“Madness!! Auditions.
Folk & Roll musicians-singers for acting roles in new TV series.
Running parts for 4 insane boys, age 17-21. Want spirited Ben Frank’s-types. Have
courage to work. Must come down for interview.”
We all know
what happened after this ad was published in Variety and The Hollywood
Reporter in September 1965. Mike Nesmith, Micky Dolenz, Peter Tork, and
Davy Jones may have had varying levels of success “coming down” for their
interviews, but interview they did, and one year later, they could all be seen glaring
out from the cover of their debut album and capering on a new hit series The Monkees, which
debuted on this very day in 1966.
Fifty years
later, The Monkees seem to be as popular as ever, and more importantly, have
finally gotten the critical approval they should have been getting
since Micky first crooned “Last Train to
Clarksville”. For many of us, The Monkees also provided an accessible
introduction to the pop world when we were still a little too young for The
Beatles’ complexity, the Stones’ luridness, or The Who’s violence (yet,
somehow, we were ready for “Writing Wrongs”. Go figure). I’ve been a Monkees
freak for thirty years now, and my obsession with the TV/recording/stage/screen
sensations has left me with a wealth of Monkee facts and figures I am about to
bounce off your million-dollar head in a feature I call…
Here we come...
OK, let’s address the big, smelly ape in the room with our very first entry. So, The Monkees did not form in a garage the way most bands do. They were put together by TV show producers for mostly commercial reasons, to cash in on the ongoing phenomenal success of The Beatles (see B), and to attempt to recreate the irreplaceable magic of A Hard Day’s Night and Help! for boob-tube audiences. This does not mean The Monkees weren’t artists. Micky had done his time in a garage band sometimes known as Micky and The One Nighters, and more coincidentally, The Missing Links, and possessed a voice of magnificent range and dramatics. Peter Tork was a hat-passing folkie with an extraordinary knack for picking up instruments (piano, guitar, banjo, bass, French horn, etc.) that made him The Monkees’ own John Entwistle or Brian Jones-style jack-of-all-trades. Davy Jones had been an acclaimed Broadway song-and-dance man, and Mike Nesmith was a composer, performer, and recording artist. The boys brought their individual talents to a project that didn’t necessarily need and really didn’t want them. By asserting their artistry on records that were going to sell millions whether or not Peter picked his banjo on the sessions, he, Micky, Mike, and Davy made the Monkees’ albums better than was necessary. Consequently, efforts such Headquarters; Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn, & Jones, LTD.; and Head became albums as timeless as much of what The Monkees’ organically formed peers were making in the mid-sixties.
The guys’ original compositions also made for some of the
most interesting tracks on those records, and we’re not just talking about those of seasoned
composer Mike Nesmith, whose pure country (“Good Clean Fun”, “Don’t Wait
for Me”), pure rock (“Mary Mary”, “Circle Sky”), country-rock (“Sunny
Girlfriend”, “You Told Me”), and country-psychedelia (“Tapioca Tundra”,
“Auntie’s Municipal Court”) were consistently invigorating. Peter Tork’s “For
Pete’s Sake” was strong and vital enough to serve as the series’ closing theme
during season two, and his “Can You Dig It?” and “Long Title: Do I Have to Do
This All Over Again?” helped bring the ultra-hip Head soundtrack to life. Micky Dolenz’s “Randy Scouse Git” was
strong enough to become the first Monkee-composed single A-side (at least in
England where it was retitled “Alternate Title” and went to #2), and his “Mommy
and Daddy” was a piece of unflinching agit-prop aimed at pre-teen revolutionaries.
Even Davy Jones matured into a composer capable of such fine pieces as “Dream
World” and the tough-as-shit “You and I”. Had The Monkees never
expressed themselves as artists on songs such as these, it is likely I would
not be writing about them right now and you wouldn’t care to read about them.
Not only did John Lennon supposedly tell Mike Nesmith that
he never missed their show and considered them to be the best comedy team since
The Marx Brothers, he also befriended Mike, famously inviting him to rub elbows
with fellow luminaries such as Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Marianne Faithfull,
and Donovan at the recording session for the orchestral crescendo on “A Day in
the Life”. Paul McCartney struck up a similar comradeship with Micky, who
writes delightfully of getting stoned and zoning out to a TV tuned to static
with the Fab one in his autobiography I’m
a Believer. Micky was so taken with his encounter that he name-checked “the four kings of EMI” in “Randy Scouse Git”. A couple of tracks earlier on Headquarters, he name-checked Ringo on
“No Time” in homage to The Beatles’ version of “Honey Don’t” (The Monkees’ discography also abounds in less explicit references to the four kings: Boyce and Hart were inspired to write “Last Train to Clarksville” after hearing the fade out of “Paperback Writer” on the radio; the baroque arrangement of “I Wanna Be Free” was clearly cribbed from that of “Yesterday”; the “Pleasant Valley Sunday” riff is a variation on that of “I Want to to Tell You”; Davy’s “The Poster” was inspired by the circus themes of “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite”; the false count in to “You Told Me” winks at the one that begins “Taxman”, etc.). In an unprecedented move, The Beatles gave Micky permission to use their “Goodmorning, Goodmorning” in “Mijacogeo”, the Monkees series finale he wrote and directed. Meanwhile, Peter one-upped
both Mike and Micky by actually playing on a session with a Beatle: when George
recorded the soundtrack for the goofy “art” movie Wonderwall in 1968, he called on the Goofy One to contribute his
prodigious banjo talents. Who’s goofy now?
