Review: Michael Nesmith's 'Infinite Tuesday: An Autobiographical Riff'

In 1965, young Mike Nesmith was bumming around Texas under his shaggy tresses when he noticed that people were taking a lot more notice of him than usual. When he stepped into a 7-Eleven, the cashier flipped out and told him that the local radio station had been reporting on his appearances. Nesmith decided to pop in on the station manager to find out what the deal was. When he got to the station, the manager asked him to confirm that he was, indeed, George Harrison. Nesmith admitted he was not. The station manager threatened to have him arrested for fraud.

Review: 'The Monkees, Head, and the 60s'

If 2016 has taught us something that we should have all learned fifty years ago, it’s that The Monkees are great. Not just “Boy, don’t you have fond memories of hearing ‘Daydream Believer’ at the prom?” great, but seriously great. This year they’ve finally received the treatment they deserved since they became a “real” recording band when they made Headquarters. The Monkees’ reunion album Good Times has received almost uniformly glowing reviews. Their TV series has received a deluxe blu-ray treatment usually reserved for critical darlings like Star Trek and Twin Peaks. There has also been an uptick in Monkees scholarship. This past summer, Rosanne Welch published an intelligent analysis of the Monkees TV show called Why The Monkees Matter. A few months later, Peter Mills is publishing a similarly in-depth study of the group’s only feature film called The Monkees, Head, and the 60s.

Following a general run down of how the series came to be, the backgrounds of the four stars of the show, their producers Bob Rafelson and Bert Schneider, and the music, Mills settles in on his central purpose. He offers a scene-by-scene analysis of Head’s audio-visual chop suey. The analysis is non-academic and fairly general, and there may not be too many revelations for those who already get that the film skewers The Monkee’s pre-fab image and shows how locked into it they were. A lot of page space is devoted to descriptions of scenes without much analysis at all, which can be especially frustrating when it is followed by a big conclusion such as “the juxtapositons in this closing sequence are in some ways irresponsible and morally duplicitous” without any explanation for what provoked that conclusion.

Mills keeps that from ever really becoming truly exasperating because The Monkees, Head, and the 60s is so packed with trivia, quotes and insights from the men who made the film, background information on its making, and fascinating comparisons between what was in the script and what ended up on the screen (according to the script, Davy was originally supposed to sing “Magnolia Simms” instead of “Daddy’s Song”!). As was the case with Welch’s book, the evidence used to support the analysis is more stimulating than the analysis itself. That’s fine by me since I’m more interested in learning about The Monkees than learning about how someone interprets their work. Mills still manages to get us to care about whom is telling this story by relating his own personal experiences as a Monkeemaniac throughout the book. This is actually an important element in The Monkees story, since the band’s long road to legitimacy has also been our long road to legitimacy, and in hearing Mill’s personal anecdotes about being a fan, we are also reminded of our own experiences loving a band that it seems the world is only just beginning to admit that it loves too.  

Review: “The Monkees Complete Series” Blu-ray Set

UPDATED 8/15/2016

The Show: I assume I don’t have to go into a long spiel about the quality of “The Monkees”, itself. If you’re considering dropping $200 (plus tax and shipping) on “The Complete Series”, you must already know whether or not you like the show enough to spring for it. In short, it still holds up as a radical, joyous, original, tuneful, subversive twist on the Network sitcom. Four hippies don’t merely reassure your parents that it’s OK to grow out that crew-cut; they also subtly voice their opinions about drugs, prejudice, teenager rights, war, and other topics in their improvisations, scripts, after-show interviews, and songs. And, boy, those songs! Some of the most glorious pop of their day. But again, you already knew that, and if you didn’t, spend an hour reading through every post tagged “Monkees” here on Psychobabble. That should hip you right up.

Farewell "Monkees" co-creator Bert Schneider

The son of the president of Columbia Pictures, Bert Schneider was born into entertainment. As a twenty-year old he entered the business officially, transporting film cans for Screen Gems. By 1965, he was developing a network television series with his buddy Bob Rafelson for the company. “The Monkees” was to be one of the most profitable and controversial projects of the ‘60s, cashing in on The Beatles’ popularity while also introducing hippie ideology and anarchic surrealism to primetime. While the hipsters derided Schneider’s “pre-fab four,” and avoided the band's brilliantly avant garde film Head (1968), they praised the second film his and Bob’s independent studio, Raybert Productions, unleashed in 1969. Once again hippie ideology and Rock & Roll were at the heart of Easy Rider, but the public found antiestablishment sentiments much more convincing coming from Dennis Hooper and Peter Fonda than Mike, Micky, Davy, and Peter. Following another major critical and commercial success with Five Easy Pieces, Schneider and Rafelson formed BBS Productions with a third partner, Bert’s childhood friend Steve Blauner. The trio continued making innovative independent films that inspired a new crop of filmmakers to embrace the gritty, naturalism that defined ‘70s cinema.

As Rafelson settled into his role as big shot movie director, Schneider focused more and more on politics, and his movie work grew sparse. Yet he continued to make major impressions as producer of the Oscar-winning, Vietnam documentary Hearts and Minds (1974) and Terence Malick’s reflective classic Days of Heaven (1978). Schneider dropped out of the movie business after producing Broken English in 1981. The ongoing popularity of “The Monkees”, Easy Rider, The Last Picture Show, and his other major achievements kept his name alive in the movie, T.V., and pop history books. Pop experimenter, cinematic trendsetter, Bert Schneider died this past Monday of natural causes in L.A. at the age of ’78.