In 1972, Cass Elliot and John Denver appeared on Burt Sugarman’s Midnight Special to perform Leaving in on a Jet Plane, but before they started the hit song, both Elliott and Denver told the audience to register to vote since it was an election year.
Vietnam was still raging on at the time.
“My issue is that it’s all very well to sit back and complain, but when it’s your country, you have a responsibility. Cass Elliot
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Cass Elliot, a McGovern supporter, had become much more vocal about her political activism following the 1968 break up of The Mamas & The Papas, as in this interview with Rolling Stone:
I think everybody who has a brain should get involved in politics. Working within. Not criticizing it from the outside. Become an active participant, no matter how feeble you think the effort is. I saw in the Democratic Convention in Chicago that there were more people interested in what I was interested in than I believed possible. It made me want to work. It made me feel my opinion and ideas were not futile, that there would be room in an organized movement of politics for me to voice myself.
Elliott was a strong feminist, and John Denver was a liberal Democrat who fought for causes such as the environment and world hunger.
In 1976, Denver campaigned for his friend Jimmy Carter.
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