Embodying the role was Henry
Corden, a character actor with a resume that could choke the Monkeemobile’s exhaust pipe. Corden had been a TV staple since he turned up as a deliveryman
on The Life of Riley in 1949. In the fifties he appeared on such shows as The Adventures of Superman, My Little Margie, The Count of Monte Cristo, Soldiers of Fortune, Perry Mason, and Dragnet. In the sixties, he was
even more of a living room presence, showing up on Peter Gunn, 77 Sunset
Strip, Wagon Train, The Twilight Zone, The Untouchables, Jonny Quest, I Dream of Jeannie, Mister Ed, and Gilligan’s Island. He also flaunted
his vocal talents in a number of roles on The Flintstones, which sparked a
major sideline for the actor in cartoons. In fact, with 1977’s A Flintstone
Christmas, Corden actually took over the coveted role of Fred Flintstone from
the recently deceased Alan Reed, who’d originated the character on the sixties
series. Fred was a big feather in Henry Corden’s cap, but Monkees fans will
always remember him best as rotten Mr. Babbit… and, to a lesser extent, the slightly less-rotten hotel manager Mr. Blauner (see R) in the post-Babbit episode
“The Wild Monkees”.
As has been the case with The Threetles (Paul, George,
and Ringo without John) or The Two (Pete and Roger without John and Keith), The
Monkees have not always been a foursome. In fact, for the majority of their
career, they were not really a foursome. Even on their only true “we’re a
band!” record, Headquarters, Chip
Douglas, Jerry Yester, and John London regularly contributed bass tracks that
swelled their ranks to a quintet. On their first two albums, it was rare to
have more than one Monkee on a single track. However, the band was always seen
as a foursome... at least for their first couple of years.
The first to jump ship was Peter, when he bought himself out
of his contract in late 1968 after shooting the last-gasp TV special 33⅓ Revolutions Per Monkee. When the next album, Instant Replay, was released less than two months later, Peter was
absent from the album cover, though his guitar and Danelectro bass work were
actually buried within Mike’s wall-of-sound production of an old track from the
Monkees-’66 archives, “I Won’t Be the Same Without Her”.
After the next album and a notoriously odd tour with a
lounge R&B band called Sam & The Goodtimers (see T), The Monkees shed another member, reducing the act to a duo of Micky and Davy. Without the two
most dominant musical forces in the band, The Monkees made their final album as
they made their first two: leaving the music completely in the hands of a
producer (tin-pan alley hit-maker Jeff Barry). Consequently, Changes was the most bubblegum and least
experimental record the guys ever made. It is telling that the band’s most bubblegum
and least experimental member, Davy, basically disowned the record, though it
had Micky’s relatively un-bubblegum and experimental C&W ramble “Midnight
Train” going for it. After that came a flop Micky/Davy single, “Do It in the
Name of Love” and the end of The Monkees’ classic years, but not the permanent end
of The Monkees. 1986 saw a major twentieth-anniversary Monkees revival (see P) that found the guys back on the road
playing to sell-out crowds and releasing their first top-twenty hit since “D.W.
Washburn”. But not only was serial hold-out Mike Nesmith not on that record,
Davy was missing too because of his bitterness over how Arista records had
handled his seventies solo career when the label was still called Bell Records
(see X). This left vocalist Micky
and guitarist Peter as the only Monkees on “That Was Then, This Is Now”. Davy
pointedly left the stage whenever his band mates performed the hit on stage.
In the years to come, The Monkees almost always worked as
less-than-four, with the sole exception being 1996’s Justus album, the only Monkees LP cut without any outside input.
However, even its companion tour was a case of the missing Monkee as Mike fled
after receiving some bad notices from the British press. Sadly, Davy’s death in
2012 guaranteed that all future Monkees ventures would always lack involvement
from the four individuals… which, in a strange and sad way, is kind of true to
how the guys made music for most of their existence.
In the years to follow, serious reevaluation of The Monkees
ceased to be an embarrassment. One Monkees historian, Andrew Sandoval, actually
really loved the band and wrote the first truly great and exhaustive Monkees
book: 2005’s The Monkees: The Day-by-Day
Story of the 60s TV Pop Sensation. Lefcowitz subsequently fattened out The Monkees Tale a bit more (though
seemed even less impressed by the band than he was in ’85) and republished it
as Monkee Business in 2013.
Meanwhile, other serious studies of The Monkees continue to pop up in books
such as Rosanne Welch’s Why the Monkees Matter: Teenagers, Television and American Pop Culture and Peter Mills’s upcoming The Monkees, Head, and the 60s or sites such as The Monkees Live
Almanac and Monkees.net, which counts the original Monkee scholar, Eric
Lefcowitz, among its contributors. Most of these print and online publications were valuable resources in the creation of this very feature you’re reading right now!
