On Tour

During the Monterey Folk Festival arrangements were made with the Mamas and Papas, Jimmie Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Scott McKenzie to play a concert at the Hollywood Bowl.  It meant playing a heavyweight concert, not a festival.

Lou Adler had been handling Jan and Dean until the Mamas and Papas diverted most of his business attention.  There were bad feelings and at the beginning of the Hollywood Bowl concert, Jan jumps up on the stage, slugs somebody, knocks him down, grabs the microphone and starts bad rapping Lou and the industry.  It put a bad karma flavoring on it and three weeks later was the tragic accident that Jan got into and barely survived.

Another time the group played at the Hollywood Bowl with the Turtles, Sonny and Cher, and the Beach Boys.  It was a K.H.J. charity concert.  Sonny and Cher closed the place down.  There was a forty string orchestra with them.  “I Got You Babe.”

When you arrive at the big concerts you can see the heavy weights of the industry sitting down in the front rows with all these big gunzels standing around to protect the biggies.

All of the group’s bookings into concerts were done by the Roberts and Landers Agency formed by Bobby Roberts and Hal Landers.  They made all of the reservations for airplanes, hotels and limousines.

The Mamas and Papas performed on the weekends and recorded on the week days.  There were usually three or four engagements per weekend.  For example, they left Los Angeles via plane Friday afternoon to do a concert at the University in Berkeley Friday night.  Saturday night they would play the San Francisco Civic Auditorium.  Sunday afternoon they attended the first big acid be-in in Golden Gate Park.  All of the San Francisco groups were there:  Janis Joplin and Big Brother, the Grateful Dead, all of them.  And all of the guru’s like Tim Leary, Ken Kesey, and Wavy Gravy.  Everyone is on acid.  Sunday night they did another concert in Sacramento.  Then a plane ride home.

Another weekend they played the McCormick Place in Chicago.  Someone burned it down the following day.  Then they did a concert in Toronto and then on to Detroit to play with Mitch Rider and the Detroit Wheels.   Their hit was “Devil With the Blue Dress On.”

Then another weekend they’d play Boston, New York, and Chicago and then on another they’d play Houston, Dallas and Atlanta.  They spent nine days in Hawaii doing a concert with the Association.  It was a combination vacation/engagement but it rained the whole time they were there.

Eric played Carnegie Hall in New York with Ian and Sylvia and with the Mamas and Papas.  In Forrest Hills they played with Simon and Garfunkel.

There was always an entourage of various people on the planes.  There were photographers from magazines and newspapers doing interviews en route to an engagement.

At the Phoenix Amphitheater, there was an audience of 10,000 people.  The group had all taken acid . . . and played to a whole sea of waving, undulating, flower people.  Eric said, “Everything you did on the guitar was more than ever.”