In addition to writing the majority of the group's compositions, he also wrote "San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)" in 1967 for former Journeymen bandmate Scott McKenzie,[2] as well as the oft-covered "Me and My Uncle", which was a favorite in the repertoire of the Grateful Dead.

On his way home from France following World War I, Claude Phillips managed to win a tavern located in Oklahoma from another Marine during a poker game.

He developed his craft in Greenwich Village, during the American folk music revival, and met future Mamas & the Papas members Denny Doherty and Cass Elliot there around that time.

The festival was planned in just seven weeks, and was developed as a way to validate rock music as an art form in the way jazz and folk were regarded.

The album was not commercially successful, although it did include the minor hit "Mississippi", and Phillips began to withdraw from the limelight as his use of narcotics increased.

[9] Phillips produced his third wife Genevieve Waite's album Romance Is on the Rise, and wrote music for films.

Between 1969 and 1974, Phillips and Waïte worked on a script and composed over 30 songs for a space-themed musical called Man on the Moon, which was eventually produced by Andy Warhol but played for just two days in New York after receiving disastrous opening night reviews.

The project was derailed by Phillips's increasing use of cocaine and heroin, which he injected, by his own admission, "almost every fifteen minutes for two years".

In 1975 Phillips, still living in London, was commissioned to create the soundtrack to the Nicolas Roeg film The Man Who Fell to Earth, starring David Bowie.

[11] Subsequently, he and his daughter Mackenzie made the rounds in the media in an anti-drug campaign, helping to reduce his prison time to a month in jail, of which he spent three weeks (one week off for good behavior) at Allenwood Prison Camp, in Allenwood, Pennsylvania.

With Terry Melcher, Mike Love, and former Journeymen colleague Scott McKenzie, he co-wrote the number-one single "Kokomo" for the Beach Boys.

Several months later, photographs of him drinking alcohol in a bar in Palm Springs, California, were published in the National Enquirer.

On March 18, 2001, he died of heart failure in Los Angeles at the age of 65,[1][12][13] days after completing recording sessions for a new album.

He is interred at Forest Lawn Cemetery in Cathedral City, near Palm Springs[14] where later his third wife Genevieve Waite was buried as well.

While touring California with The Journeymen, Phillips met teenager Holly Michelle Gilliam, with whom he had an extramarital affair.

[11] The affair caused the dissolution of his marriage to Adams; subsequently he married Gilliam on December 31, 1962, and she thereafter became Michelle Phillips.

[18][19] In September 2009, eight years after Phillips's death, his eldest daughter Mackenzie alleged that she and her father had a 10-year abusive and incestuous relationship.

"[26] Jessica Woods, daughter of Denny Doherty, said that her father had told her that he knew "the awful truth" and that he was "horrified at what John had done".