Song 302: This week the playlist comes around to Monday, Monday by The Mamas and The Papas, written by John Phillips. 50 years ago, in May of 1966, near the end of my HS freshman year, I took a bus ride to NYC with a bunch of my classmates, on a day trip to the Bronx Zoo. My friends and I had a really fun day at the zoo, but for me, the best and most memorable part of the trip was the music on the radio, which included this cut. Since the Beatles rocked my world a couple of years earlier, I had struggled to justify my enjoyment of music that my religious family believed was of the devil. I would at times righteously resolve to turn my back on rock and roll, but the resolve would quickly crumble when my ears detected some magic sounds from a nearby transistor radio. That May day when I first heard this song, I liked it so much that it totally destroyed any possibility of resistance — if RnR could sound this good, I couldn’t resist, no matter how much the heavenly father, and my earthly one, might want me to do so. I mistakenly thought at first that the background singers at the beginning were singing “Bow down” and it made me wonder whether a devil-worship subtext might lurk in the recording, but if they wanted me to bow down, I would have to do it. My friend Brian had already discussed the idea of forming a band, and not long after the school year ended, my mother bought me an acoustic guitar. I wrote 8 songs in my first week with the instrument, composing a new one every time I learned a new chord. That summer we also did our visit to my father’s Ohio relatives — I mentioned in last week’s post about a Hank Williams track that in my younger years we made the drive every summer, but then in the ‘60s the family decided to only do alternate years, making the trip on the even-numbered ones. During that Ohio visit in the summer of 1966, as usual, we spent one night with my father’s brother’s family, but this time around, their house had changed dramatically. Previously, for as long as I could remember, the family had lived in a finished basement, presumably built by my father’s brother, but when we visited in ’66, the man had constructed a handsome 2-story house on top of that basement — the house that had been envisioned and promised for well over a decade had finally risen. Hanging out with my cousin in his fancy new bedroom, he soon put If You Can Believe Your Eyes and Ears on the stereo. I felt the LP lived up to its name, sounding unbelievably good, and I had no doubt that my cousin felt the same way. The next day, he would give me my first motorcycle ride, making the visit even better. Having become a major MnP fan, I would have loved to own their debut album, but my system for smuggling records into the family home was limited to singles, so I picked up whatever MnP 45s I could manage, including this one, and they spent plenty of time spinning on my little turntable in the basement. One other memory I have of this cut happened near the end of my HS sophomore year, when the disc from the previous spring had become ancient history according to the radio standards of the era, When I heard it playing on a radio at school, the version seemed much shorter than normal, and one of my classmates told me the local station would sometimes do a mini-spin on oldies. Even that short, edited-down model sounded very good to me, and to my ears, this track never lost its magic, so it surprised me decades later to read that the other members of the group had opposed Papa John’s idea of releasing it as a single, and they had not expected it to take off the way it did. To me, Monday, Monday was a perfect 45, and perhaps the perfect 45, from the first time I heard it, 50 years ago.
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