the mamas and the papas — New Episodes & Show Notes

Cass Elliot, Carnie Wilson and Fat-Shaming in Rock and Pop (Make Me Over, Episode 6) / February 24, 2020 by Karina Longworth

Listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts.

Cass Elliot didn’t die eating a ham sandwich. But the lasting power of that urban legend speaks to a far darker story. Elliot possessed one of the most influential voices of the 1960s. However, while her big break with The Mamas and The Papas and meteoric career changed the LA music scene forever, it also entrapped Elliot in a cycle of fat-shaming, sending her spiraling into catastrophic weight-loss regimens. In this episode, we’ll talk about the music industry’s complicated relationship with weight, how crash dieting likely led to the untimely death of this music legend, and the true legacy of Elliot in pop culture.

This episode was written and performed by Lexi Pandell, a writer from Oakland, California. Her work has been published by The Atlantic, The New York Times, WIRED, The New Republic, Condé Nast Traveler, GQ, Playboy, and many others.

SHOW NOTES:

Sources specific to this episode:

Dream a Little Dream of Me by Eddie Fiegel

Go Where You Wanna Go: The Oral History of The Mamas and The Papas by Matthew Greenwald

American Legends: Mama Cass by Charles Rivers Editors

Reducing Bodies: Mass Culture and the Female Figure in Postwar America by Elizabeth Matelski

California Dreamin’ by Michelle Phillips

The Mamas & the Papas: Behind the Music from VH1, 1998

E! True Hollywood Story: Mama Cass Elliot, 1996

“Mama Cass: A Myth, Larger Than Life,” July 31, 1992, Entertainment Weekly

“California Dreamgirl,” December 2007, Vanity Fair

“Sink Along with Mama Cass,” June 1, 1969, Esquire

“What a Way to Lose 110 Pounds!” March 1969, The Ladies Home Journal

“The Untold Story: Cass Elliot’s Daughter On the Crushing Fat-Shaming Her Mother Endured,” May 24, 2019, NextTribe

“Cass Elliot, Pop Singer, Dies; Star of the Mamas and Papas,” July 30, 1974, The New York Times

“How Karen Carpenter's Death Changed the Way We Talk About Anorexia,” May 23, 2016, Time

“Wilson Phillips’s California Dream,” May 17, 1990, Rolling Stone

“Carnie Wilson Says She Was Weighed and Fat-Shamed by Howard Stern: 'I Was Devastated',” November 8, 2017, People

Excerpts from the following television shows and films were used throughout the episode:

The Mamas & the Papas: Behind the Music from VH1, 1998

Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery, 1997

Man of the Year, 2006

The Mike Douglas Show, 1970

E! True Hollywood Story: Mama Cass Elliot, 1996

The Dinah Shore Show, 1972

Different - Cass Elliot featured in Pufnstuf, 1970

The Carol Burnett Show, Season 4, Episode 8, 1970

The Carol Burnett Show, Season 5, Episode 4, 1971

The Red Skelton Show, 1971

The Tonight Show, 1974

The Talk, November 8, 2017

Carnie Wilson: Unstapled, 2010

Cass Elliot, 1967 Photo by Jerry Schatzberg/Getty Images

Music:

The music used in this episode, with the exception of the intro, was sourced from royalty-free music libraries and licensed music collections. The intro includes a clip from the film Casablanca.

Excerpts from the following songs were used throughout the episode:

California Dreamin’ - The Mamas and The Papas
Creeque Alley - The Mamas and The Papas
Home Fires - Preservation Hall, Jenson Navarro
Summer Of Love - Christophe Marie Alai Deschamps , Brisa Roché
Picking Daisies - Dominique Gabriel Joseph Depret
Sometime - Rebecca Ruth Hall
Caribbean Fun - Gerhard Narholz
Nice To Meet You - Silvain Vanot
The Face - Julien Guillaume Yves Bonneau, David Alphonse Pierre Krutten, James Sheppard
Water Rising - Gareth David Dickson
One Emotion - Vasco, Jeremy Noel William Abbott
Snowmen - Kai Engel

Credits:

Make Me Over is a special presentation of You Must Remember This. It was created and directed by Karina Longworth, who also edited the scripts.