The Monkees can count making hippies family friendly among their myriad accomplishments. Fortunately, the older generation was pretty clueless, otherwise they might have understood why the guys’ eyes were so red, why they kept giggling for no reason in “The Monkee’s Paw”, and why the Frodis alien in “Mijacogeo” mostly consisted of a plant that mellowed out the villains by emitting plumes of fragrant smoke. Yes, The Monkees were big potheads (even sweet little Davy!), and Frodis was their code name for the demon weed. According to Dolenz, he derived the word from the name of everyone's favorite weed-smoking hobbit, Frodo Baggins, a favorite mascot of the hippie culture. In fact, Mick could sometimes be seen sporting a "Frodo Lives" badge.
As is obvious from the episodes mentioned above, the guys
did not keep their pot consumption to off-business hours (not that The Monkees
had many of those), and even had a refrigerated room dubbed “The Black Box” installed
on set for them to puff their brains out between takes while filming their
show. Despite how seemingly blatantly The Monkees flaunted their indulgences—their
one and only movie was called Head
for the love of crimony!— they were strictly instructed to never let on about
their drug use in interviews, and would cheekily taunt over-inquisitive
journalists by claiming they were hooked on Ex-Lax.
With fame comes parody, and few bands were as famous as The
Monkees in the sixties. However, there wasn’t a great Monkees parody of note
until 1992, the year that young people across the U.S. adapted disaffected
poses and swathed themselves (OK, fine, ourselves)
in unflattering baggy sweatshirts, flannels, ripped jeans, and combat boots.
Comedian Ben Stiller recognized the faddishness of grunge and spoofed it
by imagining four Seattle twangers living together in a laugh-track-haunted flat
and enjoying surreal adventures, trying to impress a record exec, joining arms
to do “the walk,” and getting starry eyed at the sight of cute grunge chick Goo
(Jeanne Tripplehorn channeling Kim Gordon). Hey, hey… Jonsie (Stiller), Dolly
(Andy Dick), Stone (Bob Odenkirk), and Tork (guest star Rob Morrow) are The Grungies, a spot-on parody of Gen-X
bullshit and The Monkees that appeared on the short-lived, fondly remembered
sketch comedy series The Ben Stiller Show. Adding extra
legitimacy to an already hilarious sketch, record exec Josh Goldsilver is none
other than a smarm-oozing Micky Dolenz.
Boyce & Hart may be best known as Monkee handlers, but
they had a prolific career outside of that multi-media project. In their
pre-Monkees days they were responsible for The Goodies’ “Dum Dum Ditty” (best
known by The Shangri-La’s later version) and Jay and the Americans’ “Come a
Little Bit Closer” (co-written with Wes Farrell and the song that caught Don Kirshner’s golden ear). Bobby also co-wrote Little
Anthony’s gut-wrenching smash “Hurts So Bad” with Teddy Randazzo and Bobby
Weinstein. And before The Monkees took a crack at “Steppin’ Stone”, Paul Revere
and the Raiders had first dibs on it with a slightly less renowned version on
their Midnight Ride LP.
Boyce & Hart also had a pop career of their own,
starting as the frontmen for The Candy Store Prophets, whose Gerry McGee
(guitar), Larry Taylor (bass), and Billy Lewis (drums) played on their share of
Monkees sessions (especially ones for the first album). They also had a
well-deserved top-ten hit under their own names in 1968 with the exhilarating
“I Wonder What She’s Doing Tonight”.
Five years after the official dissolution of The Monkees,
the duo who saw it out the longest became a foursome again when Micky and Davy
recorded and toured with Tommy and Bobby as Dolenz, Jones, Boyce, & Hart.
Ironically, their only album was not exclusively stacked to the gills with Boyce
& Hart originals, although it did contain two landmark Dolenz/Jones
originals.
At the end of the decade, Tommy Boyce reemerged with his own
group, The Tommy Band. Bobby also recorded his solo debut, titled, rather
appropriately, The First Bobby Hart Solo
Album. In the mid-eighties both composers reunited on stage to tap into the
renewed fascination with The Monkees (see P).
Sadly, Tommy Boyce also suffered from physical and mental health issues and
took his own life in 1994.
Bobby Hart, however, lived to tell his tale in last year’s Psychedelic Bubblegum: Boyce & Hart, The
Monkees, and Turning Mayhem into Miracles, and naturally, when Micky,
Peter, and Mike reunited earlier this year to record their first album in
twenty years, Good Times!, they were
compelled to finish off “Whatever’s Right”, a Boyce & Hart tune left
unfinished since 1966. After all, it wouldn’t be a Monkees album without at
least one Boyce & Hart tune.
Lugging around equipment is the bane of the musician’s
existence (I once regretfully passed on a groovy ’68 Volkswagen Beetle because
I couldn’t fit my bass and amp into its tiny trunk). Fortunately for The
Monkees, they had a cushy ride they dubbed the Monkeemobile to transport their
Gretsches to gigs. This was key since a band that had so much trouble getting
auditions and record deals could hardly afford roadies. Don’t ask how they were
able to spring for a custom GTO though. That will have to remain yet another
mystery of Monkeeland.
