Crazy day

This past weekend was glorious. I kept thinking I should post something, but that would mean I'd have to go inside. I didn't go inside until later in the evening when I watched a PBS special on The Mamas and the Papas. I loved them as a young kid. The Mamas and the Papas was the first *stereo* album my older sister got. No more mono!

Today's a crazy day, lots to do and I still don't have anything to post, but I thought I'd put up one of The Mamas and the Papas songs. There are any number I could have put up... I like their Dancing in the Streets better than Martha and the Vandellas or Jagger and Bowie's... but this song has been stuck in my head for the weekend and doesn't seem to be leaving...

Comments

[glen]

I'm not sure if it's the same special, but when my ex was in labor with our daughter, we watched a documentary of the Mamas and Papas in the hospital, passing the many
hours between "mini" contractions and "real" ones...it talked about, mainly, John Phillips' drug addiction and had a rare, spooky piece of footage of them doing "California Dreaming" in some church. Whenever I hear that song now, I think of the day my daughter was born.
Kinda sweet, kinda sad.

[Jennifer]

Glen- John was dead by the time this special was made so I'm guessing your lamblet had been on the planet for awhile. It was old enough though that Denny Doherty was not dead yet. I think he just died last year or the year before.

So many of their songs are kinda sweet, kinda sad, but "California Dreaming" is especially haunting.

[Adorable Girlfriend]

Ah yes, the M and Ps. They were before AG's time. Nevertheless, they put out some good stuff.

Glad you had a nice weekend. It rained here, but AG and UC had lots to do.

[Snag]

I still have my very first album. Assuming my kids haven't destroyed it yet. I'll have to dig it out tonight.

[Idyllopus]

Was the PBS special the same that was on Youtube, which I went and watched after reading your post? I wasn't particularly impressed with it except for the black and white film footage of the "I saw her again" song.

To me there are two "Mamas and the Papas". There's the one I first heard as a kid growing up on the West Coast, which was when they had come out and their songs mingled with the smell of the air out there and the sun and it was all very visceral and part of its time. Then in 1974/75 I remember their songs again playing on the radio a lot for a while and of course they were disbanded, Mama Cass was dead (I remember the day she died and learning of it, how it was hot and July) and I was on the East Coast now and by then the music, though not that old, was all nostalgia and the glittery golden sun that had accompanied their music was gone gone gone, not surviving the 60s for the 70s.

There is a pseudo kind of third "Mamas and the Papas" about the time of their break-up, when Michelle was now wearing caftans and everyone knew the story of Michelle getting booted out and then back in and the affairs etc. Again, I was still a kid and for me that was a part of the souring of the flower child 60s and those golden dreams burned away with the reality of emotional repercussions for certain extravagances.

I was never even really a fan of them, didn't care for their music that much that I ever owned a record. It was radio music to me, something that should come and go. But hearing "California Dreamin'" always takes me back to when it was a hit and "Monday Monday" always takes me back to a graveyard on the Gulf Coast, which is where I was when it last made a radio impression for me in 1975. I thought briefly, "Maybe I should have an album," and then decided, no, it ought to stay radio play, coming and going. For whatever reason, that's how I felt about them, though not about The Beatles or Jimi Hendrix or much of the other music from that era.

[Jennifer]

Idyllopus- I'm not sure if it was the same special. I've seen another before and it was more in-depth than the one I saw on Saturday. The other one had more of the dirt, more of the grim reality. The one I saw on Saturday was a bit more edited and seemed to be selling the compilation

I always loved the M&P's harmonies. I was young when I first heard them and heard them either on the radio or through my siblings' albums. I know by the time I was old enough to think about what I wanted to listen to, they were passe. I still loved the harmonies though and the memories. I also remember being sad when Mama Cass died even though they had been long broken up by that point.

Were you on the West Coast during the Summer of Love? I saw The American Experience episode on that last week... it was quite interesting to watch how it all evolved and turned into something sad in a relatively short period of time.

[blue girl]

I love The Mamas and The Papas. Always have. Only knew the radio hits. Never owned an album. I have downloaded Monday, Monday and California Dreamin', though.

