The Mamas and the Papas' Peak on Record
Reflections on the group's second album
Back in 2022, when Listening Sessions was still getting off the ground, I wrote about the second album by the Mamas and the Papas. Titled simply the Mamas & the Papas (at one point, it was to be far more provocatively titled), it’s, at least in my opinion, the high point of the group on record. I recently re-listened to my copy of the album (and very much enjoyed doing so), and thought I would re-share my essay on it after giving it a good edit.
I hope you enjoy it and will let me know your thoughts.
With December around the corner, it’s tradition here to turn to the sounds of the season (for those less inclined to Christmas music, not too worry, regular programming will resume here by the end of the year). First up will be some thoughts on the Carpenters’ two seasonal albums and then one other essay (subject matter still up in the air). Prior to that will be a response to the very kind writers here who have nominated me for the Sunshine Blogger Award—expect that by the end of this month.
Until next time, may good listening be with you all!
The Mamas and the Papas’ Peak on Record
By: Robert C. Gilbert
Crashon Screamon All Fall Down. For a time, that was to be the title of the Mamas and the Papas’ second album, just as memorable as If You Can Believe Your Eyes and Ears, the introduction to California’s second-most important—the Beach Boys’ being first—musical deliver of the promise of the Golden State in the late sixties.
Their debut had a cover for the ages. John Phillips, Cass Elliot and Denny Doherty squeezed width-wide in a bathtub with Michelle Phillips lounging length-wise, feet stretched across the laps of her bandmates. To their left was a toilet, a site so controversial in 1966 that a sell sticker was slapped in front of it on later pressings.
If You Can Believe Your Eyes and Ears is three-fourths a great album. Beyond its two hit singles, ‘California Dreamin’’ and ‘Monday, Monday,’ there were ace covers that featured the group’s two supreme voices, Doherty on ‘Do You Wanna Dance’ and ‘Spanish Harlem’ and Elliot on ‘I Call Your Name’ and the closing ‘The In Crowd.’ ‘Straight Shooter,’ with its full-throated declaration of “no more” following “or I won’t come around your door” hit the listener with the defiance underlining their collective harmony and ‘Got a Feelin’’ suggested that John Phillips, the group’s primary songwriter and arranger, had an early pulse on the milieu of the sixties counterculture along with a darkness underneath the meticulousness of the Mamas and the Papas’ merging of backing tracks powered by the cream of California’s crew of session musicians: Larry Knechtel, Joe Osborn and Hal Blaine, with Phillips’ intricate vocal charts.
The photo that was to grace the cover of Crashon Screamon All Fall Down oozed cool. In the foreground were John Phillips on the left chewing a piece of tumbleweed and Doherty on his right nattily attired in a suit and tie with a pocket square. Behind a fence in the centre was Elliot with a feather fan framing her face. To her left wasn’t Michelle Phillips but Jill Gibson.
As the Mamas and the Papas were quickly recording their sophomore album, Michelle Phillips was in the middle of an affair with Gene Clark, by then having left the Byrds. When John Phillips found out, it wasn’t long before his wife was fired. In her place was Gibson, a singer, songwriter, photographer and artist, best-known for her work with long-time boyfriend Jan Berry of Jan & Dean which connected her to Lou Adler and ultimately to the Mamas and the Papas whom Adler produced for his record label, Dunhill.
The recording sessions resumed and Gibson also appeared with the group live. It soon became clear that, for whatever reason, the fit just wasn’t right and Michelle Phillips was back in the group although interestingly enough, Gibson would serve as one of the primary photographers at the Monterey International Pop Festival of June 1967 in which Adler as well as John and Michelle Phillips were driving forces.
With Michelle Phillips back in the group, she recorded over some of Gibson’s contributions for the Mamas and the Papas’ upcoming album but not all of them. When it was released at the end of August, the evocative Crashon Screamon All Fall Down was titled just the Mamas & the Papas. In place of the flapper and dandy-esque outdoor shot was one of the group behind a window, everyone except for Michelle Phillips looking tired, even haggard.
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That vivid weariness is not exactly reflected in the album’s music. If John Phillips was initially reluctant to embrace the pop sounds of the sixties, holding tight to the purity of folk, he was all in by the time of the Mamas & the Papas, the peak of the group on record. Consider ‘I Saw Her Again.’
It’s one of six album tracks that Michelle Phillips is likely on. The others are ‘No Salt on Her Tail,’ ‘Words of Love,’ ‘My Heart Stood Still,’ ‘Dancing in the Street’ and ‘Once Was a Time I Thought’ leaving Gibson likely on ‘Trip, Stumble and Fall,’ ‘Dancing Bear,’ ‘Strange Young Girls,’ ‘I Can’t Wait,’ ‘Even If I Could’ and ‘That Kind of Girl.’
The brief introduction is breathtaking with the Mamas and the Papas layering a bright chord over a bed of strings and Blaine’s shimmering cymbals. What follows builds on that flash of ecstasy. John Phillips’ vocal arrangement is full of counterpoint and double-time runs. Elliot’s voice punches through at the start of the third verse. Doherty has the line, “she’ll never leave me,” all to himself and is answered by a flourish of the strings on the low end. There’s also a beautiful, bright interlude.
