Initially, "Are The Monkees authentic?" doesn't seem to be the question driving Tom Kemper's new book The Monkees: Made in Hollywood. Rather, it mostly argues that the project was the unique product of geography, that not only Hollywood's TV industry but also the city's deep well of producers, songwriters, ace session musicians, and high-profile radio stations helped make The Monkees world dominators in 1967. In this regard, Made in Hollywood is valuable, interesting, well-argued, and built on a pile of documented evidence.
When the narrative turns back to questions of authenticity, it starts to take on the flavor of one of those old hit pieces against the individual guys, though with an academic's air of authority in place of the smug hipness that defined The Monkees' original rock-press critics. This is where Kemper starts dropping a few clangers in an attempt to support his thesis. He bumps the rating of Head up from "G" to "R" to make this bizarre Monkees feature-film seem like an even more absurd move than it already was. He claims Mike Nesmith recorded his bizarre 1967 solo album, The Witchita Train Whistle Sings, in a bid for credibility without mentioning that the real reason Nesmith cut the record was as a tax write-off. In any event, how an album of Sousa-march versions of Nesmith originals would have brought credibility in 1967 is beyond me.
The author seems unimpressed with the group's revolution, painting its effectiveness as a foregone conclusion because the enterprise couldn't afford to lose Mike, Micky, Davy, and Peter if it wanted to keep capitalizing on The Monkees, without mentioning that the boys were under contract and probably didn't actually have that much leverage. He also suggests that they almost immediately retreated after making Headquarters and went back to the old style of recording. However, despite Chip Douglas's line about Mike refusing to work on the other guys' songs on Pisces, this isn't true (he played on all the tracks except for Davy and Kim Capli's "Hard to Believe"). All of the remaining Monkees stepped up their songwriting and production work after Pisces, but Colgems generally chose to populate their albums with songs by outside writers, a situation for which they could hardly be blamed.
Kemper leaves the four individuals who made up The Monkees seeming like limp noodles in their own story and paints their revolution as the band's undoing rather than their boldest moment and the most convincing evidence for their "authenticity." And that question of authenticity seems particularly irrelevant considering how slippery that term is (see The Rolling Stones, a quartet of middle-class English boys regularly praised for the authenticity of their records mimicking those of working-class black American musicians) and how well The Monkees have endured.