Less mysterious is the history of the Monkeemobile. It is
the handiwork of Dean Jeffries, the
Hollywood stunt coordinator and car customizer tasked with making wheels for
Mike, Micky, Davy, and Peter. Jeffries’s buddy Jim Wangers was doing promo with
Pontiac at the time and figured there was no better way to get his product in
front of car buyers than to feature it every week on a network sitcom. He
furnished Jeffries with a couple of 1966 GTO convertibles, and the dude got to
work dropping in a bench where the trunk had been, extending the tail lights,
installing a parachute on the rear, and doing other modifications that
transformed these vehicles into Monkeemobiles. As a slick bonus, the real Mike,
Micky, Davy, and Peter got their own GTOs.
The Monkeemobile was rarely a major player in the series,
though Micky could sometimes be seen working on it. However it was always group
leader Mike who got to drive it…perhaps not the wisest decision since Mike was
known to rocket his own GTO down the Hollywood Freeway at speeds up to 125mph. The
car only really got to shine in season two’s “The Monkees Race Again” when it
was pitted against the Klutzmobile, piloted by a couple of Hogan’s Heroes
rejects.
Shortly after that episode aired, The Monkees was no more,
and the Monkeemobile ended up in the possession of George Barris, who had his
own impressive automotive pedigree as the designer of the Batmobile and the
Munster Coach. In 2008, Barris auctioned off the Monkeemobile to a private
owner who is no doubt driving it to auditions and gigs all over Michigan.
To be clear and fair, Kirshner wasn’t really a villain, and
he wasn’t even a bad guy. As the music supervisor on the whole “Monkees” project,
he actually did a very good job bringing in Tin Pan Alley hit makers to supply
the series and its accompanying soundtrack discs with catchy pop tunes. Kirshner
even helped The Monkees get a major hit before the series went on the air.
Kirshner’s problem was that he lacked flexibility and refused to recognize the
talent or ambitions of the young men playing a phony band on TV. It would be
one thing if Mike, Micky, Davy, and Peter lacked a feel for pop music or
experience in the business, but they really were fine musicians, performers,
singers, and composers. When Mike understandably reacted against the
critical drubbing he and his cohorts were receiving for not functioning as a
“real” band (a pretty unfair expectation of the press in any event), he
demanded that he and the other guys play on their records (a businessman as
well as an artist, Mike also surely realized the money-making potential of getting
more of his own compositions on Monkees vinyl). Kirshner, an old-school record
industry bigwig, saw this as insubordination and lack of gratitude from a
sitcom actor.
Had this conflict occurred a couple of years earlier, the
trophy surely would have gone to Kirshner, but 1967 was a turning point that
found young people, particularly young musicians, being taken more seriously.
Plus, "The Monkees” was a hit and the project’s producers were afraid Mike would
make good on his threat to walk if he didn’t get his way. Amazingly, these four
guys who barely had any experience playing together would be allowed to cut
their own records, and the first would be a single B-side slated for early ’67:
Mike’s “The Girl I Knew Somewhere”.
Kirshner had other plans and issued back-to-back songs by proven hit makers
Neil Diamond and Jeff Barry recorded after coaxing the rather
counterrevolutionary Davy Jones into the studio. This act of insubordination earned Kirshner the heave-ho, and The
Monkees were now in charge of their own recordings.
The following year, Kirshner found a band more likely to
follow orders: cartoon characters The Archies. Their #1 smash “Sugar Sugar”
must have tasted like sweet victory to Kirshner since it far outsold any
Monkees single of ’69 and because he claimed he’d pitched it to The Monkees,
who rejected it (Jeff Barry says this is a myth). Kirshner continued to enjoy
success as the host of Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert in the seventies, though
his bitter feelings about getting canned from the “Monkees” seemed to last
until his death in 2011.
Like any hit-racking band or landscape-changing TV series, that thing called “The Monkees” left paw prints running up and down the pop culture terrain. The Monkees may not have been TV’s first pop singers (Hiya, Ricky Nelson! How you enjoying your chart success, Shelley Fabares? Umm, good for you, Paul Peterson), but they were its first band of any note, and it would be wrong to fail to recognize their influence on The Partridge Family, The Heights, Josie and the Pussycats, The Banana Splits, and of course, The Archies (see K), even if, as far as legacies go, it’s not the most dignified one. More agreeably, actor Walter Koenig has claimed that the popularity of Davy Jones inspired Gene Roddenberry to add his own diminutive mop-top, Mr. Chekov, to the Star Trek crew. Nevertheless, The Monkees were always strongest on record, and the future artists who grew up digging their music is impressive: The Bangles, Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers, The Go Gos, R.E.M., XTC, Guided by Voices, Nirvana, U2, Weezer, among scores of others. Several of these artists even contributed material to Good Times!
The Monkees’ legacy
can also be felt in the bands who chose to play their music. The songs they
made famous have been covered by Robert Wyatt, The Sex Pistols (can we agree
they were playing tribute to The Monkees and not Paul Revere and the Raiders...especially since Malcolm McLaren's assembling of The Pistols was so similar to the way Rafelson and Schneider put together The Monkees?),
The Four Tops, Bong Water, The Violent Femmes, The Specials, U2, They Might Be
Giants, The Replacements, The Church, Magnapop, The Wedding Present, and many,
many more. Samples of Monkees music
have driven records by Run DMC, De La Soul, and Del the Funky Homosapien. And during an era
many agree to be a new golden age of television, their songs have returned to
the small screen on some of the very, very best series of the twenty-first
century. On Mad Men, Don Draper pondered his ever out-of-control life to the
swirling strains of “Porpoise Song” (and earlier that season, a character with the last name Torkelson was introduced. Coincidence?). On Breaking Bad, Walter White cooked up
a batch of meth to the pounding “Goin’ Down”. Now that’s a legacy.
