157: Cass Elliot, Carnie Wilson and Fat-Shaming in Rock and Pop (Make Me Over, Episode 6)
You Must Remember This
Karina Longworth
4.6 • 15.7K Ratings
🗓️ 25 February 2020
⏱️ 45 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Cass Elliot didn’t die eating a ham sandwich. But the lasting power of that urban legend speaks to a far darker story. Elliot possessed one of the most influential voices of the 1960s. However, while her big break with The Mamas and The Papas and meteoric career changed the LA music scene forever, it also entrapped Elliot in a cycle of fat-shaming, sending her spiraling into catastrophic weight-loss regimens. In this episode, we’ll talk about the music industry’s complicated relationship with weight, how crash dieting likely led to the untimely death of this music legend, and the true legacy of Elliot in pop culture. This episode was written and performed by Lexi Pandell, a writer from Oakland, California. Her work has been published by The Atlantic, the New York Times, WIRED, The New Republic, Condé Nast Traveler, GQ, Playboy and many others.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Jump, jump, jump high up her foot palm ... |
| 0:25.1 | Welcome. |
| 0:26.9 | To another episode of Make Me Over, a special presentation of You Must Remember This. |
| 0:33.5 | I'm your host, Karina Longworth. |
| 0:36.9 | Today's episode is about one of the biggest rock stars of the 1960s. |
| 0:42.2 | That wasn't meant to be a pun, but unfortunately, for over 50 years, much of the discourse |
| 0:48.6 | surrounding Cass Elliott has revolved around the fact that she was physically larger than |
| 0:54.5 | most female celebrities during her lifetime. |
| 0:58.5 | Today's storyteller is Lexi Pandel. |
| 1:02.0 | Lexi has written for the Atlantic, the New York Times, and tons of other publications. |
| 1:08.0 | And she's sitting with me here in the studio in San Francisco, California. |
| 1:12.3 | Lexi, who was Mama Cass? |
| 1:14.8 | Cass Elliott possessed one of the most influential voices of the 1960s. |
| 1:20.1 | As a member of the mamas and the poppers, her stood out among the four-part harmonies |
| 1:25.1 | on the hit single, California Dream Inn. |
| 1:51.1 | Later, she embarked on a solo career. |
| 1:56.4 | She stood out from the other three band members in the mamas and the poppers because of her |
| 2:00.7 | charisma, her powerful and unique voice, and because she was one of the first fat women |
| 2:06.1 | in modern pop music. |
| 2:08.4 | She had one of the biggest and brightest personalities of her generation, too. |
| 2:13.3 | And as a fat woman in an image-obsessed industry, she paved the way for a new kind of celebrity. |
| 2:19.7 | She broke barriers despite how she looked, then became famous because of it. |
... |
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