The Mamas & the Papas

Look at these lovelies. The Mamas & the Papas, with harmonic voices like the golden sunlight and dry red wine, inviting Bacchus to fornicate with delicate, robust women and men summer after summer. Hear the band's twinkle and stardust guitars and trebly drums, and those lyrics that drop with the sun behind darkening hills.

Mama Cass Elliot could go sufficiently nuts at a moment’s notice, as in the song “Glad to Be Unhappy” when she bleats, “Like a straying baby lamb / With no mama and no papa, / I’m so unhappy, yeah... / But oh so glad.”

And then the song “Monday, Monday” cannot even be touched or talked of properly; it is so spastically a burst of sun melody and of timeless lyrical importance.

It makes me want to inject my arms with serious steroids and bludgeon a considerable hole into every head of every drum I own. The multi-part harmonies are disgustingly soothing to my soul, and lyrically the song is sound: Monday is such a bastard, deceitful, heart-deflating day to have somebody lovely leave you. What could have been good turns out bad and mars the cycle of future weeks. I play leg drums in my car when I freak out to these hotties.