It Was 50 Years Ago Today: ‘If You Can Believe Your Eyes and Ears’ by The Mamas and the Papas
May 24, 1966
If You Can Believe Your Eyes and Ears by The Mamas and the Papas
#1 on the Billboard 200 album chart, May 21-27, 1966
That the Mamas and the Papas’ 1966 debut album, If You Can Believe Your Eyes and Ears, spent one lone week at the top of the Billboard 200 may not seem an especially notable accomplishment. But one glance at the rest of the year’s #1 albums shows how much of an outlier If You Can Believe actually was. Its week at the top was wedged between five consecutive weeks of Going Places by Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass and eight consecutive weeks of What Now My Love… also by Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass. (Neither of those two releases was even the best-selling album of 1966 — that would be Whipped Cream and Other Delights by, you guessed it, Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass.) Only two other artists had #1 albums earlier that year: SSgt. Barry Sadler, whose Ballads of the Green Berets was more successful as a political symbol than a work of pop artistry, and the Beatles, the only rock act guaranteed to top the album charts.
In the mid ’60s, young pop fans largely preferred to invest in singles, which allowed them to get more bang for their buck than shelling out for riskier LPs. That the Mamas and the Papas managed to sneak in at the top of the albums chart, however briefly, speaks not only to the group’s massive popularity, but also to their universal appeal.
Conservative pop fans could appreciate their richly textured harmonies and solid songcraft, which borrowed from such traditional genres as folk and Tin Pan Alley, while rockers picked up on the countercultural references in John Phillips’ lyrics and their kinship with bands like the Byrds and the Lovin’ Spoonful. This ability to simultaneously court two different audiences can be summed up in the group’s version of the Beatles’ “I Call Your Name,” which alternates between Denny Doherty’s pop-rock flair and Cass Elliot’s vaudeville vamping.
The title If You Can Believe Your Eyes and Ears, coined by producer/manager Lou Adler, played off the disparity between the group’s hippie lifestyle and immaculate vocal arrangements. In Barney Hoskyns’ Waiting for the Sun: A Rock and Roll History of Los Angeles, Adler describes his first impression of the Mamas and the Papas: “They had just come down off about 80 acid trips, they were funky and dirty and grizzly, and yet they sang like absolute angels.” The group’s unconventional looks also set them apart from other pop groups, who usually presented a unified visual front, often down to coordinating outfits and matching haircuts.
In contrast, the Mamas and the Papas seemed cast to look as different from each other as possible, from the tall, serious John Phillips, to the boyish Denny Doherty, to “earth mother” Cass Elliot, to Michelle Phillips’ blonde California cool. This disparate appearance gave the Mamas and the Papas more personality than most vocal groups, which in turn made them more appealing to mainstream audiences who might otherwise shy away from a paean to free love like “Go Where You Wanna Go.”
As idiosyncratic as the Mamas and the Papas might have been to the eyes, however, what really mattered was how well they appealed to the ears. Each singer’s voice was as distinct as his or her appearance, but the brilliance of the group’s arrangements was how well the voices meshed together without ever ceding their own personality. The precision of the group’s vocals carried over into the spotless instrumentation by the legendary session musicians of the Wrecking Crew, which gives even lesser tracks the lush, joyful sound that would come to define the sound known as sunshine pop.
While If You Can Believe is split roughly in half between originals and remakes, it’s the rare pop album of the era where the covers don’t seem slotted in to fill vinyl. The most notable of these is the group’s slowed-down, romantic version of the Bobby Freeman R&B rocker “Do You Wanna Dance,” cradled in gentle strings and Doherty’s starry-eyed vocals.
By the time If You Can Believe became a #1 album, it had already spawned three singles. The first, “Go Where You Wanna Go,” didn’t chart (although a cover by the Fifth Dimension would be that group’s first hit the following year), but the second, “California Dreamin’,” soared into the top five after a slow start, eventually becoming the anthem of the decade’s cultural and musical shift to the West Coast. Its follow-up, “Monday, Monday,” did even better, giving the group its first (and only) #1 hit. If part of the Mamas and the Papas’ charm was the discrepancy between their looks and their sound, then “California Dreamin'” and “Monday, Monday” played at the same duality from a different angle, wrapping downbeat songs about depression and frustration in warm harmonies and catchy melodies.
While the Mamas and the Papas’ individual personalities and styles made for a compelling look and sound, these differences unfortunately also led to troubles between members and difficulty in keeping the group together and flourishing. While the Mamas and the Papas released several more great records after If You Can Believe Your Eyes and Ears, none of their successive albums match their debut in both consistency and in the heady joy that pervades even their gloomier material. If You Believe stands not only as the Mamas and the Papas’ strongest album but also as a reflection of the optimism suffusing the early days of the hippie movement, where a group of young people, no matter how different, could come together in perfect harmony.
It Was 50 Years Ago Today examines a song, album, movie, or book that was #1 on the charts exactly half a century ago.