I watched some Rock History documentary on VH1 a few months back and there was a really cool segment about them. They were in New York City(forget the year) and all the hip musicians of that time were also in NYC. The M&P's felt like they needed to get away from the scene -- man. And mellow out, I guess. So, they went to the Bahamas for a few months. When they came back to NYC, all the musicians had left NY for California. It was like the whole world changed in those few months. Doesn't sound that interesting -- me describing it here, but it was a neat little tidbit in the documentary.

[Idyllopus]

When I say West Coast I mean Washington State, in Richland, which to me is West Coast/PNW. I was ten in 1967 but the Hippie awareness had been around for a while. We were California acculturated, though in the middle of the desert and with a peculiar kind of Washington State competition thing going with California, like "It's better here than there, you've got nothing on us." At least that's how I remember it. The radio was all sunlit California music and moonlit Motown, we were skateboarding up and down the baked streets, and the babysitters were reading the pulp Teen magazines which weren't "Oooo it's The Monkeys" but were stories about the San Francisco lifestyle (this was in 1966) and LSD and living low in love not war, which were supposed to be precautionary tales, but were of course flush with a longing and excitement their young readers wanted. There were a lot of people with relatives in California and a sense of a contact high from that. "I was swimming at so-and-so's house and her cousin plays so-and-so on television." (But leave out the part where you threw up cheetohs all over their car, embarrassing yourself beyond belief as so-and-so's cousin was a favorite childhood star.) We were further convinced we were hot because Sharon Tate was from Richland and had been Miss Richland and a babysitter to some of us. Which helps describe some of the psychology that was going on. AsRichland was a very small town this was all magnified and so to me as a child it felt like we were in the same current as California, and to us California was LA and San Francisco and the beach and nothing else. We believed we were hip in the way that kids believe themselves to be hip by reason of living on the same coast as so-and-so, the Pacific binding us together in its uber cool way, and your babysitter's friend's sister going down to San Francisco during the Summer of Love sounded nothing but sensible in your blue Washington state kitchen because the same sun was shining there as in San Francisco and you were just as eager for the war to end now and just as cynical about mass idealism crushing itself with homo sapien needs and greeds in San Francisco but we were also young lemmings with an urge to Be-In together, the walls of the nuclear household having been blown away by that great communal sun king of youth beaming the anti-war tide and psychedlic sound surf onto from here to eternity beaches, Scotty the Good Engineer overseeing our safe arrival as Benevolent Cosmic Explorers.

Then I was transplanted down South and instead of clothing for art and freedom-loving function the kids were wearing Brooks Brothers, no one had heard of Hang Ten, no one had a skateboard, radio play was tamer and very strange with a prefix of W instead of K which was all the change needed to make for a bizarre seeming place. San Francisco and Malibu which had seemed an arm's length away (the Columbia flowing into the Pacific and the Pacific belonging to us all made Malibu Barbie absolutely relevant culturally) were suddenly on the far side of a universe which turned out to have alien hostile pockets. Instead of kids drawing their own Flower Power signs there were "whites only" signs on the drinking fountains and the only people who weren't deeply solidly conservative and racist were my Jewish friends who had family in New York and were always in New York on business, so I switched from hearing all about West Coast and thinking of Haight Ashbury as a natural progression to hearing about Broadway plays and watching the clothes horse That Girl trot about the urban wasteland. Which was how I'd thought of New York, growing up on the West Coast, that it was a gray ode to empire crumbled under the weight of materialism while we on the West Coast were children of the freedom loving sun.

October of 1967 was when The Death of the Hippie ceremony was held in Haight Ashbury. In November I landed Down South. The golden west was done and over with. Disco was bound and determined to follow Kent State, the stars already flowing that way.

[Jennifer]

Idyllopus- I can't EVEN imagine the shock it must have been going from the the West Coast to the South! I've enjoyed the times I've been in the south, but it's such a different world. It must have truly been culture shock. I'm guessing you got over it to some degree? You're still there, right?

[Idyllopus]

I'm in Atlanta. It's one of the places where Southerners move to escape the South. The other place is, of course, New Orleans. But it has troubles.