When he ceased to find a place on The Monkees, Landis
never exactly had to go begging for work, as he turned up on Hawaii Five-O, McMillan & Wife, Columbo, and Police Woman, as well as features such
as Young Frankenstein, Body Double, Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, and (a-hem)
Candy Stripe Nurses. He still looks
back fondly on his Monkees days, recalling a particular rapport with fellow
UK vaudevillian Davy Jones. Monte Landis hasn’t appeared on TV since showing up on the short-lived Golden Girls spin-off The Golden Palace back in 1992, but at age 83, the devil is still very
much with us.
Head may have
flopped upon release, but the edge that Nicholson brought to the project helped
it become an enduring cult classic for Monkees freaks and people who think they
suck alike. Nicholson’s anarchic wit and sardonic tone, best embodied by his corrosive
“Ditty Diego”, is a constant presence in the film. Nesmith, for one, has
claimed the film was more Nicholson’s vision than that of
co-writer/director/producer Rafelson, and had such lingering fond feelings that he dedicated his biggest solo hit, “Joanne”, to Nicholson and his girlfriend Mimi Machu (the woman who makes out with all four Monkees at the beginning of Head). Tork, whose relationship with Rafelson
was apparently pretty sour by this point, added that Nicholson’s presence made
the filming bearable.
With all the material recorded for the first two Monkees
albums alone, twice as many LPs could have been assembled. Several of these
outtakes (“All the Kings Horses”, early versions of “You Just May Be the One”,
“I Wanna Be Free”, “Words”, “Valleri”, and “I’ll Be Back Upon My Feet”) ended
up on the series’ first season to keep the soundtracks from being overly
reliant on the mere two-dozen songs that had been properly released thus far. With
a sole producer (Chip Douglas) at the helm for Headquarters and Pisces,
Aquarius, Capricorn, & Jones, LTD., the sessions were more focused and
the outtakes far less plentiful, but the glut resumed as soon as Mike, Micky,
Davy, and Peter began producing their own sessions after Pisces. So The Birds, The
Bees, & The Monkees became another project with an excess of material. There
were so many recordings at music supervisor Lester Sill’s disposal that he
assembled the seventh Monkees record (Instant
Replay) as a veritable outtakes compilation, mingling some of the earliest
recordings (“Tear Drop City”, “I Won’t Be the Same without Her”) with some of
the latest.
Decades after the whole operation had folded, Rhino Records
took over and started dusting off the plethora of tracks that were denied
release during their own time. The first compilation, Missing Links, appeared in 1987, and while it was not consistent
enough to crown a “revelation”, there were some truly wonderful tracks,
particularly the intended single “All of Your Toys”, Nesmith’s wistful Birds remnant “Carlisle Wheeling”, and
his earlier production of Goffin & King’s “I Don’t Think You Know Me”. Such
pieces have inspired endless fan debates about how records such as More of the Monkees, Birds, and Instant Replay could have been improved with keener track
selection. Swap out “The Day We Fall in Love” and swap in “Of You”… now there’s
a More of The Monkees that would
never make me want to slap the needle off the vinyl!
That first Missing
Links disc was just the beginning, as Rhino rolled out two more volumes,
supplemented the Listen to the Band
box set with several exclusive tracks, and filled out its CD reissues of the
proper albums with leftovers. Astoundingly, there was still enough material to
pad out those albums even further for Rhino’s ongoing series of Super Deluxe
handmade box sets. I still suspect that there are a few more versions of “I
Don’t Think You Know Me” and “Prithee” somewhere in the can.
Quotable catchphrases are natural byproducts of classic TV
series. The Monkees was no different. Who among us has not retorted “I am
standing!” after being commanded to stand up? Who has not sneered “Don’t do
that!” after being the victim of a doing we have not wanted done? Who has not
shrieked “Take that, Wizard Glick!” before smacking the nose of someone named
Wizard Glick? Who has not trumpeted “Frodis!” when requesting a second helping
of marijuana? Our most socially conscious brethren have clearly wailed
“Save the Texas Prairie Chicken!” from the sidelines of protest marches through
the ages. Just this morning you noted the absence of a loved one by breathlessly gasping “He’s gone!” and “Isn’t that dumb?” would be an appropriate thing to say in nearly a half dozen possible scenarios, which is why you’ve said it. Such exclamations reveal how thoroughly the Monkees influence has
crept into each and every life of every man, woman, child, and prairie chicken
on Earth.
Even as The Monkees took television hostage, Rafelson and
Schneider still intended to ride that success into cinemas. Unfortunately,
their first feature production, Head
starring The Monkees and co-written and directed by Rafelson, was a flop of
monumental proportions. Their follow up, Easy
Rider (which they hoped to promote as “From the Guys who Gave You Head”
before realizing the joke would fall flat since no one actually saw Head), was not. Following that film’s
success, Rafelson and Schneider welcomed Screen Gems producer Steve Blauner, who’d worked closely with The Monkees, into the fold,
and Raybert became BBS Productions.
