Cass Elliot: More than just a dreamer
“I had to create my own market,” Cass Elliot told Russell Harty in 1972. “There’s a prevalent attitude among entertainers that’s like, ‘we’ll all just make the money and go somewhere else.’ I got to the point where I figured if I don’t handle my own responsibility, there wouldn’t be a country.” After the Mamas and the Papas broke up, Elliot made it her mission to contribute to creating an equitable country for all, extending her efforts beyond just her music.
As a solo artist, Elliot used her platform to advocate for social justice. Although she started in theatre, her rise to fame coincided with the 1960s counterculture movement, a time that was deeply intertwined with the civil rights movement. Performing at benefit concerts and supporting civil rights causes established her as one of the leading voices in the social sphere, despite many of her interviews revolving around failed marriages or her appearance.
Although she worked hard to detach herself from the negative comments surrounding her appearance and the moniker she loathed, Elliot had to work twice as hard as her male peers and even some of her female counterparts, purely because she looked different, talked differently, and performed differently. However, she shunned most of the darkness in favour of using her visibility to speak out on women’s rights and the importance of being politically educated.
Elliot’s high intelligence often astounded her male interviewers—you can see it in Harty’s eyes—proving that her sophisticated delivery while tackling many important societal matters often reflected the country’s issues with women’s voices for a while. As Elliot became a central conduit for women’s rights and equality discourse, her remarks were often met with discouraging responses like: “Why did you ditch the Mama Cass name?” to guide her back to more trivial matters.
For this reason and many others, she often felt ostracised, sometimes finding it difficult to resonate with some artists due to her tastes being driven by both her emotional capacity and ability to analyse precisely where musicians are coming from. “If I like it, then later I analyse why I like it,” she told Rolling Stone in 1968. “First has to come the initial liking. I can’t say, really. Like, today, I’d rather hear Jimi Hendrix. Today. The Doors, for instance: I can’t really get into their music. I find it very one-dimensional.”
And while Elliot was often hailed as America’s most defining dreamer, she was constantly fighting a personal battle with nicknames and derogatory descriptions that never really reflected her true character. “[The name ‘Mama Cass’] is a stigma I might not be able to drop right away,” she once explained. “I fought it all my folk-singing life. Before I was even with the Mamas and Papas. I hated it. Everybody’d say, “Hey, mama, what’s happening?” Then came the Mamas and Papas and I was stuck with it.”
Still, amid the oddly unsettling relentlessness of media stir and misogynistic degradations, Elliot rose above it all, revelling in the here and now while having a heart big enough for anyone who suffered along with her. In her song, ‘The California Earthquake’, she sings: “I heard they exploded the underground blast / What they say is gonna happen is gonna happen at last / That’s the way it appears.”
In keeping with this sentiment, Elliot always lived by her own mantra, “If we’re falling into the ocean, we’re falling into the ocean,” demonstrating her ability to take the cards she had been dealt and apply both emotional resilience and critical thinking to navigate life’s challenges with grace and compassion.
She may have earned fame and success through her talent with the Mamas and the Papas, but Elliot’s path was marked by a broader sense of striving for greatness, uplifting everyone who came into her embrace along the way.
