SCOTT McKENZIE: SCOTT McKENZIE perform- ed 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 so-called Summer of Love.
A website devoted to the singer, who has died aged 73, said he suffered from Guillain-Barré syndrome, a disorder that causes the immune system to attack the nervous system.
San Francisco was written by John Phillips, a founder of the Mamas and the Papas, and friend of McKenzie’s since high school. The two started a band called the Journeymen, which recorded several albums in the 1960s. In the song, McKenzie sang 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 against what they saw as an unjust social order. But despite its success and a subsequent tour with the Mamas and the Papas, McKenzie never had another hit. He took a break from music and moved to Virginia Beach, where he was married briefly to Anzy Wells. In the late 1980s he made a comeback of sorts. He toured with a reconstituted Mamas and the Papas and, with Phillips, Mike Love and Terry Melcher, wrote Kokomo, an upbeat love song that became a number one hit for the Beach Boys.
Born Philip Blondheim in Jacksonville, Florida, McKenzie grew up in difficult circumstances. His father died before he was two, and his mother was forced to travel for work, so he was raised by his grandmother. No immediate family members survive.
He often 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 his view of the song changed. Chris Campion, who is writing a biography of John Phillips, interviewed McKenzie and said the singer told him soldiers returning from Vietnam would sing the song on the plane to San Francisco. He later became friends with some of those veterans.
“He was grateful that he had the opportunity to have such an impact on their lives,” Campion said.
Scott McKenzie: born January 10th, 1939; died August 18th, 2012