How the most Californian song ever written was born in a New York tenement
Some songs are so tethered to a place that they become utterly inseparable.
When it comes to California, the map point has so many songs tied to its Coastal Redwoods and long-lost landmarks that a playlist could blast out of speakers state-wide, and they likely wouldn’t have to repeat a track for months on end. But out of all of them, none feels as defining as ‘California Dreamin’ by The Mamas and the Papas.
There are plenty of truly iconic tracks sung for and about California. To those living there, they sing about it as a golden beacon of home, as Joni Mitchell lilted “California, I’m coming home / Oh, will you take me as I am?” The Beach Boys saw the women of the state as the pinnacle of beauty, singing “I wish they all could be California girls”. Even in modern music, that yearnful love for the place remains as Lana Del Rey casts it as the setting for so many love songs like ‘California’, ‘Venice Bitch’ and beyond.
While music has many epicentres, there has arguably never been one as mythologised as ‘the Golden State’. Even beyond music, though, that seems to be the case as its energy, its complex tethers to fame, its wild weather and contrasting landscapes all make it appeal to generation after generation of artists. From Eve Babitz chronicling its gossip to the countless Hollywood movies fascinated first and foremost by their own Hollywood home, California looms large in art.
Yet when it comes to ‘California Dreamin’, one of the tracks most associated with the place, the material actually couldn’t have been written in a more opposing place. While now so associated with the sunshine, freshness, and brightness of the West Coast, the track was written in the deep, dark winter over in the East as Michelle and John Phillips were shivering in a New York apartment.
This was 1963; the hippie era had barely even kicked off, and Michelle Phillips was 19. Despite being born and raised in California, suddenly she found herself far from home as a newly wed as John, growing tired of his work in the West, wanted to try a different scene. They were hoping it would be more serious, more artistic, but mostly they found it was just cold and grey.
Michelle, especially, was miserable. They were stuck in a small tenement, and all she could muster the energy to do as the cold set in was to complain. One night, John got bored with it and put her complaint to music, and that’s how ‘California Dreamin’ was born, several years before the band was even formed.
Listening back now, it makes complete sense. While the track has come to be associated with the West Coast, its lyrics are so obviously a singing voice from elsewhere, yearning for the sun. “All the leaves are brown, and the sky is grey,” the track begins, painting a picture directly opposite to the sun of Los Angeles or its other valleys and areas.
Instead, the tune is for exactly what it says in the chorus, “California dreamin’, on such a winter’s day”.
Eventually, though, the Phillips would make the move, and along the way, they’d meet Cass Elliot and Denny Doherty, putting the band together. When the time came to finally record, this old tune came back around as suddenly the couple found themselves in exactly the situation they were dreaming of, back in California, far from the cold and the grey.
