The Mamas & The Papas

It's easy to get misty eyed when you hear the opening notes of "California Dreamin'" or "Monday, Monday." As this collection can attest, the music of the Mamas & Papas epitomizes the optimism and hazy worldview of the latter half of the '60s. There is also darkness underneath the smiles, as the songs of John Phillips exude more than just the joys of communal living.

As with such contemporary jazz and folk harmonists as the Hi-Los and Peter, Paul & Mary, the pretensions of their elaborate schlock were strictly vocal. Rather than a wall of sound for them to emote over, Lou Adler had the Tycoon of Teen's studio studs construct a latticework for them to wend through, with strings generally left out, mixed down, or reduced to chamber music. Another corn corrective was John Phillips's detached, often acid songwriting--cf. the gentle rake's confession "I Saw Her Again," or this collection's sole serious omission, the cheerful junkie boast "Straight Shooter." Phillips got romantic only as a California dreamer, most tellingly in the late, commercially minor "Twelve Thirty," a benign description of how groovy it felt to leave New York for L.A. circa 1966. Its sense of stoned entitlement on show business's hippie fringe evokes a utopian moment too many '60s memoirists have forgotten or never knew. (Grade - A)