The Mamas & the Papas were part of my growing-up years. As teenagers, we knew California Dreamin’, Monday, Monday and Dedicated to the One I Love because they turned up regularly on Radio Malaysia and Radio RAAF Butterworth. Beyond those three songs, the rest of their output was largely a mystery to me. That is why, when a friend passed me a copy of 20 Golden Hits in the 1990s, I was taken aback to find a double album’s worth of material. It said a great deal about how deeply the group had once lodged itself in our everyday lives.
Listening again to 20 Golden Hits reminded me of just how brief and explosive the moment of The Mamas & the Papas really was. For a group that existed for barely three years, their hold on the sound of the mid-1960s remained strong. This compilation, first issued in the early 1970s after they broke up, captured that moment almost in full. With only five studio albums to their name, a collection like this felt definitive.
At the heart of the record is the group’s unique vocal chemistry. John Phillips shaped their songs and harmonies. Michelle Phillips added a cool presence, visually and vocally. Denny Doherty carried many of the leads with a smooth and elastic voice. And then there was Cass Elliot, whose sheer presence and personality gave the group its most recognisable human centre. On these recordings, their voices did not compete so much as complement, stacking emotion in layers.
The songs traced their rise and decline. Early hits like California Dreamin’ and Monday, Monday were fully formed, confident and expansive, while later tracks carried a sense of strain within the members. Creeque Alley turned their own history into pop mythology, name-checking friends and failures. Even the title of Dedicated to the One I Love carried a hint of fragility, as if everyone involved knew how precarious things already were.
California Dreamin’ remains the emotional core of the album. The song that came to define sun-drenched West Coast longing was written during a bitter New York winter, when John and Michelle Phillips were holed up in Greenwich Village and dreaming of escape. The imagery of brown leaves and grey skies is not symbolic so much as literal. It came from what they were living through at the time. The stop at a church, the pretending to pray, the ache for warmth and light, all grew out of that moment. Even the haunting flute solo felt like cold air moving through an empty street, a sound that carried the chill of that season straight into the song.
What made 20 Golden Hits particularly satisfying was its sound. Issued at a time when stereo remastering was taken seriously, it allowed the group’s harmonies to breathe. I could hear how carefully constructed these songs were, even when they presented themselves as effortless.
As a portrait of a band, 20 Golden Hits succeeded because it was more than a convenient collection of hits. It was the sound of a brief, intense California dream, captured at its height and preserved just long enough for us to hear its radiance.
That compact disc, with its handful of solo tracks, hinted at a much larger and more complicated chapter in Cass Elliot’s life after the Mamas & the Papas came apart. When the group fractured in 1968, she emerged both liberated and exposed. For the first time, she was free of the internal politics and personal entanglements that had defined the band, but she was also left to navigate an industry that had never quite known what to do with a woman of her size, intelligence and force of personality.
Cass moved quickly into a solo career, releasing Dream a Little Dream in 1968, followed by Bubblegum, Lemonade &… Something for Mama and Make Your Own Kind of Music. Although commercial success was uneven, she continued to work steadily and refused to disappear quietly.
Her personal life remained turbulent. Deeply affected by the breakdown of the band and by years of being underestimated and judged for her appearance, she worked hard and struggled with health issues. By the early 1970s, the optimism of the “California dream” years had given way to a more demanding reality.
Cass Elliot’s death in 1974 at just 32, closed that chapter and froze her public image in place. In the years since, she has often been remembered as a tragic figure or as a symbol of a lost era. Yet looking at her life after the Mamas & the Papas, what stands out is not failure or decline, but persistence. She kept working, experimenting and asserting her presence in a fast-moving industry. If there is sadness in that story, it lies in how little time she was given to finish becoming who she wanted to be.
Side 1: California dreamin', Dedicated to the one I love, I call your name, Twelve-thirty (young girls are comin' to the canyon), Creeque alley
Side 2: Dancing in the street, For the love of Ivy, Go where you wanna go, My girl, Look through my window
Side 3: Monday Monday, Words of love, Twist and shout, I saw her again last night, Dream a little dream of me
Side 4: People like us, You baby, Got a feelin', Trip stumble and fall, Straight shooter
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