Of course, Rafelson and Schneider would not be best known
for Five Easy Pieces or The Last Picture Show. They would always
be known as the guys who created one of the hugest and longest-lasting pop
sensations of the sixties. Not that Bob and Bert always had an easy relationship with that
legacy or the guys. Schneider was unable to comprehend why his partner would
want to make a feature film starring The Monkees. Peter Tork has enduring bitter
feelings about Rafelson, which resurfaced when the Criterion Collection
released a BBS box set in 2010 and public discussion turned to Head, which Peter criticized as a
product of Rafelson’s cynicism.Jack Nicholson claimed that Rafelson specifically set out to end The Monkees with Head.
Yet the movie is largely sympathetic to The Monkees’ plight,
showing that they were a killer live band in spite of accusations that they
couldn’t play their own instruments (see I)
and the unfairness of the series’ depiction of Peter as “the dummy.” Fifty years down the road, Head stands as a surprisingly
humane—and audaciously inventive—portrait of Monkeemania. With the end of BBS’s
seventies success, Rafelson and Schneider both backed off of film considerably.
Bert Schneider died at the age of 78 in 2011. According to Andrew Sandoval, Schneider professed his love for the group and project he co-created shortly before his death.
Mr. Schneider’s wise and calming presence was supposedly a
substitute for the manager character who didn’t sit well with test audiences
(see C). Despite Mr. Schneider’s
multitudinous admirable qualities, one must wonder how Bert Schneider (see R) felt about being the namesake of a
big lump of wood. And despite being the only guy in the pad who was working,
you could not count on Mr. Schneider to cough up a lousy buck-eighty to pay for
an important telegram. Nobody’s perfect.
That initial backlash was actually unfair from the get go,
since The Monkees played as a live band from almost the very beginning of the
project’s existence. Less than three months after The Monkees debuted, The
Monkees were on tour across the U.S.
as players of guitars, bass, drums, keyboards, and maracas (see I). They walloped audiences with pure
Monkee performances of hits such as “Last Train to Clarksville”, “I’m a
Believer”, and “Steppin’ Stone”, LP cuts such as “Mary Mary”, “I Wanna Be
Free”, and “Sweet Young Thing”, and oddities such as “She’s So Far Out She’s
In”, “If I Could Shimmy Like My Sister Kate”, and “Prithee” (see O). They may not have been the most
polished band in the world, but they had plenty of garage band spirit. The
Candy Store Profits (see H) provided
a bit of professional polish as the backing band during solo spots in which
Peter played wicked banjo on “Cripple Creek”, Mike freaked out on the maracas
while howling Willie Dixon’s “You Can’t Judge a Book By the Cover”, Davy did
his Broadway thing on “Gonna Build Me a Mountain”, and Micky did his epic James
Brown impersonation while shrieking Ray Charles’s “I Got a Woman”. Key moments
from the tour were incorporated into Bob Rafelson’s documentary-like “Monkees
on Tour”, one of the most compelling and unique episodes of The Monkees.
After completing their most complete artistic statement, Headquarters, The Monkees were back on
tour with better material and more confidence than ever. Infamously, Jimi
Hendrix opened for several shows on the tour before storming off in frustration
over a teenybopper audience not quite ready for his Stratocaster humping. As
for The Monkees’ portion of the tour, some of it would be captured on the first
official live Monkees album released twenty years after the fact: Live 1967.
In the fall of 1968, The Monkees would traverse other
corners of the world, visiting Australia and Japan with more recent material
such as “Salesman”, “Daydream Believer”, “D.W. Washburn”, and “Cuddly Toy” in
the set list. This would be their final tour with the now bearded Peter Tork,
but not their final one of the sixties. In 1969, Mike, Micky, and Davy resumed
as the front men of Sam & The Goodtimers, a lounge R&B band who backed them
on an extensive tour from March through December. Critics were baffled by the
combination of Monkees pop and Goodtimers soul. They apparently hadn’t been
paying close attention to a band that often traveled an unconventional road. Don’t
even get me started on the 1987 tour with Weird Al.
Wait a minute. No… that’s wrong. Actually, New Monkees
was a colossal failure, croaking after just thirteen episodes (22 had been
planned for season one). Its accompanying album sold about three copies. But
everyone loved The Monkees in ’87. What the hell went wrong? Well, first of
all, there were no actual Monkees in New Monkees. The Powers That Be
seemed to underestimate the fact that wacky adventures were just a small part
of why everyone had become so re-enamored with the original Monkees. We loved the
guys—the real guys. Bringing the original foursome together was a
lightning-in-a-bottle moment for Bob Rafelson and Bert Schneider, and it was a
bit presumptuous to assume that kind of thing could be done twice, even if old
Raybert partner Steve Blauner (see R)
helped produce the new project.
