Last week I wrote about Duane Allman’s death and the lore surrounding the band’s subsequent album, Eat a Peach.  Now on to Mama Cass.

Long before I knew who Duane Allman was, I knew that Mama Cass died from choking on a ham sandwich.  I don’t know why I knew about Cass and not Duane, except maybe that my mother would have appreciated the Mamas and the Papas’ harmonies and have had no idea whatsoever of what to do with the Allman Brothers.  As I type this, though, I now recall a Scooby Doo episode with the Mamas and the Papas.  I never dug Scooby Doo that much, except for those celebrity guest stars.  Hello, Laurel and Hardy.  And didn’t Don Knotts and the Apple Dumpling Gang make an appearance?  Am I making this up?  Somebody help me out.

Anyway, word was that Cass choked to death on her sandwich in a London flat.  This word was passed because the doctor who pronounced her dead on the scene reported to The Daily Express, “She appeared to have been eating a ham sandwich and drinking a Coca-Cola while lying down – a very dangerous thing to do.”

Firstly, why is the combo of sandwich and soda dangerous?  The implication is that drinking, say, water would be better if lying down.  Is there a similarity here to the stone-cold fact that you should never mix carbonated beverages with Pop Rocks?”

“This would be especially dangerous,” the doc went on, “for someone like Cass who was overweight and might be prone to having a heart attack.”

So soda and ham while horizontal are particularly dangerous to overweight people, apparently.  Take note.

The doctor neglected to note that the sandwich remained unbitten.  The police report noted that fact, however, and the postmortem found that Cass died of a heart attack brought on by obesity.  Her weight had fluctuated for years (John Phillips initially wouldn’t let her into the Mamas and the Papas because she was fat) and she had lost 80 pounds in the eight months before her death by fasting four days a week.

Four years earlier, after landing a three-week solo debut stand in Vegas at $40,000 a week, she lost 100 of her 300 pounds on a six-month crash diet, leading to throat problems that she treated by drinking milk and cream, which added 50 of those pounds back.  She blew opening night.  Newsweek compared her to the Titanic.  The rest of the shows were canned.

And so she died in 1972 at the age of 32.  In her sleep, nicely enough.  The consensus is Cass’ rollercoaster of weight gain and loss inflicted irreparable damage to her heart.

And, in keeping with the creepy strain of rock n roll death convergences noted in the Allman post: Keith Moon died in the same flat, at the same age, four years later.