[.ca] Go Where You Wanna Go: The Oral History of The Mamas and ... (ISBN 0815412045)

worse than you can imagine:
The "sloppy and disappointing" reviewer has it right on. If anything, the book is worse than that review indicates. The tapes were either transcribed by a particularly backward sixth-grader or someone who simply didn't care. There are mistakes on virtually every page, there is no index and narrative flow is replaced with a patchwork of jumbled memories. This is truly a crass, opportunistic rip-off.

save your clams, pop in and see denny:
The best oral biographies take their characters to the stage. Shorn of the literary flab and single-voice subjectivity of traditional biographies, they are frank and immediate. The characters leap to their feet, they sing and dance and joke, they fight, spit bile, defend themselves, contradict themselves. At worst, though, these books are lazy money spinners. Tape a few interviews from some willing participants, snip a few out of some old magazines, paste them together into a fairly comprehensible whole. No arduous writing, just scissors and tape. 'Go Where You Wanna Go' - the oral history of the mamas and the papas' begins by stumbling into the latter. From the start typos creep and crawl across the page. Then you get to the continuity, oh the continuity, the weird jumps in chronology. And, oh the repetition! "John is a great songwriter", "as a songwriter, John is great", "it's great, john's songwriting", "songwriting john, he's great!" We know! Why do you think we're reading the damn book! It feels like in order to boost a failing word count every last crumb of interview has been raked together. Consequently it feels like its falling apart in your hands. It's not all gloom though. It would take a mischievous genius to produce a book on a musical soap opera as fascinating as any in pop and then fail to entertain. When the four characters come together, then sparks fly. It's then it hits a rich vein of anecdotal debauchery, tomfoolery and studio session discussion. The remaining mama and papa Michelle Phillips and Denny Doherty are a delight. Denny, awash with wit and wisdom, tries to wrestle the book out of Greenwald's paws. He should issue spoken word cassettes. Michelle, driven by a desire to set the record straight, is similarly mouthy, and she's lucid and very likeable. John's interview snippets, though, are matter of fact, soulless. And it's unfortunate however that without Cass Elliott and any of her close confidents, arguably the most interesting character stays in the shadows. That the fly leaf claims Cass contributes her point of view, via a rare never before seen extensive interview (sounds suspiciously like the one heard on the gathering of flowers album), reeks of untruth. Her contribution amounts to nothing more than a few snatches of, sometimes inappropriate, dialogue desperately pasted into the text for some credibility. Nevertheless as soon as the four characters come apart the bottom falls out. So it's flawed, it's ratty, you're paying a princely sum for a pretty meagre text but, well, there's not a lot else available on the subject around at the moment so I suppose I'd recommend this ramshackle tome. Although better still, save your cash, pop in and see Denny, he's a pleasant chap, I'm sure he'd be happy to regale you with tales for a couple of afternoons.

Lame:
If I see one more author write about the Sixties and excuse total unconcern for truth and objectivity with "If you can remember it, you weren't there!" ... Whenever this statement appears, you can prepare for gross errors of fact. And that's what you get with this book: A jumble of interviews with no evidence of fact-checking in site. This book isn't unique in this respect, of course. Lots of "rock encyclopedias" get birth dates, causes of death, family relationships, and other easily verified pieces of information wrong on every page. But this author solicited the help of devoted fans, some of whom are highly knowledgeable regarding the Mamas and Papas, and still managed to produce this disappointing and unenlightening muddle. Admittedly, Michelle's recount of her deathbed interview with John is not to be missed. But nearly everything else is either covered elsewhere (John's and Michelle's books, Denny's stage presentation, and Jon Johnson's biography of Cass) or questionable in integrity and intent. Particularly galling is the amount of mud slung at Cass Elliot, who of course can no longer tell her own side of the story, with no evidence of any attempt to contact anyone who might. Conspicuous by their absence are her sister, Leah Kunkel, and her last manager, Alan Carr (who was still alive when the early parts of this book were being researched). All in all, I could have done without this book. I was a teenaged Mamas and Papas fan in the Sixties: I was there, I do remember it, and this ain't it.

Disappointing and sloppy:
This book is just barely worth reading if you're a Mamas and Papas fan, but honestly you'll get more of a sense of the people and the times from John Phillips' autobiography, Papa John. The oral history format used here is confusing since there are no connecting bits by the editors to keep a strong chronological flow going. We hear a lot from Michelle and Denny, and not much from John. There are a couple of bits from Cass with no explanation--maybe they contacted her at a seance? It's made clear that Michelle wanted this book to serve as a corrective for some things that John had said over time, and I do like hearing her side of the story. But the book is so badly edited and proofread, it makes you wonder what other mistakes have been made. There are typos galore, filmmaker D. A. Pennebaker's name is misspelled, and whoever transcribed the tapes of the interviews did an especially sloppy job. Among other problems ("ideal" for "idea"), the imaginary word "innamorate" appears once; I can only guess that what was actually said was "enamored of..." Behind-the-scenes people like Bones Howe are given some space, but I would have liked to have read more about the actual music. As a big fan of the musicians, I was really looking forward to this, but it's very disappointing.

Did they even have an editor?:
I am used to finding typos in published books, but this one takes the cake. it's so horribly edited that it's laughable, and it makes one question the fact-checking.