‘I Saw Her Again’ sounds like the sunniest day of the year, almost certainly a Saturday. California like in the movies. The lyrics tell of something different. Amidst the sunshine, it’s about Doherty’s affair with Michelle Phillips. He co-wrote it with John Phillips. It’s full of anguish. Guilt too. But also, and most critically, it suggests that some unmeet need is being fulfilled, against the protagonist’s better judgement, in the admission that, “I saw her again last night and you know that I shouldn’t.”
It’s a song like that which gives dimension to the music of the Mamas and the Papas. What they created may be called sunshine pop but it’s more complex than that. Listen to it and hear the slow realization of the dark underbelly of the sixties. That also underlines the group’s history. Beyond the numerous affairs, there was Elliot’s unrequited love for Doherty and John Phillips’ initial refusal to make her a permanent member of the group.
No album in the group’s discography captures these tensions like the Mamas & the Papas. ‘Trip, Stumble & Fall’ reads as a warning of Manson and Altamont. A more literal interpretation, particularly the lyrics in the middle section of the first verse, suggest, as what was often the case in the songs that John Phillips wrote, that the trouble could just be getting tangled up with the wrong type of woman. ‘Strange Young Girls’ is far more specific about the sixties ending up being a bummer.
When thinking about John Phillips, I often think of Brian Wilson too. No one came as close as Wilson to treating the studio like a laboratory where wondrous sounds would emerge from the hours upon hours of toil as Phillips did. Both had demons. Wilson conquered this. Phillips’ were far darker.
As a result, it’s hard to encounter a song like ‘No Salt on Her Tail,’ which opens the Mamas & the Papas and has an uncredited Ray Manzarek on organ, and not cringe a bit. Best to just approach it in the moment and marvel at its lament for a partner destined to fly away as well as the counterpoint between John Phillips and Doherty, and Michelle Philipps and Elliot. ‘That Kind of Girl,’ on the other hand, doesn’t warrant such generosity. It’s a tuneful song that gender-wise is simply off-key.
‘Even If I Could’ is magnificent with an especially memorable coda that includes the opening line of ‘Deck the Hall’ and a structure in which the bar length of the verses vary. It’s a poignant song on the inevitability of karma in a relationship when one partner has hurt the other, and is experiencing the same emotion in turn. ‘I Can’t Wait’ has John Phillips and Elliot gleefully trading barbs anticipating the moment when they both will lower the boom on their unsuspecting partner.
It’s part of the sass and the brass that Elliot brought to the group. It’s there as well on her hip lead on an in-your-face cover of ‘Dancing in the Street.’ Her finest moment on the Mamas & the Papas is ‘Words of Love,’ one of two hits off the album (the other being ‘I Saw Her Again’) with her exaggerated phrasing apropos of the song’s kitschy, Roaring-Twenties feel that also features Knechtel’s roadhouse piano and Michelle Phillips’ unforgettable “no!!!!” in the middle of the first verse.
That’s part of the range that the Mamas and the Papas had. On their second album, it’s also found in the attempt to treat Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart’s ‘My Heart Stood Still’ like ‘Go Where You Wanna Go.’ It doesn’t exactly work, it’s just a little too glib (for comparison, give a listen to Frank Sinatra’s magisterial recording of it from 1963 with Nelson Riddle). Far better is the baroque poetry of ‘Dancing Bear,’ with a woodwind trio of flute, oboe and bassoon and some of John Phillips’ most ambitious lyrics, full of imagery of chimney sweeps and cabin boys, kings and queens, magic ships and a spread of “fruits and candy” and “nuts and cheese.” It’s also a rich solo for Doherty’s warm Maritime voice, pure and knowing. It ends with a spine-tinging round—first Elliot and (likely) Gibson, then Doherty and finally a chorus of John Phillipses that fades out to return to the opening figure by the woodwind trio. I’m not sure the Mamas and the Papas had a finer moment than this.
The closing of the Mamas & the Papas is equally ambitious. ‘Once Was a Time I Thought’ takes all that has been sung in the preceding thirty minutes and offers a benediction. It’s all of a minute and is a jazzy tongue-twister in the style of (Dave) Lambert, (Jon) Hendricks & (Annie) Ross. It begins in cynicism, mentioning that love has been elusive because “the potion of passion / had never been passed to me.” It ends with the cynicism, at least for the moment, dissipated: “but now with you by my side / I find I feel so satisfied / somebody must have lied to me.”
"Dancing Bear" sticks out like a sore thumb from the rest of their work both for its classical music touches and its length. Whereas most of their tunes were ready to play for AM radio, that one is so elaborate it probably could only have been on the FM dial.
But that goes to show what kind of group they were- and the amazing experimentation of John Phillips as an arranger and a songwriter.
This is such a compelling reminder that certain albums aren’t just collections of songs—they’re pressure points where arrangement, tension, and personality collide in ways that can’t be repeated. Your analysis captures that collision beautifully. I especially appreciate how you trace the musical consequences of the group’s real-life fractures, not as trivia, but as forces shaping the very sound we hear.
The Jill Gibson interlude, the exhausted cover photo, the guilt woven inside the sunniest harmonies—your framing brings out something I hadn’t fully felt before: that this album documents the moment where California pop began to curdle at the edges. You’ve given this record a depth that may slip past even longtime fans, and you make the case without sentimentality, just close listening and good judgment. It’s the kind of writing that sends me back to the music with new ears, eager to listen again, and that is the highest compliment I can offer.