I wonder if the Bohemian Embassy name is related in anyway to old Bohemian Embassy club.
'Papa' started as a T.O. gypsy
JEFF CHRISTENSEN/STAR FILE PHOTO
Denny Doherty (second from right), with Cass Elliot’s daughter, Owen, Michelle Phillips and John Phillips after the Mamas and Papas were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1998.
Singer of 'Monday, Monday' and 'California Dreamin' later lived quiet family life in Mississauga
January 22, 2007
John Goddard
Staff Reporter
"Zal and Denny working for a penny," sang the Mamas and the Papas in their autobiographical hit, "Creeque Alley."
Zal was guitarist Zalman Yanovsky, later of the Lovin' Spoonful.
Denny was Denny Doherty, perhaps best known as the clear, sweet tenor that carried "Monday, Monday" to a Number 1 single by the Mamas and the Papas in 1966, a quick follow-up to their smash debut, "California Dreamin'."
Zal and Denny worked for pennies together in Toronto, then moved south and split to help form two of the biggest folk-rock acts of the 1960s.
"What – get a lease? Get a landlord?" Doherty said when asked once where he lived in those early Toronto days. "No, man. We were gypsies. We were vagabonds.
"We slept wherever we could sleep. Be ready to move. Have your gear packed and your guitar case ready to go."
Doherty died Friday of an abdominal aneurysm at 66 after collapsing at his Mississauga home.
Originally, he was from Halifax. From 1955 to 1958, he sang in a rock band called the Hepsters and switched to folk music, he once said, "because it was a way to make a living and get out of town."
He formed a trio called the Colonials, with a rhythm guitarist, a washtub bass player and himself on lead vocals.
"We were sort of like the Kingston Trio, a commercial folk act trying to get by," Doherty said with typical modesty and enthusiasm in a 1996 interview, prior to being inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame.
"We had a lot of stuff that we had written ourselves and that the purists looked down their noses on us for, but we'd go right on through."
In 1960, the Colonials left Halifax for Montreal. A year later, they travelled to Toronto to appear on Juliette, the CBC music show aired Saturdays after Hockey Night in Canada. They picked up other work and stayed.
"We played the Colonial Tavern and we were the first to play the Las Vegas Room at the Seaway Hotel (since demolished)," Doherty recalled.
"We also worked the Imperial Room at the Royal York Hotel, and there were about three coffeehouses at that time – the House of Hamburg, the Village Corner Club and the Bohemian Embassy."
At the Bohemian Embassy, they took part in hootenannies.
"Ian and Sylvia would get up and do a couple of numbers," Doherty said. "We would get up and do a couple. We'd do all these folk sets going, `Tra-la-la, la-la-la-la-la.'
"But after you got up at the hoot at the Bohemian Embassy you'd go, `Is there any place else to work?'
"The folk clubs were selling coffee and cake," he said. "They weren't making enough money to pay everybody. So you would pass the hat, or play for nothing, and hope that somebody had heard you, or hope something magical would happen."
The start of something magical was a chance meeting in 1962 between Doherty and Toronto-born Zal (pronounced Zol) Yanovsky, who played a gut-string acoustic guitar.
Yanovsky, as Doherty once told the story, had just returned in semi-disgrace from an Israeli kibbutz. "He had blown the tracks off a Caterpillar tractor by putting the brakes on at 20 or 30 miles an hour," Doherty recalled.
"You're supposed to gear them down but he put the brakes on, blew the brakes, destroyed several buildings on the kibbutz. He went right through the mess hall or something, which they had just finished building and they said, `Don't help us anymore. Israel can get by without you.'"
Yanovsky told the story differently.
In 1962, at the age of 17, he was living on his own near Dupont St. and Avenue Rd.
His main hangout was the nearby Wash and Dry Laundromat, now an electronics repair store. It was warm, it was cheap, it was open 24 hours a day and Yanovsky said he spent most of his time there until Doherty hired him.
"I was catapulted from the dryer to the stage of the Colonial Tavern," he told Martin Melhuish for the 1983 book Heart of Gold: 30 Years of Canadian Pop Music.
"Our guitarist only played chords," Doherty said, "so we needed somebody who could pick some melodies and Zal could do that."
In 1963, Doherty, Yanovsky and the second guitarist, without the washtub player, relocated. Or as a line from "Creeque Alley" puts it:
"Zally said, `Denny, you know there aren't many who can sing a song the way that you do. Let's go south.'"
Shifting between Washington, D.C., and New York's Greenwich Village, Doherty and Yanovsky met all the members of their two future respective bands.
First, they met John and Michelle Phillips of the Journeymen, and Cass Elliot of the Big Three.
In February 1964, Elliot invited friends over to watch the first Beatles' appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, among them John Sebastian.
The new formations took place in stages.
Doherty, Yanovsky and Elliot played in a group together. Sebastian joined them briefly.
Doherty formed a group with John and Michelle Phillips.
Finally, Yanovsky and Sebastian co-founded the Lovin' Spoonful in New York with two other players.
From mid-1965 to late 1967, they rode the top of the pop charts with such hits as "Do You Believe in Magic?" "You Didn't Have to Be So Nice" and "Summer in the City."
Elliot moved to California. Doherty, with John and Michelle Phillips, joined her there to form the Mamas and the Papas.
For a while, all reigned as members of pop royalty. Afterward, Yanovsky settled in Kingston, and opened the restaurant Chez Piggy. He died in 2002.
Doherty returned to the Toronto area in 1986 to live as an unassuming, neighbourly family man listed in the phone book. Elliot died in 1974, John Phillips in 2001.
In 1996, Doherty and Yanovsky were inducted together into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame.
On hand to present the awards, respectively, were Michelle Phillips and John Sebastian.
With files from Richard Crouse.
