Review: Edsel Records' Deluxe Turtles Reissues

Although they scooped up a bundle of smash 45s such as “Elenore,” “You Showed Me”, “It Ain’t Me Babe”, and the deathless “Happy Together”, The Turtles never quite garnered the reputation for being a great album group as peers such as The Byrds, Simon & Garfunkel, and The Monkees did. That’s too bad because The Turtles’ albums tended to be as effervescent, memorable, and weird as their singles. The LPs also really throw a spotlight on the odd ways a group most noted for their good-timey pop tunes evolved.

The 1965 debut, It Ain’t Me Babe, finds the L.A. sextet in total folk-rock mode, covering Dylan with almost as much enthusiasm as The Byrds did on their debut. The Turtles also shred through a couple of bitter treats by Dylan-aspirer P.F. Sloan and thoughtful originals by their own Howard Kaylan, such as “Wanderin’ Kind” and “Let the Cold Winds Blow”. While there are none of the gum drops that would soon come tumbling out of The Turtles’ shells, a jaunty version of “Your Maw Said You Cried” and the band’s decision to cover a tune by Tin Pan Alley team Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil is an early clue that times would soon be changin’ for the less politicized.

Nevertheless, 1966’s You Baby/Let Me Be is still dominated by “Let Me Be” brooding rather than “You Baby” sugariness, offering another slew of withering folk rock, such as Kaylan’s “House of the Rising Sun”-esque “House of Pain” and Highway 61-esque “Pall Bearing, Ball Bearing World”. Even the love songs are pretty moody, and the upbeat “Flyin’ High” and the Kinky “Almost There” bookend the album with a fanged snarl. A version of Bob Lind’s “Down in Suburbia”, however, matches cute social commentary with a fun and funky Latin clatter, hinting at the clever strangeness to come.

Then came The Turtles’ breakthrough year, 1967, and the hits that really defined their career. “Happy Together” and “Me About You” are too moody to really categorize as bubblegum, but “She’d Rather Be with Me”, “Guide for the Married Man”, “Makin’ My Mind Up”, and “Person without a Care” deliver the Bazooka Joe goods in the best way. Happy Together is also where The Turtles started exploring their inner zany for good (“The Walking Song”) and ill (the unlistenable “Rugs of Woods and Flowers”).

Produced by one-time Turtle Chip Douglas, 1968’s The Turtles Present the Battle of the Bands makes use of a concept that allows the band to indulge every idiosyncratic side of their personality with complete abandon. The album basically makes good on the supposed concept beneath Sgt. Pepper’s: The Turtles pretend to be a different band on each track, which allows them to show off how well they could mock soul combos (“The Battle of the Bands”), psych groups (“The Last Thing I Remember”), corny C&W pickers (“Too Much Heartsick Feeling”), surf bands (“Surfer Dan”), jazz fusionists (“Food”), Booker T. & The MG’s (“Buzz Saw”), errr…world music? (“I’m Chief Kamanawanalea”), and themselves (“Elenore”). A rare flash of sincerity called “Earth Anthem” reveals that the Turtles still cared about their world, could create work of tremendous beauty, and were rather prescient in their ability to foresee the coming environmental movement of the seventies. Anyone baffled by how the guys who sang “Happy Together” ended up working with Frank Zappa should listen to Battle of the Bands pronto.

Unlike The Turtles’ previous hit-packed albums, Turtle Soup failed to spawn a significant single. This is significant because it also marks The Turtles’ complete maturation as an album group. Blame Ray Davies, whom the band hired to produce in the vein of The Kinks’ raucous early singles. However, Davies had just completed his masterpiece, the textured and sensitive Village Green Preservation Society, and decided to continue with that approach while also taking advantage of resources available to a band that sold a lot more records in 1968 than The Kinks did. The results were such Wagnerian production feats as “Love in the City” and “How You Loved Me”, as well as the more elegantly orchestrated “John and Julie”. Relatively simple productions, such as the ’66-style jangle of “She Always Leaves Me Laughing”, the stripped down boogie of “Hot Little Hands”, and the “Happy Together”-revisited arrangement of “You Don’t Have to Walk in the Rain” were just as effective. As far as I’m concerned, Turtle Soup is not just the best Turtles album but also one of the very best of 1969, and I’d sooner spin it than such acknowledged classics of that year as Led Zeppelin’s debut, Let It Bleed, and The Kinks’ own Arthur.