I personally think another factor in the failure of The New
Monkees was the fact that, for many of us, The Old Monkees were a welcome
antidote to the off-putting synthetic atmosphere of eighties pop. After being
force fed a steady diet of Starship, White Snake, Bon Jovi, Debbie Gibson, and
Phil Collins’s Genesis, those old, organic productions by Mike Nesmith, Boyce
& Hart, Chip Douglas, and the rest sounded wonderfully, invitingly real… a
delightful irony considering The Monkees’ reputation for being ersatz. Instead
of trying to tap into that sound, The New Monkees sounded as synthetic and
contrived as Mr. Mister. After suffering through the pilot episode and failing
to feel that old Monkee magic, we tuned out, put Headquarters on the turntable, flicked on the VHS copies of
“Mijacogeo” we taped off Nick-at-Nite, and never looked back.
Valerie Kairys has come to be known as the “Monkees Girl”
because of her starring role in “A La Mode” and her appearances as an extra in
fourteen other episodes and Head.
She’d been doing such background work since the 1964 Hank Williams bio-pic Your Cheatin’ Heart. She was also a
stand-in for Barbara Eden on I Dream of Jeannie and Elizabeth Montgomery on Bewitched. Bert Schneider actually hired her to do that very job as Davy’s
stand in, though the union took issue with a woman standing in for a man. As a pretty slick consolation prize,
she got to actually appear on camera, making such an impression on viewers that
her reputation remains tied to The Monkees, though she also appeared in another
very sweet item: the “Sandman Cometh”/ “Catwoman Goeth” arc that gets my vote
for best Batman episodes.
Kairys has another interesting Monkees connection: she was
married to the late Nik Venet, who produced Mike Nesmith’s song “Different
Drum” for The Stone Poneys and was the brother of Steve Venet, who co-wrote
“Tomorrow’s Gonna Be Another Day” with Tommy Boyce (see H). More apocryphally, some have speculated that she inspired
Boyce & Hart to write the band’s final top-ten hit, “Valleri”. Even if that
songwriting duo wasn’t actually smitten enough with the extra to dedicate a
song to her, there’s no doubt that one guy was totally taken with Ms. Kairys:
Peter Tork confessed to having a huge crush on her during his commentaries on
Rhino’s old Monkees DVDs. Kairys, herself, got a chance to do the same when
she contributed new commentary tracks to “Monkees A La Mode” and “Some Like It Luke Warm” on the latest blu-ray
box set. In 2012, she appeared in “Breaking Bread”, a pro-frodis short for Funny or Die.com co-starring fellow Monkees serial-extra Roxanne Albee.
Keith Moon had his target shirt. Freddie Mercury had his diamond-print unitard. Ian Anderson had his codpiece. And Michael Nesmith had his wool hat. Perhaps the most iconic garment in pop history, Mike’s hat has a special history all its own. It all started when he came galumphing into his audition with a sack of laundry over one shoulder and a wool hat upon his pate. By Davy’s estimation, it made the intellectual Monkee look like some sort of mountain man. But we all have to wash our clothes and we all have to keep our heads warm, so cut Papa Nes some slack, Davy!
Nesmith’s green hat so enchanted Bob and Bert that they
actually considered naming his character “Wool Hat” in a move that would have
been even dumber than shortening the name Thorkleson to one that rhymes with
“dork.” Nes put his foot down about adopting that idiotic moniker, although he did briefly use it as an alias in the pilot episode, “The Royal Flush”, in which he is saddled with the silly screen name both when being himself in his anarchic interview with Rafelson and when in character, as Bing Russell’s manager, edited from the episode (see C), calls him “Wool Hat” (Mike is not the only Monkee with identity issues in the unaired version of “Here Come The Monkees”; Dolenz is credited as “Micky Braddock”, the screen name he used as a child when starring in his first TV series, Circus Boy). Nevertheless, Mike did
continue to wear a pom-pommed dome-cover throughout nearly every episode of
season one and often on stage during The Monkees’ tours of ’66 and ’67 (see T). Interestingly, the only album covers
that depict him in his signature cap are the eponymous debut and Bernard Yezsin’s illustration on the cover of Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn, & Jones, LTD.
Mike was not as crazy about his hat as his fans were, so he
surely made himself and one young woman very happy indeed when he pulled the original off
his head and chucked it to her during a show at Cleveland’s Public Hall on
January 15, 1967 (contradicting rumors that he’d had the hat cast in bronze!). Nes
couldn’t be rid of the damn thing so easily, and he would soon be seen in a fresh hat of blue (unveiled in “Monkee Mother”, the first episode shot after the Public Hall gig) or a new green one
bedazzled with four buttons in mimicry of the band’s almost-as-iconic
double-breasted shirts (first worn in “It’s a Nice Place to Visit”). Mike’s hat remains a cultural force to this day, and you
can be sure that any blog article about The Monkees includes the comment
“That’s not even Michael Nesmith’s real hat!” posted by some joker who mistakes
the ability to quote The Simpsons for possessing original wit. Joke’s on you,
because it is his real hat.
