August 26, 2012 – Motor City Radio Flashbacks

From current MCRFB news wires:

SCOTT McKENZIE, SINGER OF ’67 ‘SUMMER OF LOVE’ BALLAD, DIES AT 73

By LESLIE KAUFMAN / Published: August 20, 2012

Scott McKenzie, who performed the 1967 ballad “San Francisco (Be Sure To Wear Flowers In Your Hair),” which became a defining hit for the counterculture generation and helped draw tens of thousands to the Haight-Ashbury district for the Summer Of Love, died on Saturday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 73.

The cause was unknown, said Dr. Frank Snyder, one of his physicians. A web site devoted to Mr. McKenzie said that he had been ill for several weeks and that he suffered from Guillian-Barre Syndrome, a disorder that causes the immune system to attack the nervous system.

“San Francisco” was written by John Phillips, founder of the Mamas and the Papas, who had been a friend of Mr. McKenzie’s since high school. The two started a band called the Journeymen, which recorded several albums in the 1960s.

In the song, Mr. McKenzie sang lyrics like these with a slow, almost mournful cadence:

All across the nation, such a strange vibration.

People in motion.

There’s a whole generation, with a new explanation.

“San Francisco” hit a nerve with people looking to protest what they saw as an unjust social order, and it rocketed to the No. 4 position on the pop charts in 1967.

But despite the song’s success anda subsequent tour with the Mamas and the Papas, Mr. McKenzie never had another hit single. He took a break from the music business and moved to Virginia Beach, where he was married briefly to Anzy Wells, Dr. Snyder said.

In the late 1980s he made a comeback of sorts. He toured with a reconstituted Mamas and the Papas and, with Mr. Philips, Mike Love and Terry Melcher, wrote “Kokomo,” an upbeat love song that became a No. 1 hit for the Beach Boys.

Born Philip Blondheim on January 10, 1939, in Jacksonville, Fla., Mr. McKenzie grew up under difficult circumstances. His father died before he was 2, and his mother was forced to travel for work, so he was raised by his grandmother. No immediate family members survive.

In discussions with friends, he expressed mixed feelings about the song that defined his career and life. Fame in the short run had been overwhelming and even terrifying. He found it “sick” and “perverse” that strange women wanted to sleep with him.

But over time, his view of the song changed.

Chris Campion, who is writing a biography of John Phillips, interviewd Mr. McKenzie this year and said that the singer had told him that soldiers returning from Vietnam would sing the song on the airplane to San Francisco. He later became friends with some of those veterans and would tour the Vietnam Veterans Memorial with them.

“He was grateful that he had an opportunity to have such an impact on their lives,” Mr. Campion said.