25 Albums I Can't Live Without: #12
The Mamas and the Papas, "If You Can Believe Your Eyes and Ears"
Happy Valentine’s Day (and if you’re a real ATLien, you’ll respond with “every day the 14th”)!
I grew up surrounded by oldies. Atlanta had the best oldies station in the world, Fox 97, and my parents listened to it all the time. Fox 97 had a signal that was so strong that I swear you could hear it on the moon, and it had one of the most expansive playlists of music from the ‘50s, ‘60s, and early ‘70s.
One artist that Fox 97 exposed me to that I fell in love with was the Mamas and the Papas. I started listening to them about the same time that I started learning how to sing harmony, and those harmonies and vocal arrangements still blow me away today.
The quartet’s debut album, “If You Can Believe Your Eyes and Ears,” set the template for the rest of the group’s output: an appealing mix of originals and covers with one foot planted in the pop of the day and the other foot in the music of the past. It’s a perfectly produced pop record with no song longer than three and a half minutes.
The album stirred up controversy for an unusual reason: the cover photo featured the group sitting in a bathtub, and the toilet showed up on the right of the shot. That controversy didn’t hurt album sales. (Of course, to this editor and grammar nerd, the apostrophes are a bigger horror.)
Everyone knows the singles from the album, both of them pop masterpieces:
I just recently discovered that “Go Where You Wanna Go” wasn’t a single; the label yanked it and replaced it with “California Dreamin.’”
Other originals on the album shine as well:
The covers only add to the greatness of this album. It takes guts to cover the Beatles…
…and Ben E. King…
…but the Mamas and the Papas make both songs their own. Covers of songs by less iconic artists work well, too.
Whether they tackled their own compositions or cover tunes, the Mamas and the Papas made every song on “If You Can Believe Your Eyes and Ears” their own with one eye on the bourgeoning sounds of psychedelia and the other eye on Vaudeville and old Hollywood. But it’s those harmonies that truly set the artist and the album apart.
Photo credit: CBS Television, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons