Random Access

It doesn’t seem right but here it is, our first Monday Monday without Denny Doherty. A new reason not to trust that day.
He and Mama Cass Elliot always seemed like the soul of the Mamas and Papas, even though John Phillips was obviously the (drug-crazed) creative force. The group had an instantly recognizable sound: light, breezy, cheerful and uplifting.
And those harmonies. It was a memorably communal croon, which left an impression much like that of another California group, the Beach Boys. Listeners were transported to a world of late night parties followed by long afternoons spent lolling on the beach exploring the summer side of life.
If you ever get a chance to see the documentary that Bravo Canada keeps showing periodically on the The Mamas and Papas, check it out. Denny waxes eloquent about the early days and it is obvious that he can still hardly believe that they really happened.
He relates how one night, while he tried for the umpteenth time to convince John that the folk music craze was over and the British invasion had changed everything, Phillips announced that they needed a vacation. He ordered his wife Michelle to close her eyes, walk to a wall map and pick a spot.
Which is how they ended up in the Virgin Islands where they quickly blew nine grand in cash, mostly on acid, while trying to figure out their sound. Denny kept trying to convince John to have Cass join the group but Phillips resisted for a long time. As the money ran out, they started performing in a converted bar where Cass worked as a waitress. She tried to change John’s mind by singing harmonies while she wiped tables.
They maxed out their credit card, got kicked off the island and sold everything they could to get to New York. There John and Michelle were forced to walk back from someplace in a snowstorm and, in the freezing cold, stopped into a church along the way to warm up. I think you know what happened next.
They lighted out for California where, as Denny recounts on his web site, www.dennydoherty.com, the group was really born. It happened one day when Cass was doing the ironing while the other three rehearsed. She decided to join in at the top of her lungs.
“Suddenly there’s real power,” says Denny as he recalled the story for his stage production, Dream a Little Dream. “We have to sing harder to keep up with her. And that’s when Harvey showed up. No, not the big invisible rabbit. Harvey was an overtone - a fifth voice that was created when the four of us sang together and it all worked! It wasn’t folk music anymore, man. At long last it was really and truly rock and roll!”
By the time Doherty moved to Mississauga a couple of decades ago, he was long past looking for the limelight. He lived quietly, first on Lewisham Dr. in Park Royal, then in Lorne Park, doing some periodic stage work, and then the highly successful CBC children’s show Theodore Tugboat, where he made an impression on a new generation.
There was never any pretence about him and reporters for The News who interviewed him over the years inevitably found him eminently down-to-earth and approachable.
Anybody who would name a group The Mugwumps and have his phone number listed in local telephone book isn’t your celebrity ego tripper. Cass, Zal Yanovsky and John Sebastien who would later hit with the Lovin’ Spoonful, drummer Art Stokes and James Hendricks were all in the Mugwumps at various times.
Doherty got the name for the group from his Newfoundland grandmother. On the Rock it refers to a creature that is mug on one side and a wump on the opposite. In other words, it was neither fish nor fowl. The Mugwumps did some folk and some rock and a few things in between.
The Mugwumps may not have known who they were, but Papa Denny always seemed to have a pretty good idea of who he was and what the Mamas and Papas were.
Interesting, isn’t it, that despite his numerous successes, Doherty ended up not as an LA beach boy in the promised land but as a mensch from Mississauga.
That’s a place where the leaves turn brown, the sky turns grey and, if you take a walk on a winter’s day, you can still indulge in some warm-weather dreamin’.
Those Mugwumps always have to have it both ways.