The Mamas & The Papas – Monday Monday

He told them he’d be back in the morning with a song that had universal appeal. They laughed at him.

Denny Doherty would not let it go. They had California Dreamin’ finished and sitting there waiting for a release date, and he kept at John Phillips about what was going to come next. Phillips eventually told him he would go home and come back in the morning with a song that had universal appeal — which is the sort of thing a songwriter says when he has been needled past the point of patience. The rest of the group made the obvious jokes. He came back with a song about how much Mondays drag, and it turned into the only American No.1 any of them ever had.

Keep watching: The Mamas & the Papas – California Dreamin’ · Cass Elliot – Dream a Little Dream of Me

They cut it at Western Recorders on December 16, 1965 with Lou Adler producing, using the Wrecking Crew behind them as Dunhill did on all these records. What makes it work is not the arrangement — it is what four voices do to a melody that sounds simple until you try to sing it. Cass Elliot at the top, Michelle Phillips underneath her, Doherty and Phillips filling the middle, all of it moving in parallel rather than trading lines. Phillips wrote the parts and had the group learn them, which is how a song written overnight ended up sounding worked-over for months.

Dunhill put it out in March 1966. It reached No.1 in the United States and No.3 in Britain, and it did something no record had managed before: it was the first Hot 100 chart-topper by a group with at least two men and two women in it. That sounds like a small distinction until you look at what else was on the charts in 1966, where groups were almost uniformly one gender or the other. In March 1967 it won the Grammy for Best Contemporary Group Performance, and in 2008 it went into the Grammy Hall of Fame.

The only Monday that made it

It was also the first American No.1 with a day of the week in the title, and six decades later it remains the only one with Monday in it. The Bangles got to No.2 with Manic Monday. The Carpenters got to No.2 with Rainy Days and Mondays. Nobody else has managed the top with the worst day of the week in the title, which is a strange little piece of chart history and probably says something about what people want from a Monday.

The group had been the New Journeymen in 1964 before moving to Los Angeles the following year, and their first single had failed to chart at all. Michelle Phillips has said she never had any ambition to be on a stage — she wanted to be John’s wife, and would be in the kitchen making dinner when he called her in to sing a part. That is more or less how the harmonies on these records were assembled: whoever was in the house.

Four years, and one that got away

They played Monterey Pop in June 1967, closing the festival that Phillips and Adler had organized together. The performance was filmed for the documentary and then cut from the finished print, which means the definitive footage of this band at the defining event of their era exists and has essentially never been seen.

They broke up in 1968, four years after the four of them first sang together, after John and Michelle Phillips divorced. Cass Elliot died in London in July 1974. John Phillips died in Los Angeles in March 2001, and Denny Doherty in Ontario in January 2007. Michelle Phillips is the only one left. They went into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1998.

The song holds up because of what it is not. There is no story in it, no character, no argument — just the flat, universal fact that the week starts again whether you are ready or not. Phillips was right about the universal appeal, and he was right about it inside twelve hours, which the others never entirely forgave him for.