The Mamas
& The Papas biography
The leading California-based vocal group
of the '60s, the Mamas & the Papas epitomized the ethos of the mid- to late-'60s pop culture: live free, play free, and love
free. Their music, built around radiant harmonies and a solid electric folk
foundation, was gorgeous on its own terms, but a major part of its appeal lay
in the easygoing southern
The group's founder and de facto leader, John
Phillips, born in 1935, was actually quite a bit older than most of the figures
who emerged as rock stars during the middle and late 1960s. He was more of
Elvis Presley's generation, the product of a chaotic home life with a difficult
childhood and adolescence, and seemed to be headed for life as a low-level
delinquent until he was scared straight, and then had been headed for the
Ultimately, Phillips' first marriage ended, as did the
Journeymen, but his attempts at musical success continued. Phillips formed the
New Journeymen with future screenwriter Marshall Brickman
and a young model and singer named Michelle Gilliam; they didn't succeed any
better, but Phillips and Gilliam married and they also started to write songs.
One that they composed jointly during this period was a catchy tune with some
potential that expressed an idealized vision.
Meanwhile, working in a different realm of the musical
spectrum was a Baltimore-born singer named Cassandra Elliot, who had become a
big fish in a small pond -- though Cass Elliot would have been the first to say
that she was a pretty big fish in any pond -- as part of New York's
off-Broadway theater scene, and had made some noise
in touring productions of The Music Man. She's moved into folk music in
partnership with Tim Rose -- himself an ex-associate of the Smoothies.
They worked as two-thirds of a trio called the Triumverate,
whose third spot was subsequently filled by Nebraska-born folksinger James
Hendricks. This group eventually became the Big 3 and hit it big at New York's
Bitter End, and from there went on to a brief flurry of recording activity that
yielded two LPs, a handful of singles, and a brace of television commercials.
Eventually, the Big 3 evolved into the Mugwumps, whose ranks included Elliot, Hendricks, Zal Yanovsky, John Sebastian, and
Denny Doherty, a veteran of the Colonials in the early '60s, who later
rechristened themselves the Halifax Three -- Doherty and Elliot, who were
pretty impressive on their own, made a dazzling pair of voices together. The Mugwumps seemed to be on the edge of a new sound, mixing
electric instruments played with ever more emphasis on folk-based material --
this was concurrent with the West Coast activities of Roger McGuinn,
Gene Clark, and David Crosby in the Byrds -- but
could never quite put together a sound that sold, even to the record labels,
much less the public. They were foundering when Phillips decided to reactivate
his trio as the New Journeymen and, with Brickman
gone, recruited Doherty to sing some shows down in
Meanwhile, Cass Elliot was paying her bills by singing
jazz, in
The group headed to
That album was one of the finest examples of what
later became known as "sunshine pop," and it's still one of the best
harmony vocal showcases in 1960s music. In addition to the two hit singles,
"California Dreamin'" and "Monday,
Monday," listeners could luxuriate in the radiant splendors
of "Go Where You Wanna Go," "Got a
Feeling," and eight more unabashed gems, and they reciprocated by lofting
it to the number one spot on the charts and keeping it among the top-selling
albums in the country for months. Sadly, this would also mark the Mamas &
the Papas' high watermark as an album act; they would never again release any
long-player quite as consistent in terms of quality and inventiveness.
Even before it was recorded, the unity of the group
and its sound, and the foursome's reasons for working as group (which had been
cultivated for a year) were jeopardized by the overlapping romantic attractions
between the members -- John and Michelle Phillips were married, but that didn't
stop Doherty, who'd already been the object of Elliot's affections, from
pairing off with Michelle Phillips and, in the process, engendering stress and
distrust all around. Stresses also arose as Michelle Phillips became involved
for a time with Gene Clark, the principal composer, co-founder, and lead singer
with the Byrds -- worse yet, she ended up being
accused of disloyalty to the group for her public displays of attraction to
Ironically, even as their internal lineup
was disrupted for a time -- Michelle Phillips was back in the ranks by the time
of the album's release -- the group's studio sound was honed to a fine point.
The first album had used a brace of top session people, including Glen Campbell
and P.F. Sloan on guitars and Bud Shank on flute, but by the spring of 1966 it
had solidified around guitarist Eric Hord and the
established Los Angeles session players Larry Knechtel
on keyboards, Joe Osborne on bass, and Hal Blaine on drums (usually referred to
as "the Wrecking Crew"), all being coordinated by John Phillips,
engineer Bones Howe, and label chief Lou Adler. Both the band's tracks and the
quartet's vocals were meticulously worked out separately and merged in the
final mix, which could go as deep as 16 tracks, unheard of in pop recording in
1966. The mix of hands didn't conflict at all -- rather, on the Mamas & the
Papas' recordings, they resulted in the illusion of a self-contained group that
was playing as well as singing. Their records held up unbelievably well, on the
radio or heard at home, and they seemed to move from triumph to triumph, the
first two singles giving way to "I Saw Her Again" and "Words of
Love," then "Dedicated to the One I Love," "Creeque Alley," and "Look Through My Window,"
all of which turned up on their third album, Deliver, which was sort of an
"in" joke in its title, coinciding with the birth of Cass Elliot's
daughter.
Good as their second and third albums were, however,
things were never quite the same for the group after that bout of disunity in
the first half of 1966. They'd arrived in Los Angeles in relative innocence,
essentially four happy people who were happy just to be singing together, but
the intermingling of affections tainted that; although resolving the initial
problems had allowed them to keep working together, the motivation soon became
a matter of protecting the success they were enjoying -- in essence, they were
in it for the money, the prestige, and the stardom, as much as and perhaps more
than the sheer joy of the singing and of seeing what they could accomplish.
