THEY COULD BEEN BIGGER THAN WILD STRAWBERRIES


clubhouse band The Palace Guard, and Terry Rae, came in to fill out the new band. An early song workout, a cool, facetious poke at Marmalade, was called ‘Strawberry Jam’ and from this, the combo took on its name. John Phillips went full steam ahead and recorded the boys as his primary project coming out of The Mamas & Papas (along with sessions for Noel Harrison), focusing on the rich harmony blend of Don Adey and Paul Downing. Developed as an act for John’s Dunhill/ABC Records subsidiary Warlock Records, they would become Jamme and release, after a long wait, one of only two LPs on the imprint (the other being Phillips’ own solo album, subtitled John The Wolfking Of LA).


JAMME released one sublime album on Papa John Phillips’ Warlock Records in 1968. LA music/culture historian DOMENIC PRIORE returns to the place and time to consider the last great LA pop group of the ’60s


A


ddressing the creative decline of the Hollywood music scene after most of its teenage nightclubs had been closed in


November of 1966, Eve Babitz recalled that “The open boom-town quality of The Monterey Pop Festival days had passed, and now some of the groups had grown rich while others had split up and fallen apart.” John Phillips, who in ’67 helped to spearhead Monterey Pop as a post-66 outgrowth of the LA scene’s lost potential, personified this “rich hippie” aesthetic. Like fellow vocal arrangement-head Brian Wilson, Phillips built a studio in his palatial mansion in The Santa Monica Mountains, high in the airy space above Sunset Strip. Sadly, the “falling apart” aspect of Eve’s quote can be applied to Phillips’ own group, The Mamas & The Papas, who would record their final LP in John’s home studio. But there was this sense that a future did exist in LA, it just did not have a stable base.


During this transition-to-nothing, the most logical prospect for a man with the music industry momentum of John Phillips would be to utilise his home studio to develop new artists (as well as recording his own songs).


16


Having worked closely with Derek Taylor in the creation of The Monterey Festival, it’s no surprise that as Taylor moved back to London to work with Apple Records on the development of groups like The Iveys, Grapefruit and Marmalade, so it was that his companion out West would work a similar Beatlesque/sunshine psych-pop mode. A back-door prospect was pulled partially (British expatriate Don Adey) from Churchill Downs,a house band at Gazzarri’s, one of the few remaining Sunset Strip clubs, and another group from Washington DC, The British Walkers (ex-Pat Paul Downing plus TimSmyser). When Paul began dating a gal named Nancy – who just happened to be the niece of John Phillips – he made a trip to the West Coast, where he met Don Adey at The Cheetah club out in Venice. Paul and Don ran into each other again at The Guitar Center on Sunset Boulevard, and through obvious connections (and a few good songs composed on the spot), found themselves quickly ushered in to the pampered bomb shelter and fading creative realm of Mr. Phillips. TimSmyser was lured in from DC, and Emmit Rhodes’ drum replacement from Hullabaloo


In a sense, Jamme could be seen as the last really great ’60s work by John Phillips, as his own LP and a Mamas & Papas reunion album both take on a less dream-like production sound more familiar to the early ’70s. Instead, Jamme feature a more ethereal, melodic pop bounce to their numbers, with ‘She Sits There’ and ‘Jan’ being personal trips into the melancholy of broken romance, ‘Scarborough Rose’ bringing ‘Ruby Tuesday’ sentiments into a Thunderclap Newman ‘Something In The Air’ guitar tonality, and ‘Poor Widow’ making for a great movie theme, as used in the Peggy Lipton/Dino Martin Jr. flick A Boy... A Girl, (directed by John Derek). This is a great sample of what a ’68 Apple Records “find” would have been, thrown into the realm of post-Sunset Strip Mamas & Papas reality, but sigh... everything in LA was truly falling apart.


The fragile nature of John Phillips’ marriage to Michelle lent the first crushing blow to the group (detailed in the liner notes), and despite his studio investment, a lack of faith on Dunhill’s behalf in the ability of John Phillips to produce hits began to inhibit the producer. In the end, Phillips would move the pieces of the group around, fire members, hire new ones (Don’s brother Keith would replace Paul Downing as the main harmony voice), and session men would finish the like


album. Much like Dunhill’s ’66 appropriation of San Bruno’s The Bedouins


Bedouins as The Grass Roots, only to


only to fire the band and then hire The 13th


the band and


hire The 13th Floor as The ego


clubs, to driving around in Jaguars and flirting with most


around


Grass Roots, LA ego and music biz chican from


chicanery brought Jamme fromtheir roots in teenage clubs, to


Hollywood’s most beautiful to


women, to just being another of


San Bruno The


piece of plastic product to fill time in a celebrities’ schedule


on the way down. But a great album was left behind, a remnant of the sparks and afterglow that was Sunset Strip’s interchange with England in the pop-sike sweepstakes.


Jamme is available one Now Sounds records.


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