Last edited Sat Oct 2, 2021, 07:16 AM - Edit history (2)
Sun Jan 10, 2021: More; much, much more; about Scott McKenzie and the crowd he ran with back in the '60s
I had a lot of help digging into this from a now-retired librarian. She worked in the local history room of the Alexandria (Virginia) Library.
Philip Blondheim lived about a ten-minute walk from where Jim Morrison lived, but the Morrison and McKenzie families lived at their addresses at different times.
Fri Dec 21, 2018: "All the leaves are brown, and the sky is gray."
A few years ago, we had a thread about '60s musician "Scott McKenzie." This post went into some of the history of the Mamas & the Papas.
Tue Aug 16, 2016: Scott McKenzie
That was not his real name, and is this ever a long story. There used to be someone at the local history room of the Alexandria Library who was well-versed in this subject.
"Scott McKenzie" spent his high school years in Alexandria, Virginia. He lived a few blocks from where Jim Morrison lived.
Inside The LC: The Strange but Mostly True Story of Laurel Canyon and the Birth of the Hippie Generation Part XVIII
{snip}
According to Michelle, "Tamar put on perfect airs around my dad and when it became necessary she would sleep with him." Whatever works, I guess. That perhaps explains why, in early 1961, Gil didn't have a problem with allowing his underage daughter to move to San Francisco with the daughter of a violent pedophile. Soon enough, Tamar found herself in a relationship with Journeyman Scott McKenzie, and bandmate John Phillips began coming by Tamar and Michelle's room on a nightly basis.
It wasn't long before Michelle, still just seventeen, was romantically involved with twenty-six-year-old Phillips, despite the fact that John was still married to Adams, with whom he by then had two children, Laura MacKenzie Phillips having been born on November 10, 1959 in Alexandria. Father Gil, who had himself recently taken a sixteen-year-old bride (one of a string of six wives), still wasn't concerned. And it's probably safe to assume that Phillip's father, who had pursued his bride when she was just fifteen, wouldn't have been too concerned either.
In October 1962, a year or so after meeting Michelle, John curiously found himself in Jacksonville, Florida (alongside Naval Air Station Jacksonville and Naval Station Mayport) for "two weeks of rest and rehearsal" during the Cuban Missile Crisis. For a guy who "never felt comfortable with political advocacy," John seems to have had a keen interest in Cuban affairs. Two months later, on New Years Eve 1962, Holly Michelle Gilliam became John Phillip's second wife. She also joined his reconfigured band, as did Canadian Denny Doherty, who had formerly been with the Mugwumps alongside Cass Elliot. This new lineup was dubbed the New Journeymen.
The newly-formed trio promptly embarked on a curious Caribbean adventure, arriving first at St. Johns, where John has claimed that they "snorkeled on acid" for several weeks. They next ferried over to St. Thomas, where they set up camp at a dive beachfront boardinghouse known as Duffy's. Soon enough, Ellen Naomi Cohen, better known as Cass Elliot, showed up with John's nephew, who was a childhood friend of hers. Cass had been born in Baltimore but had grown up in Alexandria, where, like Phillips, she had attended George Washington High School.
If that links ever goes out, try this one. There are several parts to this lengthy story.
A Homer's Odyssey
By David Montgomery
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, August 24, 2006
{snip}
This morning Opsasnick is driving down a winding street in Alexandria. Anybody else would have seen just the tall oaks and blooming crape myrtles shading neat Tudors and Colonials. Opsasnick looks more deeply and sees something that isn't here anymore.
"We're entering Morrison country," he says dramatically, like a tour guide to a secret landscape. "These are the streets he walked on, these are the fields he played on, the sidewalks he traveled to visit his friends." ... That would be Jim Morrison, lead singer of the Doors.
"There's his girlfriend's house where he went around back and threw pebbles up to her window to get her to come out," Opsasnick continues. "Here is the corner where he would hold court and act crazy. . . . I can almost visualize a teenage Morrison shuffling from his house." ... The house is a stone-fronted Cape Cod in the 300 block of Woodland Terrace. Opsasnick started with the relatively well-known fact that Morrison lived here from the middle of his sophomore year through graduation from George Washington High School in 1961. Then he gave his subject the full Opsasnick treatment: He investigated those 32 months as if they involved the birth of the nation or the fate of the Earth.
The resulting brand-new opus -- "The Lizard King Was Here: The Life and Times of Jim Morrison in Alexandria, Virginia" -- fits well with the other five volumes that make up the author's investigations: another encyclopedic search-and-rescue mission down offbeat byways of the local past.
Out of the Attic - Two Port City musicians with flowers in their hair
Alexandria Times, February 4, 2016
One of the iconic songs of the counterculture movement in the 1960s was sung by Alexandria’s Philip Blondheim. Better known as Scott McKenzie, Blondheim sang the vocals to “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair),” written by fellow Alexandrian John Phillips.
Born in Jacksonville, Fla. in 1939, Blondheim and his family moved to Asheville, N.C., where his father died a few months after Philip’s second birthday. His mother moved to Washington, D.C. in early 1942 to find work in the war industries, but she initially couldn’t afford an apartment of her own, so Blondheim stayed with his grandmother and other family members until 1946, when he joined his mother in an Alexandria townhouse.
Blondheim and Phillips, who later on gained fame with The Mamas and the Papas, both grew up in Alexandria in the mid-1950s and attended George Washington High School. They sang in separate vocal groups in the mid-1950s and met at a party hosted by Phillips at his apartment on Ramsey Alley. The two formed part of a quartet called The Abstracts, modeled after vocal quartets like The Four Freshmen and the Four Preps.
Out of the Attic - From Del Ray to Monterey Pop Festival
Alexandria Times, February 11, 2016
At the center of Alexandria’s connection to rock and folk music fame was John Phillips. Born in South Carolina, John and his family lived in Del Ray for much of his childhood.
He attended George Washington High School, like Cass Elliot and Jim Morrison, graduating in 1953. He met and then married his high school sweetheart, Susie Adams, with whom he had two children, Jeffrey and Mackenzie, who later became famous in her own right.
Phillips and Adams lived in the Belle Haven area after high school, but John left his young family at their Fairfax County home to start a folk music group called the Journeymen in New York City. The new group included lifelong friend and collaborator Philip Bondheim, later known as Scott McKenzie, also from Del Ray.
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