This was understandable as, for the first time, they
were all making huge amounts of money from their music and were at the center of the musicians' colony in
Indeed, their appeal was remarkably similar to that of
the
The irony was that Phillips was a member of Elvis
Presley's generation and had been in music longer than many of the group's
younger listeners had been alive -- ten years earlier, he could've been an
aspiring member of the Four Freshmen. He'd reinvented himself with a few changes
in visual style and his songwriting, and enjoyed his
moment in the sun a decade later than his contemporaries such as Presley, Dion, Bobby Darin, et al. And for all of the idealism of
their songs, there was a lot of hedonism present -- Phillips and Doherty (whose
voice and looks drew women like moths to a flame) enjoyed access to every
fleshly pleasure there was to be had in late-'60s California; Michelle Phillips
was no slouch in that pursuit herself, as well as being one of those fleshly
pleasures herself, while Cass Elliot loved the role of Earth Mother and hippie
Queen of Hearts, surrounded by admirers. She may have played as powerful an
indirect role on American music as John Phillips, helping facilitate the birth
of Crosby, Stills & Nash by bringing that trio together under one roof --
it was a long way from The Music Man or The Boy Friend, stock and touring
performances, or her father's delicatessen.
In the late spring of 1967, John Phillips' influence
on popular culture reached its zenith when he and Lou Adler, with Michelle
Phillips, Al Kooper, and a lot of others assisting,
organized the Monterey International Pop Festival. The first and most renowned
(musically) of all the rock festivals of the 1960s, the event launched the
careers of dozens of mostly San Francisco-based acts nationally and beyond,
including those of Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, the
Electric Flag, and Phillips' old friend and Journeymen bandmate
Scott McKenzie. In honor of the festival, Phillips
had written a song called "San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Some Flowers in
Your Hair)," which he gave to McKenzie to record as his solo debut on
Adler's new Ode Records label; precisely why he didn't give it to his own
group, except perhaps for the fact that they weren't recording or even working
at the time, has never been clear, but McKenzie enjoyed a Top Five hit and was
suddenly in almost as much demand as the Mamas & the Papas.
By that time, the group even had a rival of sorts, at
least in the public perception, in the guise of Spanky
& Our Gang, a Chicago-based outfit with folk roots and impeccable vocals
built around a powerful female singer, though they were a little wider-ranging
in their repertory and placed more emphasis on comedy and a certain
theatricality in their presentation.
John and Michelle Phillips built a studio of their own
where their fourth album, The Papas & the Mamas, was recorded, and although
there were some new sounds embodied in the work and some hits included (most
notably the radiant, sadness-tinged "Twelve-Thirty"), the group's
days were numbered; precisely how numbered they were was revealed by the
release of the single "Dream a Little Dream of Me" as a Cass Elliot
solo single. The world had also changed in the two and a half years since the
group emerged. By 1968, assassinations, the dragging on of the Vietnam War, and
the festering political wounds that the war engendered (and the underfunding of Lyndon Johnson's concurrent "War on
Poverty" due to the United States' ongoing Vietnam involvement) were
eating into the fabric of society at every level; things were getting ugly, or
at least serious, and John Phillips' Pied Piper-like presence, beckoning people
to California and an idealized quasi-hippie lifestyle, seemed increasingly out
of touch with older teenagers and college students' sympathies. They were
magnificent songs, to be sure -- "Twelve-Thirty" was a stunning,
bittersweet ode to California's beauty, both natural and in the guise of
"young girls coming to the canyon," though as gorgeous as the group's
version was, Scott McKenzie's solo rendition offered a poignancy that gives the
song some unexpectedly serious overtones, at least in mood, while "Creeque Alley" is one of the funniest and catchiest
autobiographical songs of the 1960s. By 1969, the Mamas & the Papas were
history, victims of changing times, emotional exhaustion, and an excess of
sexual, chemical, and alcoholic pleasures.
Cass Elliot was the first to emerge in her own right,
her larger-than-life image lending itself to pop stardom and her musical
ability being the most solid on a solo basis -- she had a big voice and she'd
also acted professionally, which made her a natural, whether recording solo or
in tandem with Dave Mason. Her first venture into performing solo, in Las
Vegas, was disastrous, but by the early '70s she was on an even keel, hosting
and performing on music-oriented television shows such as The Ray Stevens Show
and Get It Together as well as her own specials, and also appearing in the
movie H.R. Pufnstuf. John Phillips did a solo album,
The Wolf King of
The group did reunite in the studio early in the
decade to record one album, People Like Us, to help fulfill
its contract; conversely, there were also lawsuits by John Phillips against his
former label over unpaid royalties, which dragged on for years. The most
notable event surrounding the group, however, was the tragic death of Cass
Elliot on August 2, 1974. From that day forward, the notion of any reunion or
revival of the group was little more than the organizing of a "ghost
band," even when John Phillips organized such groups (most notably in 1982
with Doherty, while his actress/singer daughter MacKenzie
and Elaine "Spanky" McFarlane, formerly of Spanky & Our Gang, filled the women's spots) to play
the oldies circuit and recycle the vintage repertory. Much more interesting was
an appearance that Phillips made at New York's Bitter End in 1983, playing solo
-- he had spent most of the 1970s coping with various drug problems, and even
in his prime had never performed solo, and there he was at a leading performing
venue, armed with nothing but an acoustic guitar (and a surprise special guest,
Scott McKenzie). This apparent effort at reactivating Phillips' career was
overlooked by most of the press, however, and quickly forgotten.
The group's appeal, however, has lingered, as
reflected in its induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1997. There
have been multiple reissues of their original four LPs, in widely varying
quality (especially in