“One day a gypsy woman read my mother’s tea leaves and said:
‘You’re going to have two sons. Tell your second son to build his house on wheels,’ and that was me. The only one that ever left home.”
- Denny Doherty,
from Dream a Little Dream:
The Almost True Story of the Mamas and Papas
The beautiful tenor voice from The Mamas and Papas was a guy from northend Halifax named Denny Doherty. The tumultuous career of the foursome ended after one of the greatest musical events of the 1960’s ,the Monterey Pop festival in 1967. Ironically, it was an event that John Phillips masterminded. They did a few things after that but, as Denny recollects, “The magic was over.”
Denny Doherty then pursued a solo recording career and acted off-Broadway before returning in 1977 to Nova Scotia. Most of gigs were acting, taking on live theater, which he was really good at. But he did hit the stage for the 1977 and 1978 Atlantic Folk Festivals and was host for CBC Halifax TV’s Denny’s Sho in the summer of 1978.
He briefly went back with John Phillips in 1980, reforming the Mamas and Papas with Phillips’s daughter, MacKenzie, and Spanky McFarlane. They toured internationally until 1986 when Denny quit the road and headed for Toronto to do theater. In 1988, he appeared in Fire, a gospel-rock musical written by Paul Ledoux and David Young.
In 1996 Denny and Paul Ledoux came to White Point Beach Resort in Nova Scotia with some talented musicians to put together a show entitled: Dream A Little Dream: The almost True Story of the Mamas and Papas. For a whole month I had the privilege of listening to him rehearse and tell stories both on and off the stage. For me, it was like I was living through the whole era.
In the late ’90s, Doherty appeared as the main storyteller in The Needfire, a Canadian-celtic musical performed at the Princess of Wales Theatre in Toronto. The last time I saw Denny Doherty was at the Neptune Theatre in Halifax in July 1999 when he did Dream at the Neptune Theatre. Although an icon of the ’60’s in Canada Denny is known to a whole generation of kids as the harbourmaster in a childrens show Theodore Tugboat.
Denny was never dropping names when he spoke of John Lennon, Bob Dylan and Janis Joplin. He truly knew these people as fellow artists and enjoyed a kinship with them, a special group of people who only come along at a special time in history.
He died in January 2007 and we all miss him.
Stumble it!