreaming’ not only became a reality but turned to nightmare. It’s about sex, drugs, and a distinctive kind of rock and roll, in a time when the world was changing fast - and it was really important to be young.

The story is told in sequence, but the four retrospective narrators (appearing in the order of their deaths) impose the perspective of another time. Their perception of the events we see adds to our knowledge of them - but it’s also as interesting for the things they miss, or misinterpret, as for the individual insights they offer as participant-observers. Behind each one as he or she speaks to us, the action keeps running, in sometimes viciously ironic parallel.