Behind the song: “Creeque Alley” | The Mamas & The Papas

Mar 11

Although never directly mentioned in the song’s autobiographical lyrics, Creeque Alley would forever be stamped as a significant location in the story behind the formation of The Mamas & The Papas. Located in the St. Thomas Virgin Islands, the getaway isle was where the quartet spent some time before switching up their approach to music and rebranding their image. At the time, John and Michelle Phillips, Denny Doherty, and Cass Elliot were still trying to make ends meet, playing at Sparky’s Waterfront Saloon — a St. Thomas club at the end of Creeq Alley (John would later add an “e” at the end for the song). While only briefly referencing their time spent on the isle, the song “Creeque Alley” highlights the years leading up to how The Mamas & The Papas came to be and their subsequent journey to making California dreaming a utopic, glistening reality.

The track opens with bouncy guitar strums and the first lines: “John and Mitchy were getting’ kind of itchy / Just to leave the folk music behind.” Before John and Michelle Phillips made it to the City of Angeles, the pair resided in New York, where the folk scene was the most alive in the early sixties. At the time, Greenwich Village was the epicenter of the folk scene, where Simon and Garfunkle got their start and Bob Dylan and Joan Baez infamously performed together, but by 1964, John and Michelle were eagerly looking beyond the genre. With the rise of rock led by The Beatles, its burgeoning scene was beginning to take over, but the Phillips would find it easier said than done to transition from one genre to the next.

John had been performing at Greenwich clubs with the group The Journeymen, consisting of members Scott McKenzie, Dick Wiessman, and himself. The trio had a discography of three albums, but with rocky friendships and the British Invasion, they dissolved in 1964. Attempts to revive the group took place, thus birthing The New Journeymen, with John, Michelle, banjoist Marshall Brickman, and vocalist Denny Doherty. When Brickman split, only the trio was left, soon taking to the Virgin Islands on a trip that Michelle called “just to have some fun,” camping out for several months. It was then when Cass Elliot joined them and everything magically clicked into place.

The opening lyrics are followed up with “Zal and Denny workin’ for a penny / Tryin’ to get a fish on the line / In a coffeehouse Sebastian sat / And after every number they’d pass the hat,” referring to Zal Yanovsky, Denny Doherty, and John Sebastian. In 1964, Cass, Zal, Denny, and John (along with Cass’s then-husband James Hendricks) formed the Greenwich-based group The Mugwumps. Though short-lived, the folk quintet managed to release one album in their time together (sans Sebastian), but just like John and Mitchy, were eager to leave the genre behind.

Meanwhile, “McGuinn and McGuire” were “just getting higher in LA” — you know where that’s at. Of course, Roger McGuinn of The Byrds represents the heady spirit of the city seeing as their cover hit "Mr. Tambourine Man” pretty much defined the spring of 1965. When The Mamas & The Papas had built up a catalog of material, the group traveled to LA. The only address they knew in the city was “Eve of Destruction” singer Barry McGuire’s residence. While staying with Barry, he introduced the group to his producer and co-owner of Dunhill Records, Lou Adler.

“I had a habit of when I listened to a new group, I tried not to look at the group so as not to be influenced in any way by the way they look, but hear them as I would hear them on a record,” Adler explained in a 2009 documentary. “They went through the four or five songs and I opened my eyes, looked up at them, and that’s how I got the title of their first album: If You Can Believe Your Eyes and Ears.” From there, the group found success with their new rock image and a number-one debut album that would catapult them to mainstream success even before they had performed live on stage together for the first time at the Hollywood Bowl for KHJ’s event.

And famously, “No one's gettin' fat except Mama Cass.” In the first three verses, the term “fat” refers to Cass’s success in the industry, alluding to her prosperity. However, the fourth verse contradictorily reads “And everybody's gettin' fat except Mama Cass,” implying that despite Cass's friends achieving significant success, she had not been able to attain it yet.

Regardless, Michelle Phillips remembers Cass’s initial reaction to hearing the line for the first time in the EPIX’s documentary Laurel Canyon: “John came up with the lyric and I said, ‘Yeah but what are we really gonna say there?’ He says, ‘That’s the lyric.’ And [Cass] laughed so hard, she said, ‘I love that!’” Cass later explained, “I think that we were offensive to the point of being inoffensive. There were things about the group physically that startled people. The fact that these four people would come together and look like that and make that kind of music live in concert.”

The lyrics “Zally said ‘Denny, you know there aren’t many / Who can sing a song the way that you do, let’s go south’” reveal the Canadian lineage of both Zal and Denny, who had traveled south to Greenwich Village to explore a career in live music. Thus, “Zal, Denny, and Sebastian sat at the Night Owl / And after every number they’d pass the hat.” The Night Owl club was a hotspot in the Village folk scene and also the home space where John Sebastian’s The Lovin’ Spoonful would play, quickly establishing a name for themselves. Together with Zal, drummer Joe Butler, and bassist Steve Boone, the Spoonful became one of the most notable acts to emerge from the Village folk-rock sphere.

Despite the song stating that “When Cass was a sophomore, planned to go to Swarthmore” for college, her original plans of achieving a higher education involved articulating at Goucher College near her hometown of Baltimore. John Phillips apparently only used “Swarthmore” for a rhyme, still the song’s lyrics detail Cass’s ambition to travel to New York under any circumstance, including hitchhiking. “When Denny met Cass he gave her love bumps / Called John and Zal and that was The Mugwumps,” is a reference to Denny and Cass’s attraction to each other upon meeting when she finally arrived in New York City, the two later becoming involved in a brief relationship. The lyrics, here, again touch on the formation of The Mugwumps.

Yet, despite all of the “Mugwumps, high jumps, low slumps, big bumps” in the early stages of their musical careers, the band members had to experience the make-ups, break-ups, and shake-ups in order to reach their destined fame. While “Sebastian and Zal formed the Spoonful,” Michelle, John, and Denny were “gettin’ very tuneful” in the Virgin Islands. This brings us out of the New York folk scene, where the members were once “broke, busted [and] disgusted.” John, Denny, and Michelle made an escape out of The City That Never Sleeps to the Caribbean even though they were without a great deal of funds, since Mitchy wanted to “go to the sea.” After a month and a half spent on the isle, Cass would join the group, though they’d “knew she’d come eventually.”

There, they lived off of Michelle’s American Express card which she notes that “no one had bothered to pay for several months.” From the song’s final few lyrics, we learn that they lived in tents with low rent that were difficult to keep out the heat. But with “Duffy’s good vibrations” and their collective imaginations, the group would find themselves having an epiphany about their future. The mentioned Hugh Duffy was the owner of a guest house, three bars, and a discotheque at the end of Creeque’s Alley, the latter of which was where the group worked.

“When the season started, John, Michelle, and Denny talked Duffy into letting them perform in the discotheque. They sang on the tiny stage while ‘Mama Cass’ Elliot waited on tables (she was a terrible waitress, Duffy recalls) and from the back of the room contributed the distinctive high harmony that was to bring her fame a year later,” Duffy’s Love Shack remembers. Of course, those good, early times couldn’t have gone on indefinitely. Soon, the restless group fled from the isle to Los Angeles, where they landed a record deal and the rest turned to history as California dreamin’ became a reality for the foursome.

"You have to understand how important their stay on St. Thomas was to the Mamas and Papas," Timothy Duffy, Hugh Duffy’s son, says. "They really shaped their sound here as they got used to John Phillips’ songs. Remember, the Beatles developed their sound in Hamburg, Germany, before returning to England and fame. St. Thomas was Hamburg for The Mamas and The Papas."