In late 1968, Peter was the first to go, and he quickly put
together a new group called Peter Tork And/Or Release with bassist Riley
Cummings (formerly of a group called The Gentle Soul) and drummer Reine Stewart
(who’d played on the 33⅓ Revolutions Per Monkee sessions
and later become Mrs. Tork). The band never managed to go anywhere, nor did a
six-song demo Peter recorded for Sire in 1980 featuring versions of “Shades of
Gray” and “Pleasant Valley Sunday”. Tork’s most enduring post-Monkees project
was a rock and blues band called Shoe Suede Blues, which began in the
mid-eighties and exists to this day. He also managed to slip out a proper solo
album called Stranger Things Have
Happened (featuring contributions from Dolenz and Nesmith) in 1994. Despite
synth-based arrangements that make it sound like it was recorded a decade
earlier than it was, there is some fine material on the record, such as the
title track and a much better version of “Getting’ In” than the one on Pool It!
Mike Nesmith left next in late 1969, and without question,
he enjoyed the most satisfying musical career after The Monkees. His first
album, Magnetic South recorded with
his First National Band, was an ingenious extension of his 1968 Nashville
sessions for The Monkees, using Sgt. Pepper’s-style
musical gimmicks (non-musical sound effects, segues, etc.) in a pure-country
setting. The album also produced a bona fide top-twenty-one hit called “Joanne”
featuring Nes’s previously unheard yodeling skills (so does the ass-kicking
album cut “Mama Nantucket”). Nes followed his debut with the similar though
still very good Loose Salute before
mixing things up more with eclectic albums such as the intimate And the Hits Just Keep on Comin’ (featuring
his solo rendition of “Different Drum) and the groundbreaking, award-winning,
synth-pop video album Elephant Parts on
his own Pacific Arts label. In 1994, Pacific Arts morphed into Rio Records
(named after the biggest hit on Elephant
Parts) and Nes released another four albums on Rio over the next twenty
years.
Although he was the voice of more Monkees hits than anyone
else, Micky Dolenz seemed less interested in a solo career than his former band
mates. In the seventies he recorded a number of singles for MGM (recently
compiled for the first time by +180 Records). Not until the nineties did Micky
start taking his solo career at least a little more seriously when he cut the
lullaby disc Micky Dolenz Puts You to
Sleep (bookended by new versions of the Monkees classics “Pillow Time” and
“Porpoise Song”) and an album of standards (“The Neverending Story” is a
standard? Awesome!) called Broadway Micky
for Kid Rhino. More recent releases include the Carole King tribute King
for a Day (featuring Dolenz fave “Sometime in the Morning”) and the Monkees-classic-loaded
live disc A Little Bit Broadway, A Little
Bit Rock & Roll.
As the face of The Monkees, Davy seemed most primed for solo
success. However, his 1971 eponymous album for Bell Records couldn’t even crawl
into the top two hundred. Its very Monkees-like single “Rainy Jane” just missed
the top fifty. Not even an appearance on The Brady Bunch to promote “Girl”
could rescue a solo career hampered by a contract that largely shut Davy out of
the creative process. The holiday themed Christmas
Jones faired no better, and Davy was left embittered by his time with the
label that would become Arista (see D).
He didn’t take a crack at the solo scene again until 1986’s Incredible Revisited, which was probably
intended to take advantage of the revived interest in The Monkees but was
ultimately flattened by Davy’s commitments to that band (see P). Davy managed to put out two more
studio discs—2001’s Just Me and
2009’s She—as well as several live
ones before his death in 2012.
So, assuming you are such an asshole (I’m kidding…you’re not
an asshole! I love you!), I offer one final argument: Frank Zappa loved The Monkees. Yes, kids, the guy who was known for
mercilessly lampooning pop commercialism and championing freedom of expression
thought The Monkees were A-OK. As I’m sure you’ll recall, when The Monkees were
allowed to invite their personal favorite talents to appear on the final few
episodes (Micky selected Tim Buckley and Davy chose future The Wiz composer Charlie Smalls), Mike
Nesmith dragged in the leader of The Mothers of Invention to swap
personalities, facial hair, and outfits (see W). This teaser for “The Monkees Blow Their Minds” ended up as one
of the series’ most anarchic moments, as Frank “played” a car by smashing it
with a sledgehammer while Mike conducted.
But was Frank Zappa done with The Monkees? Did their
cancellation and fall from public favor cause him to distance himself from his
former pop associates? Nope, because there he was again, towing a bull in Head and instructing Davy that it was the cute one’s duty to lead the way for the youth of today. Did it end there? Nope again. In
fact, Zappa even asked Micky to join the Mothers of Invention as drummer.
Accepting his own limitations on the instrument—and the fact that he was still
under contract with The Monkees— Dolenz declined despite being flattered that
such a respected musician and composer thought so highly of his abilities. He’s
not the only one, Micky! Much love to you and the rest of The Monkees on this
momentous day!
Further Monkees Reading on Psychobabble:
Not Bad for a Long-Haired Weirdo: The Monkees and Radical Television
Revolution Rock: The Monkees Take Control with ‘Headquarters’
Cult Club: 'Head'
21 Underrated Songs by The Monkees You Need to Hear Now!
The Monkees Meet the Monsters
Further Monkees Reading on Psychobabble:
Not Bad for a Long-Haired Weirdo: The Monkees and Radical Television
Revolution Rock: The Monkees Take Control with ‘Headquarters’
Cult Club: 'Head'
21 Underrated Songs by The Monkees You Need to Hear Now!
The Monkees Meet the Monsters