This episode was written and performed by Lexi Pandell.

Research and production assistant: Lindsey D. Schoenholtz.

Social media assistant: Brendan Whalen.

Producer: Tomeka Weatherspoon.

Editor: Jared O'Connell.

Audio engineers: Jared O'Connell, Andrea Kristins and Brendan Burns.

Supervising Producer: Josephine Martorana.

Executive Producer: Chris Bannon.

Logo design: Teddy Blanks and Aaron Nestor.

Charles Manson’s Hollywood, Part 1: What We Talk About When We Talk About The Manson Murders / May 26, 2015 by Karina Longworth

Listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts.

This season, You Must Remember This will explore the murders committed in the summer of 1969 by followers of Charles Manson, and the Hollywood music and movie scene surrounding the killings. Throughout the series, we’ll learn how a single sociopath’s thwarted dreams of fame and fortune led to the gruesome events which became the symbolic “end of the sixties.” Future episodes will explore the various celebrities, musicians, movie stars and filmmakers (including Roman Polanski, Sharon Tate, The Beach Boys, Dennis Hopper, Doris Day and more) whose paths crossed with Manson’s in meaningful ways, both leading up to the murders and in their aftermath. Today, we’ll talk about what was going on in the show business capital that made Manson seem like a relatively normal guy. Then we'll lay out the basic facts of who was killed, and how, in order to begin to explain how these unthinkable crimes fit in to the tapestry of one of the most tumultuous times in Hollywood history.

Show Notes:

Welcome to our new season! This series will run a total of 11 weeks (I think; I’m still researching and writing) and will touch on topics as disparate as Doris Day and Michaelangelo Antonioni, Pet Sounds and Pink Flamingos. I became interested in these stories about a year ago, when I somehow found myself reading the obituary of Terry Melcher. Melcher had a really full Hollywood life, which we’ll talk about in one of these episodes, but the headline is that he was born to a teenage Doris Day, and 27 years later he became convinced he was the person the Manson family were really looking for the night they massacred everyone at Sharon Tate’s house. I knew Day and Melcher’s stories were enough to fill at least one episode; as I began researching Melcher’s connection to Manson, many, many other Hollywood stories began to emerge. I realized the story of Charles Manson and the murders he is responsible is really (or, also) the story of Hollywood and its mythology draining of hope, and I wanted to tell that story.

This should probably be obvious given the subject matter, but every single episode of this season is going to contain content and language that will probably be offensive to someone. Apologies in advance.

Bibliography:

The foundational text of this series is Jeff Guinn’s recent biography Manson: The Life and Times of Charles Manson, which I read in long stretches late at night when I was supposed to be on vacation. I couldn't put it down to go to sleep, partially because I would have nightmares every time I tried.

Here are some other books that I read or re-read to prepare myself generally for this season. I’ll make note of additional/specific sources as we go along:

Manson: The Unholy Trail of Charlie and the Family by John Gilmore (This book was previously published as The Garbage People, a much better title, I think)

Waiting For the Sun: A Rock n’ Roll History of Los Angeles by Barney Hoskyns

Easy Riders, Raging Bulls by Peter Biskind

Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood by Mark Harris

Weird Scenes Inside The Canyon: Laurel Canyon, Covert Ops & The Dark Heart Of The Hippie Dream by Dave McGowan

Shadows and Light: Journeys with Outlaws in Revolutionary Hollywood by Gary Kent

Discography:

The Last Ones by Jahzzar

Stormy Moods Orchestra by Apache Tomcat

Scubba Adventure by Apache Tomcat

Alabama Song by The Doors

Alabama Song by Bertolt Brecht

Beware of the Fall by Apache Tomkat