‘I Saw Her Again’: the bizarre love triangle that inspired one of the biggest hits of 1966
Love and romance have always been the prevailing themes of musical expression, going back centuries, but the pop boom of the 20th-century proved that, if anything, adultery, affairs, and spiteful love triangles are equally adept at spurring on musical greatness.
Rumours-era Fleetwood Mac is likely the first group that springs to mind, in that regard; a band whose intertwining relationships, affairs, and drug problems simultaneously inspired their most successful works, and spelt their downfall. However, the likes of Buckingham and Nicks weren’t exactly pioneers in that field.
A decade prior, it was The Mamas and the Papas who paved the way for successful rock and pop outfits who, at the same time, hated each other and couldn’t stop sleeping with each other.
To give as brief a run-down of the complexities of the group’s inter-band relationships: band leader John Phillips married vocalist Michelle Phillips back in 1962, and they formed the Mamas and the Papas together a few years later. Denny Doherty, however, soon engaged in an affair with Michelle Phillips, which was essentially an open secret by the time the group reached their creative peak.
All the while, Cass Elliot was harbouring unrequited and not-so-secret love for Doherty. In other words, the strings that tied The Mamas and the Papas together were as intertwined as they were strained.
While this unideal romantic situation would eventually – inevitably – culminate in the break-up of the group in 1968, and the divorce of John and Michelle Phillips a year later, it did seem to serve The Mamas and the Papas well in terms of songwriting inspiration. One of their most iconic tracks, in fact, was directly inspired by the love triangle and seedy affairs at the heart of the band.
Released in the summer of 1966, ‘I Saw Her Again’ is the kind of mid-1960s sunshine pop that doesn’t automatically scream conflict. It doesn’t take a forensic examination of its lyrics, however, to get an idea of the song’s inspiration: “Don’t know why I’m livin’ a lie, it makes me want to cry, I saw her again last night, and you know that I shouldn’t,” isn’t awash with ambiguity, for instance.
Bizarrely, the song was co-written by Doherty and John Phillips, specifically about Doherty’s affair with John’s wife, in addition to an entirely separate affair Michelle Phillips had – again, not-so-secretly – undertaken with Byrds songwriter Gene Clark. Whether or not John Phillips was aware that the song he was co-writing was about the infidelity of his own wife is up for debate, but he would have had to have been either willfully ignorant or downright dense not to catch on.
Then again, perhaps the single was such an obvious smash hit that Phillips didn’t mind the context of its inspiration. Breaching the top five of the US singles charts in 1966, and narrowly missing out on the top ten in the UK, the affair-tinged single quickly became one of the group’s ultimate defining tracks. In fact, it is rather fitting that the defining song of a band who were derailed by their drug habits and love troubles reflected those same themes, even if hidden behind a wall of sunshine pop.
