"San Francisco" (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair) is a song written by John Phillips of the group The Mamas & The Papas, and sung by Scott McKenzie. It was published in 1967, the summer of which became famous as the Summer of Love. It is considered a cultural icon.

This song was the publicity showcase of the 1967 Monterrey Pop Festival, being catapulted in a very short time to the top of the United States charts that reached number four, in the United Kingdom and in the rest of Europe. got to be number one. It is one of the best known hymns of the hippie movement.

McKenzie grew up in North Carolina and Virginia, where she befriended one of her mother's friends, "Papa" John Phillips. In the mid-1950s, he sang for a short time with Tim Rose in high school, within a group called The Singing Strings, and later with Phillips, Mike Boran, and Bill Cleary, forming a doo-wop-style band called The Abstracts. In New York, the Abstracts renamed themselves The Smoothies and recorded two singles for Decca Records, produced by Milt Gabler (producer of Bill Halley's records).

In 1961, Phillips and McKenzie met Dick Weissman and formed The Journeymen, and they recorded three albums for Capitol Records. Before The Journeymen disintegrated in 1964, they both talked about forming a new group. Mckenzie preferred to continue alone and John would contact Denny Doherty, Cass Elliot and Michelle Phillips, his second wife. The group soon immigrated to California. Two years later, Scott traveled to New York and signed for Lou Adler's label (Ode Records). Phillips wrote and produced San Francisco for Scott and it was released in 1967. Phillips played guitar during the recording and Michelle rang the bells. Immediately the song became a success and a kind of hippie anthem, managing to position itself on the charts around the world, within the Top 10. It was a very popular song around the world, it achieved presence during the Summer of Love, in San Francisco.

Scott had another minor hit called Like An Old, also produced and written by John Phillips. His first album, The voice of Scott McKenzie, was followed by another called Stained glass Morning. He stopped recording in the early seventies, settling in Joshua Tree (California) and Virginia Beach.

In 1986, he began performing again by presenting a remake of The Mamas & the Papas of the hit Kokomo, a song co-written with The Beach Boys. For a time he replaced Denny Doherty in the John Phillips band. In 1998 he left the group and began to reside permanently in Los Angeles, where he passed away in August 2012 from Guillain-Barre syndrome, a disease that affects the nervous system and that he had been diagnosed in 2010.


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