• Creeque Alley
• The Mamas & the Papas
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The Mamas & the Papas

Creeque Alley

Creeque Alley

Note this song I DIDN'T buy when it came out but when I first heard it I GOT it! 

I had been a fan of The Lovin' Spoonful as a default reaction against my big brother [I think] to his choice of the Beatles first couple of albums and I wanted to buy songs of my own generation (sic!) and chose the Spoonful as exotic and 'foreign' as they're, they had appeared on the tv pop shows I think by then and whilst my brother chose intelligent comics to read every week, I bought Fab208 which featured the Spoonful amongst others and by the time 'Hums' came out I was lost! I was also precocious enough to be aware of The Mugwumps with Zal and Denny and Mama Cass and Jim Hendricks having heard their 'You Can't Judge a Book By The Cover' and bought the album over here [although I cannot find it at the moment, I have it on digital download too]

Now as soon as I heard 'Creeque (pronounced Creaky) Alley' I knew pretty much all of the artists mentioned from Zal and Denny to Sebastian (the best harp player IMHO) and McGuire and McGuinn. It told a story and not least that lasted until the shock when later I read the accounts of the perhaps larger than life heroin addiction of John Phillips of the Mamas and Papas  . . . . . . . . he claimed in his autobiography that he shot up on average every twenty minutes for over a decade. 

It made me seek out the lyrics to share with you and I found this wonderful web site which explains it all better than I could (which I was about to try and do). Extraordinarily enough how often do you find a website devoted to interpreting one song!?

CREEQUE ALLEY

John and Michi were gettin' kind of itchy
Just to leave the folk music behind
Zal and Denny workin' for a penny
Tryin' to get a fish on the line
In a coffee house Sebastian sat
And after every number they'd pass the hat
McGuinn and McGuire just a-gettin' higher
In L.A., you know where that's at
And no one's gettin' fat except Mama Cass

Zally said "Denny, you know there aren't many
Who can sing a song the way that you do, let's go south"
Denny said "Zally, golly, don't you think that I wish
I could play guitar like you"
Zal, Denny and Sebastian sat (At the Night Owl)
And after every number they'd pass the hat
McGuinn and McGuire still a-gettin higher
In L.A., you know where that's at
And no one's gettin' fat except Mama Cass

When Cass was a sophomore, planned to go to Swarthmore
But she changed her mind one day
Standin' on the turnpike, thumb out to hitchhike
"Take me to New York right away"
When Denny met Cass he gave her love bumps
Called John and Zal and that was the Mugwumps
McGuinn and McGuire couldn't get no higher
But that's what they were aimin' at
And no one's gettin' fat except Mama Cass

Mugwumps, high jumps, low slumps, big bumps
Don't you work as hard as you play
Make up, break up, everything is shake up
Guess it had to be that way
Sebastian and Zal formed the Spoonful
Michelle, John, and Denny gettin' very tuneful
McGuinn and McGuire just a-catchin' fire
In L.A., you know where that's at
And everybody's gettin' fat except Mama Cass
Di-di-di-dit dit dit di-di-di-dit, whoa

Broke, busted, disgusted, agents can't be trusted
And Mitchy wants to go to the sea
Cass can't make it, she says we'll have to fake it
We knew she'd come eventually
Greasin' on American Express cards
It's low rent, but keeping out the heat's hard
Duffy's good vibrations and our imaginations
Can't go on indefinitely
And California dreamin' is becomin' a reality

Written by John Edmund Andrew Phillips, Michelle Gilliam • Copyright © Universal Music Publishing Group