‘Look Through My Window’: The tragic Mamas and The Papas song about divorce
When people talk about bands with dramatic interpersonal relationships, they think of Fleetwood Mac, Oasis, Abba, The White Stripes and a host more. But perhaps the most explosive act in history is The Mamas and Papas, as the hippie quartet harboured some volatile, toxic and sometimes even downright disgusting personal history.
A problematic relationship is one thing when it hides behind a series of universal pop songs designed to be far removed from the group. But putting all that into their music and forcing the other group members to sing it back must be one of the most difficult interpersonal issues to overcome. This culminated for The Mamas and The Papas when Michelle Phillips had to perform a desperate plea addressed directly to her.
The band started with the best intentions; from the outside, it seemed like a sweet gathering of musical mates. Michelle and John Phillips were already married, so they came into the band as a package deal. When they met Denny Doherty and Cass Elliot, the lineup was complete, and their harmonies were tight. But pretty quickly, tension stacked up.
In such close quarters, like tour buses and green rooms, singing songs of love and travelling the world together, it’s no wonder that there is a long history of band members falling in love. Making music together is one of the most intimate acts around, with collaboration breeding a whole new level of closeness. That could have all worked in their favour if the love flowed through its legally bound commitment channels. Instead, the group ended up in a mess of unrequited love, lust, affairs and fallouts.
It was a love quadrangle. Cass Elliot loved Doherty. Doherty and Michelle Phillips were having an affair, while her husband was having an affair with a long list of people, including Mia Farrow and, most terrifyingly, his own daughter Mackenzie Phillips, whom her father allegedly abused. The Mamas and The Papas’ relationships were in tatters.
Darkness seemed to follow the group at every turn, but their music stayed light and bright while the gloom hung over their lives. The band were one of the beacons for the 1960s hippie scenes, soundtracking the Woodstock generation and the Laurel Canyon crowd with tracks like ‘California Dreamin’’ and ‘Twelve-Thirty’. But occasionally, they couldn’t keep their own drama from their lyrical pen. On ‘Look Through My Window’, John Phillips let it slip.
“It’s not that lovers are unkind; She always said there’d come a time when one would leave and one stay behind,” Phillips sings, backed up by his own estranged wife, on this heartbreak song about her. The pair were married in 1962, but less than two years later, they separated. The band may have eventually brought them back together in fleeting moments, but before the group they split for real, with Phillips living in New York, believing his wife to be in California. Until one day when he bumped into her in the city.
The song is a sad take on the end of love, with one party being firmer on the split than the other. In this case, Phillips casts his wife as the sturdy one, borrowing her voice as he sings, “I’m not like you, when love is dead, for me it’s through.” It’s a resolute track to listen to when you finally and absolutely need to try and move on from a love you really don’t want to leave behind.
But as Michelle lends her voice to the track for the band’s 1967 album, two years before the pair had a child, the Phillips’ didn’t clearly didn’t follow their own advice. “I know I should let go,” they sing, but they didn’t divorce officially until 1969, right as the band split.
