(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
Wed 12 November 2025 20:09, UK
What follows the Summer of Love if not the Winter of Discontent? That’s pretty much how things unfurled in California, anyhow.
In 1967, the Golden State was abuzz with a sense of nirvana. Peace and love were in the air, sending ‘good vibrations’ overseas, which was where the Vietnam War was waged. Meanwhile, for the soldiers, the sweet refrain of The Mamas and The Papas classic ‘California Dreamin” reminded them of home.
The now-classic song seemed to linger over the whole enterprise of the era – the light and darkness, hope and despair. The eternal Summer of Love over in one fabled spot on the West, and the assassinations, poverty, riots and all manner of other unrests everywhere else. But for a while, that sunny spot seemed to be winning.
At this stage, the war effort felt like it could be quelled. The hippies, high on Owsley’s acid, were buoyed by the upswell of art, convinced that they could bring their utopia to fruition. By 1969, that dream was all but dead. The so-called ‘devil wind’ of Santa Anna had swept over the Hollywood hills, the current of searing gusts spiralling crime rates by 75%.
Soon enough, pushing Charles Manson’s demented dream towards its nightmarish conclusion. The Vietnam War only intensified, and the dawning of a new decade seemed to imply that the 1960s had faltered and stepped one toke over the line. Perhaps the days of peace and love were numbered from the start; there weren’t enough syllables in the epithet to sustain it. But whatever it all meant, somehow The Mamas and The Papas still trapped it in amber.
Credits: Far Out / Globe Photos
Now, the era encapsulating ‘California Dreamin” doesn’t just seem to be a song that pines for sunshine, but figuratively for the Summer of Love amid an unending Winter of Discontent that has followed. Like many other masterpieces, its own hidden backstory seems to be filled with a mysticism that prognosticated the fate where the song now fits: a perfect pop ode not just to sunshine long since cast in the shade but a prayer for a deeper sense of summer.
The discontent that spawned it was Michelle Phillips’s. The folk revival was booming in Greenwich Village in 1963, sending out a calling card to all would-be songwriters of a certain hip disposition. John Phillips was one such writer. But as Michelle strode with her husband through the first snow she had ever seen in a shivering New York towards a mouldy motel room, making music didn’t seem all that dreamy after all.
She just wanted to go back home to Los Angeles. The bohos in the East had got it all wrong. The drugs that were helping John get through their plight were only worsening things for her. He would spring up in the middle of the night to write a song and sleep all day, leaving her lost, alone, and fucking freezing.
His latest bright idea – inspired by the likes of Bob Dylan, who was now suddenly singing about his own honest disposition in pop songs – was to write about Michelle’s experience. “All the leaves are brown” seemed to hint at more than autumn. Michelle even helped him out by adding the autobiographical lyric about how she had literally sought central heating rather than God in a church a few days earlier. A rare discontented pop hit began to take shape.
However, it wasn’t until the couple were back in California that they would gain traction. They were simply too Malibu for the basements of Manhattan. Following the formation of The Mamas and The Papas with Cass Elliot and Denny Doherty, the band found themselves in a studio after signing to Dunhill Records. Greenwich had been a failure in all manners but the acquanitances they made.
A pal that they had met on their arduous travels, Barry McGuire, had suggested them to the label. They felt indebted to the folk star who was riding high on his own call for peace with the smash hit ‘Eve of Destruction’. So, they offered him the chance to record California Dreamin”.
During the debut sessions, at one point, the producer Lou Adler wanted to hear the song as the band had rehearsed it before entering the studio with McGuire. They broke into song, and he would later recall, “I actually thought that must have been how George Martin felt after he heard The Beatles.” They had nailed it. McGuire hadn’t been.
With Adler floored, it didn’t take long before John Phillips decided to retract his return favour and scrubbed McGuire, a huge star at the time with the biggest song of the day to his name, from the record.
However, he was never scrubbed entirely from the final version. Somewhere amid the opening bars, his gruff vocals still spectrally float in the mix. Here was a star whose protest anthem had once knocked The Beatles ‘Help!’ from the top of the charts, fading into the background and then out of the mix forevermore.
Alas, a ghost in the mix doesn’t receive any credits, so the explosion of ‘California Dreamin” went with McGuire unnoticed. He would never break the top 40 ever again. By 1971, he would become a born-again Christian. While he would occasionally tour thereafter, his music and ‘Eve of Destruction’ were all but forgotten about by the mainstream.
You don’t have to be the most sentimental soul to see the profound poetry in this little vignette. What we’re left with from ‘California Dreamin” is a longing for home amid a search for fame – only for that fame to finally arrive back in sunny LA thanks to the helping hand of a friend. That friend just so happened to be a rising star who typified the solidarity of the times with an anti-war protest anthem. Still, when the come hither of the industry was flaunted before the new band, favours for friends were suddenly out of fashion. He’d be forgotten about not just by the group he helped to launch but the world at large – reduced to a lingering refrain in the cacophonous chorus of the counterculture movement.
It was a movement that rose to the rarified heights of the Summer of Love thanks to beautiful art like ‘California Dreamin”; before it lost its way and The Mamas and the Papas lost sight of the music too, slipping towards a frosty and fraught winter, succumbing to their own dark demise of drugs, mysterious deaths, and damning incest allegations.
In this regard, few songs typify the times with more fidelity than ‘California Dreamin” which perhaps explains why it’s so damn torturously bittersweet. The tale of Barry McGuire hidden within it, a footnote too good to entirely be forgotten, but only a minor fragment of everything esle the anthem represents.
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