The Mamas & the Papas' recordings were released on Dunhill Records until 1967, when the company was sold and the label became ABC-Dunhill.[2] Around 1973, ABC-Dunhill discarded all multi-track session recordings and mono masters because they were deemed obsolete and too expensive to store.[3] The original recordings of the Mamas & the Papas, and of labelmates such as Three Dog Night, are therefore lost, and it has been necessary to create digital versions from the stereo album masters, often second- or third-generation tapes. This is why the sound quality of Mamas and Papas' reissues does not match the best from the 1960s. In 2012, Sundazed Records located a mono master of If You Can Believe Your Eyes and Ears in the UK and released it on 180-gram vinyl and a limited edition of 500 compact discs.[4] Three years later an extensive search of label archives worldwide turned up all the mono singles and mono LP masters from which the 50th Anniversary 2-CD set was made a year later and reissued for Record Store Day in 2018.[5]
^"Bobby [Roberts] and Lou [Adler], some time earlier, had come to us and begged us to give them a two-year extension on our contract...based on that we agreed to the extension, and we woke up two days later to read in the trades that Dunhill had been sold. Maybe for business reasons, whatever, we could not be told. At any rate we were sold, and it was a real nasty piece of business. Bobby, Lou, and Jay [Lasker] picked up a million apiece – we got nothing. We would one day look back and see that it was the beginning of the end for our recording, really. ABC did not understand us at all". Michelle Phillips, California Dreamin' , pp. 128–129.