New, Solo Album From the Late John Phillips Gets Released, at Last

Fans of the Mamas & the Papas are in for a big surprise with the new solo album from group founder and songwriter John Phillips--an album released just weeks after Phillips died of heart failure at 65.

In place of the gorgeously complex harmonizing and endearing folk-rock sound that were the Mamas & the Papas’ hallmark, Phillips’ “Pay Pack & Follow” is a raw, ragged, hard-rocking outing that sounds like a lost album by the Rolling Stones.

For good reason: It was produced by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, whose presence is unmistakable throughout the work, which also features several stinging guitar solos from former Stones guitarist Mick Taylor.

Perhaps the biggest surprise about “Pay Pack & Follow,” however, is that it has come out at all.

It’s been 28 years since Phillips started working on it, and on at least three separate occasions the master tapes were lost, only to resurface years later.

In one instance, the tapes spent two years tucked away in a cargo hold on the ocean liner Queen Elizabeth II. Another time, they turned up beneath a pile of junk in a barn on Richards’ country home in England.

“I feel like we should apply for Guinness Book of World Records status, for the longest time between the start of an album and its release,” says Harvey Jay Goldberg, the recording engineer who helped Phillips finish the album just before he died.

In a letter from Phillips reprinted in the CD booklet, the composer of “California Dreamin’,” “Monday, Monday” and most of the rest of the Mamas & Papas canon wrote: “The tapes seemed to have a life force of their own, and there were quite a few times when I really thought we had lost them forever.” Later, Phillips refers to their “legendary indestructibility.”

Lost then found, lost then found.

“It’s funny--that’s much like John’s life itself,” says Goldberg, who was a teenager working at a New York City recording studio in the early ‘70s when he first got involved with Phillips’ second solo project following the breakup of the Mamas & the Papas.

He heard from Phillips sporadically over the years, but it wasn’t until 1999 that they returned to work on it in earnest. While they were at it, Phillips also recorded another solo album, whose title “Phillips 66” reflects its scheduled release around what would have been his 66th birthday on Aug. 30. Both are on the Eagle Records label.

Phillips met Richards and Jagger in 1973 in London. During a song-swapping session one night, Jagger urged Phillips to record the new ones he was playing, to which Phillips replied, “I’ll record them if you’ll produce them.”

Two weeks later, Phillips got a call from Jagger, who said he’d booked studio time and musicians and ordered Phillips to come down and get going.

“They had just started Rolling Stone Records and he [Phillips] was probably the first artist they signed,” Goldberg says.

The basic work was done over the next three months, Goldberg said, at which time Jagger and Richards moved on to work on the next Stones album, leaving Phillips to wrap up the loose ends on his project.

“By that time, his drug habit had escalated,” Goldberg says, “and he wasn’t capable of getting anything done. The sessions drifted off until it finally fell apart. Then John disappeared again.

“About two years ago, he got in contact with me and he said he’d gotten back all the tapes,” Goldberg says. “He asked if I was interested in helping him. I said ‘Sure.’ ”

“I just want people to hear this record,” says Phillips’ daughter, actress-singer Mackenzie Phillips. “What our dad left us is his legacy--not only the freaky, weird, screwed-up childhood he gave each and every one of us, but his musical legacy, and that’ssomething I can pass on to my son.”