If you’ve yet to discover the hidden wonders of Turtle Soup and the rest of The Turtles’ long-playing catalog, you’d do no better than starting with Edsel’s new reissue series. Utilizing Bill Inglot’s same warm and detailed remasters that graced Manifesto’s Complete Original Album Collection released in the U.S. last year, Edsel’s new individual releases split the mono and stereo mixes of the first three albums between two discs each (don’t bother popping in the stereo It Ain’t Me Babe disc unless you have a high tolerance for vocals hard panned to the left and instruments hard panned to the right).  The second discs of Battle of the Bands, Turtle Soup, and the collection of 1966 outtakes Wooden Head load up on stereo mixes of non-album singles (the mono originals were collected on last year’s superb All the Singles), Turtle Soup demos, some fabulous psychedelic outtakes cut around the same time as “Sound Asleep”, and a fascinating and characteristically unsettling half-dozen Jerry Yester productions recorded for the band’s scrapped 1970 LP to be titled Shell Shock (judging from these tracks, it would have been a great record). The nice digipak packaging and Andrew Sandoval’s short but sweet liner notes help give these excellent albums the respect they should have been receiving for the past fifty years.

The Latest Bonus Specs on the 'Monkees' Blu-ray Box

OK, so it's disappointing that the "Monkees Complete Series" Blu-ray set, which was originally supposed to be released last January before being bumped up to late this April, has been delayed once again to June 27, but it sounds like Andrew Sandoval and John Hughes have been hard at work adding more content to this set. They recently appeared on the "Zilch" podcast to express their embarrassment over the delays, assure us that this is the last one, and go into greater detail about what we can expect from the set. You can listen to the full podcast here, but this is the gist of the bonus content:

"The Monkees" Alternate Song Track Guide

When “The Monkees” makes its Blu-ray debut as a limited edition box set on January 29, 2016, it will arrive with enough bonus material to stuff the trunk of the Monkeemobile. Aside from the feature film Head, the most important of these bonuses will be alternate song tracks that Monkee-wrangler Andrew Sandoval recently announced will be part of the set. These tracks are so important because not all of us were lucky enough to watch the series when it originally aired. So if you caught episodes for the first time as reruns during the summer 1967 hiatus or as Saturday afternoon reruns during the 1969-1970 season, you may be used to very different songs in certain episodes. In some cases, the replacements greatly changed the tone of the episode. Imagine The Monkees frugging in Hell (“The Devil and Peter Tork”) to the insipid “I Never Thought It Peculiar” instead of the acidic “Salesman”. Whoops!

As someone who wasn’t even born during those years, I first discovered “The Monkees” in the mid-80s when it aired on MTV, Nick-at-Night, and in syndication on weekday mornings on channel 9 WOR-TV in New York. These reruns were a jumble of the originally aired episodes, 1967 replacements, and in a couple of cases, ’69/’70 replacements. As a nostalgia junkie, I long to rewatch “The Monkees” with the songs I remember from my youth. In “Success Story”, Davy forever broods on the beach to “Shades of Grey”, not “I Wanna Be Free”. “Midnight Train” is the soundtrack to the guys getting ready for their big party in “The Chaperone”, not “This Just Doesn’t Seem to Be My Day”.

Now, Sandoval apparently said that there will be alternate song tracks for “some” episodes. This is either a reference to the fact that only 32 of the 58 episodes aired with alternate songs or that only some of those 32 episodes will appear with alternate songs. We will only know when all the specs of the still-a-work-in-progress- box set are announced. In any event, if only some of the episodes that aired with alternate songs are included, you may want to figure out which ones are present and which ones are absent. I know I will, but when I went looking for a guide to the episodes that featured alternate songs in reruns, I couldn’t find one. Thanks a lot, Internet! Steve Urkel has his own Wikipedia page, but I can’t find some pretty basic information on one of the most enduring TV shows of the sixties.

So, with a little (lot of) help from Andrew Sandoval’s essential book The Monkees: The Day-By-Day Story of the 60s TV Pop SensationI put together my own guide to the alternate song tracks used on reruns of “The Monkees”. Maybe you’ll find it useful too.

1967: Summer Hiatus Reruns

Psychobabble Babbles with… Andrew Sandoval!

Anyone who has grooved to Rhino Records’ outstanding compilation Where the Action Is!: Los Angeles Nuggets 1965-1968, that labels’ amazing string of Monkees reissues, or other rereleases by giants ranging from The Band to Elvis Costello to The Beach Boys to The Kinks to Love, owes a big thanks to Andrew Sandoval. Since publishing his fanzine New Breed in the mid-‘80s and moving on to his role as one of Rhinos’ top annotators and reissue producers, Sandoval has been the voice of classic pop and rock. With the publication of The Monkees: The Day by Day Story of the ‘60s TV Pop Sensation in 2005, he solidified his reputation as The Monkees’ finest chronicler. Andrew Sandoval recently talked with Psychobabble about his book, Nuggets, and especially, his upcoming deluxe edition of The Monkees’ Head soundtrack.

Psychobabble: A job as a reissue producer—especially one who gets to work on such plum projects—sounds like a Rock geek’s dream. How did you get your start in this line of work?

Andrew Sandoval: I started writing about music when I was fourteen. I independently edited and published a music fanzine and things took off from there. A friend named Dave Jenkins introduced me to a guy called Bill Inglot. He was working for Rhino on reissues and I started to interview him for my magazine in late 1988. A variety of meetings led to me working on The Monkees’ Missing Links Two compilation as liner notes writer and I’ve been starving ever since.

