Old news, but still horrifying: John Phillips fucked his daughter. Remember, if you will, that the Mamas and Papas’ songwriter’s daughter claims he kept her as a pseudo-consensual coke-and-heroin-addicted sex slave for about a decade starting in 1979, and ending when she aborted what she thought might be his baby. The irony, other than the fact that he was her father, is that he was – drumroll – one of the major architects of the sound of the Summer of Love and all that.

The question for us non-daughterfuckers is: is his music tainted? He didn’t just perform it, he wrote most of it. He was the creative force behind it. It’s not like you can hear the squeak of the bedspring in the recordings, but both the musical and incestuous facets of the guy required a number of preconscious impulses to be absolutely unrestrained. And since recommending the excellent “The Wolf King of L.A.” to people has gotten exponentially harder since his supreme evil has come to light, I thought I’d do a rundown of his career, trying to figure out which stuff is far enough removed from incest to still be safe for consumption.

The good news is that everything before the seventies is fine. The Journeymen, The Mamas and the Papas, and “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)” are as virginal as you-see-where-I’m-going-with-that. John may have been getting deep into drugs, but for the time being he was still sleeping with other peoples’ daughters. So if anyone asks, you can tell them, “yeah, he fucked his daughter, but that was after this.”

By 1970, he was rich enough to not need to do anything except maintain his various addictions and occasionally marry a younger woman. His first solo album details this building debauch in gentle lyrics and folk harmonies, but the song “Malibu People” now just seems like him writing about convincing a pregnant woman to keep herself semi-confined to a beach house, albeit a luxurious one. This song marks the beginning of the slide, which led to…

In 1976 he did the soundtrack for The Man Who Fell To Earth, in which a Fame-era Bowie plays a less-inhibited Ziggy Stardust-era Bowie. The music is all golden oldies given a sleazier, more depraved mid-70s take – to wit, it has an uncleanably come-stained, Fritz the Cat vibe to it. His daughterfucking would commence three years later, and given the aesthetic of the time, it’s a miracle there wasn’t a pandemic of that shit. You could make a strong case for him fucking anything if you use this as Exhibit A:

Finally, the dark age. John spent most of the 80s touring with, giving drugs to, and bedding Mackenzie, except for 1988, when he helped write the Beach Boys’ cry for help, “Kokomo”.

He was still fucking her when he wrote this. He could have thought up and hummed that A-Dm-G shift while physically inside his daughter. I can’t shake the idea of him climaxing, leaving her near-comatose in a room with no windows, then doing a few lines and putting on khakis and a loose-fitting Hawaiian shirt before showing up at one of Mike Love’s living room jams, cheerfully bobbing his head with the gentle Casio beat, occasionally pitching something like “guys, I’m thinking marimba!” I don’t know if he had anything to do with the lyrics, but I really hope he didn’t, because the song just lists all the places that he would never take her, because she’s his daughter and that’s disgusting. Maybe “take” is meant in the Liam Neeson, Taken sense of the word. Ugh.

So, sadly, you won’t be able to listen to “Kokomo” all the damn time from now on. The rest is up to you.