The Mugwumps

In the mid-1960s a fleeting New York ensemble known as the Mugwumps cut a few tracks that pointed toward folk-rock, yet the group is recalled today almost entirely because of the paths its members took once the band dissolved. Cass Elliot and Denny Doherty formed half of the Mamas and the Papas, Zal Yanovsky later played with the Lovin' Spoonful, and Jim Hendricks remained the one participant who never attained comparable recognition. The material eventually surfaced on little-known albums assembled after the fact to profit from the musicians’ rising profiles; those recordings present an uncertain outfit straddling folk and conventional pop. Hints of the folk-rock approach that would emerge later appear most clearly in the male-female vocal blends, although the songs themselves seldom rise above the ordinary and the settings remain too pop-oriented to resemble the later work of either the Mamas and the Papas or the Lovin' Spoonful.