PB: Although you’ve worked with a lot of artists, you’re probably best known for those Monkees projects. What sparked your interest in the group initially?

AS: I saw the show in 1977 on my local Metromedia station, channel 11. I really loved the music and started to seek out their records, which were out of print excepting an Arista compilation, which I was totally unaware of. My father saw someone try and trade in some of the albums to a store and the guy at the counter refused them. My dad followed him home and bought me the albums. I grew up with the first five LP’s – no hits albums – and loads of Beatles records. In 1986, when the show reappeared on MTV, the level of scholarship and interest in The Monkees increased and I certainly learned a great deal in the process. Not only was the music great but this was a band with a fascinating and sometimes convoluted history.

PB: Your book The Monkees: The Day by Day Story of the ‘60s TV Pop Sensation does a better job of organizing that convoluted history than any other Monkees bio I’ve read. I’ve always been amazed by the exhaustiveness of “Day by Day” books such as yours. What kind of time and work goes into putting one of them together?

AS: It took about 15 years to research and compile the book. The first fourteen years were done mostly on days off and weekends. There were mountains of magazines to plow through, as well as all of the session tapes. Ironically, just as I was completing the book, a lot of newspaper resources came online. That might have saved me about five years. As it was, I did enjoy reading every issue of Billboard, New Music Express, and Daily Variety from the period of 1965-1970. The actual completion of the book was done in 2004 from June to roughly January of the following year.

PB: The excellent Birds, the Bees, & the Monkees box set you produced recently really emphasizes how much fine material the guys’ recorded during those sessions, as well as the fact that the resulting album could have been better if (head of Colgems records) Lester Sill chose different songs to include on it. Do you have any insight into the thought process behind compiling the original album?

AS: I think Lester tried his best, but there was no real producer for the album. It makes you really appreciate the work of Don Kirshner and Chip Douglas in the first two sets of albums respectively. Lester did have a hand in selecting the songs on Headquarters and Pisces, but these were more focused works. Birds, Bees is sprawling; It would have made a fascinating double album.

PB: There were also a lot of terrific songs cut during the Head sessions that aren’t included on the deluxe edition: “Some of Shelly’s Blues”, “How Insensitive”, “Nine Times Blue”, “St. Matthew”, etc. Most previous Monkees deluxe editions covered the full breadth of what was recorded during sessions for each given album, but the deluxe Head mostly only covers songs that wound up on the original album. What was the rationale behind this, and does it mean we can expect the outtakes on a deluxe Instant Replay eventually?

AS: I hope that stuff will be on an expansion of Instant Replay. Head is very specific in concept and content. I felt that the balance of the album would be thrown off by including things that don’t relate to the Head story. Meanwhile, something like “War Games” should probably have been saved for Head. The bottom line is that the music is getting out there, and in mostly a coherent and sympathetic fashion.

PB: I assume that those live cuts on the second disc hail from the Salt Lake City show that yielded the version of “Circle Sky” included in the Head movie. According to The Monkees: The Day by Day Story…, the show was poorly engineered and Nesmith had to rerecord his vocal for “Circle Sky”. What can we expect regarding the quality of these recordings and why are only Nesmith’s songs from the show on the box set?

AS: Nesmith’s voice was the only one actually committed to tape. The others appear only as distortion and reverby leakage on the tracks. It is a poorly engineered recording, and though some band tracks are good, The Monkees were there to play “Circle Sky”, and that seems to be the only reason they taped Michael’s other vocals.

PB: Around the time ‘The Monkees: The Day by Day Story…’ was released, I recall reading an interview in which you said that there were plans to remaster and rerelease the TV series. Five years down the road, is this still in the works, and if so, do you think fans might finally get to view the show with alternate audio tracks featuring the songs that were dubbed on the episodes for reruns?

AS: I would love that and I feel the shows could be significantly upgraded. It is really up to Rhino at this point, and would require spending money on new transfers and some research. The market is such that this is a long shot, but it is something I am very passionate about.

PB: Another of your more recent productions, Where the Action Is!: Los Angeles Nuggets 1965-1968, is a real stunner. Are there any other Nuggets comps on the way?

AS: I compiled a few single disc Nuggets collections, which may appear via Rhino Handmade in the future. These are genre and label based and not location specific. I hope the Nuggets boxes will continue, but I haven’t heard any rumblings about this recently.

PB: Do you have any other interesting projects in the pipeline we can expect in the near future?

AS: Rhino Handmade are issuing some of my other projects soon. These include a two disc edition of The Beau Brummels’ Bradley’s Barn, an expanded Triangle and a collection of Warner recordings by Tom Northcott. I am also at work on some Pye era Kinks releases for Universal UK.

PB: Thanks Andrew, and I’m really looking forward to those Kinks releases and the expanded Triangle!