John, The Wolf King of LA

25 January 1970 was the release date for another album I’ve never listened to until now, John Phillips’s John, The Wolf King of LA. I was looking forward to listening to it, because everyone loved the Mamas and the Papas, right? And I hear it’s held in some regard by his admirers as well as by Denny Docherty who thought the songs were such that they’d have made a great Mamas and the Papas album.

Denny may be right, but taking the album as I found it, I didn’t get much out of it. I thought it was, for the most part, bland and undistinguished. It swims in the same pond as Kris Kristofferson’s early material, but I prefer KrisKris (*). It’s a kind of LA meets Nashville without bringing out the best of either.

Of course, you can’t listen to an album without at least some chance there’ll be a track you like, and in this case it was Someone’s Sleeping, musically at least–as with a lot of the album I have my doubts about the lyrical content.

Usually when revisiting an album, or when I listen to something for the first time for this blog, I listen to it twice. Not this time.

As ever, the album is on Spotify and you can make up your own mind.

(*remind me one day to tell you how the name KrisKris came about.)