Psychobabble's Favorite (and Not So Favorite) Monkees Songs...161 of Them Ranked!

A list of The Monkees' best-loved songs will inevitably be a cartload of the obvious topped with the usual suspects. "Daydream Believer". "I'm a Believer". "Last Train to Believer". Etcetera. That is not what follows. 

The Monkees were the first band I fell in love with, but it was not the big hits that caught my attention. It was the group's pervasive weirdness, which tends to get steamrolled in discussions of how cute, sweet, bubblegum, and ersatz they were. If The Monkees were the unadventurous, pre-fab, teeny-bopper bait they'd been accused of being for much of their career, I would never have paid them much mind. But that image is bullshit, although it does seemingly hold true for some of the songs that appear down at the bottom of this list, which is limited to their first-phase work (I refuse to ever listen to Pool It, if only out of respect for the band). 

These are very personal choices, hence the title of this post, and I'll do my best to express my reasoning, which will likely cause Believers to smash a piano with a sledgehammer while Nes, dressed as Zappa, conducts.  

Review: 'The Terror'/'The Little Shop of Horrors' Blu-ray

Jack Nicholson is a lieutenant in Napoleon’s army who tracks ghostly Sandra Knight to Boris Karloff’s decrepit castle. 

It took two writers to compose a script that clearly just instructed, “Jack walks down hall and opens door” for pages and pages on end. Roger Corman commissioned that script for no other reason than to get his every penny’s worth from the sets he used for The Raven and take advantage of the three extra days Karloff agreed to make himself available. 

No wonder Corman wanted to keep shooting on the castle sets: they’re magnificent. Consequently, The Terror looks great, and that cast— which also includes Dick Miller, Jonathan Haze, and Dorothy Neumann— is impressive too. However, the desperation of this production, with its patchy story further confused by four different directors (including Nicholson, co-screenwriter Jack Hill, Monte Hellman, and Francis Ford Coppola) tacking additional scenes willy nilly onto Corman’s footage, is impossible to ignore. Of that cast, only Neumann rises above the perfunctory to give an enjoyably camp performance as an old witch. 

The Terror is not as bad as its infamous reputation suggests, but the only scene that makes good on its terrifying title is the one in which Haze gets his eyes pecked out by a hawk…well, that is unless you think the image of Sandra Knight with honey on her face is particularly terrifying.

Now, if you want to see a Corman picture without a single perfunctory performance, check out the rightfully celebrated Little Shop of Horrors. The story goes that he shot it in just two days (not including reshoots) in order to beat new film industry rules giving actors more equitable contracts and pay— a sleazy motive, but one that allowed him to make his films on minuscule schedules and budgets. 

Whatever the reality of its production, The Little Shop of Horrors is a brilliant specimen of B-movie making with man-eating Venus flytrap Audrey Junior growing to massive proportions on a diet of local folks. Charles B. Griffith, the writer responsible for some of Corman’s best horror/comedies, whipped up a script rippling with absurd situations and priceless shtick. The movie’s most famous performance is that of young Nicholson as an enthusiastically masochistic dental patient, but Jonathan Haze as Audrey’s keeper/slave, Jackie Joseph as his girlfriend, Mel Welles as his boss, and Corman-fave Dick Miller as a flower-munching customer are just as memorable. Still very funny with some charming craft-shop special effects, The Little Shop of Horrors is wonderfully entertaining and wonderful inspiration for fledgling filmmakers. 

Considering its superiority to The Terror, and the cachet of its musical theater and cinematic remakes, The Little Shop of Horrors really should have been the A-feature of Film Masters' new double-feature Blu-ray set. Maybe they thought a more prominent role for superstar Nicholson and the similar marquee power of Karloff might make The Terror the more marketable movie, but I guess it doesn't matter which movie gets top billing, just as long as they're both included.

Perhaps it was also the superior restoration of The Terror that put it on the cover. This is a film cobbled together from various sources, and the stock footage doesn't look good, but the dedicated shots look fabulous, with natural grain, vibrant color, and unenhanced sharpness. The Little Shop of Horrors looks overly grainy and insufficiently contrasty in comparison, but considering the way it was shot, it actually looks better than it usually does in Film Masters' widescreen presentation.

Both discs include a nice selection of bonuses. On the Terror disc, there's a commentary from film historians Steve Haberman and C. Courtney Joyner (who also supplies a text essay that focuses more on Karloff's past in Poe movies than this set's lackluster feature film), a neat 44-minute visual essay on Corman as filmmaker with a main focus on The Terror, and a trailer. On the Little Shop disc, there's a commentary with Jonathan Haze and writer Justin Humphreys, a 17 minute documentary on Corman's Filmgroup production company, and a trailer. Overall, it's a juicy package, though it's the inclusion of Little Shop of Horrors that makes it essential.

Review: 'Atlas Artist Edition No. 1, Featuring Joe Maneely'

Joe Maneely is not as well known as, say, Steve Ditko or Jack Davis among comics connoisseurs. He didn't get a chance to be. After ten years of work with Atlas Comics, Maneely died in an accident on a train at the age of 32. 

One cannot help but ponder what might have been when viewing one of the roughly 3,500 pages of artwork he produced in his brief career. 215 of them are anthologized in Atlas Artist Edition No. 1, Featuring Joe Maneely. He was apparently game for any assignment, working on sci-fi, horror, medieval, old-west, war, humor, romance, and (aging least successfully, of course) "yellow-peril" stories (a-hem).

His style remained consistent regardless of subject matter: lots of detail, hatched shadows, etched faces. There's a hint of the underground comix to come a decade after his death in his style, although its unlikely that an old-fashioned worker like him would have found a place in that grass-perfumed nook of comics-dom.

What-might-have-beens aside, what is may not always be A+ storytelling—there's a reason titles like Haunted! and Adventures in Terror are not as well-remembered as Tales from the Crypt, and a Seven Year Itch parody from comedy-comic Riot is anything but a riot and barely comedy—but Maneely's artwork is always top-notch. This volume captures it with incredible respect. Atlas Artist Edition No. 1 is an over-sized hardcover with beautiful reproductions of 38 stories and a gallery of Maneely's covers. The coloring is wonderfully authentic—none of that garishly-digital recoloring that has absolutely ruined many an EC-anthology. This is the way classic comics reprints should be done.

12 Monkees Covers

I have a music project called The Space and spent the last couple of weeks recording a dozen Monkees covers. 

I posted them on YouTube here, or you can check out individual tracks with the following links:

Review: 'The Devil's Partner'/'Creature from the Haunted Sea' Blu-ray

 

In 1958, director Charles R. Rondeau followed up his first feature, The Littlest Hobo, with a low-budget horror/mystery picture in which a strange young man, who apparently can't sweat, drifts into a small town after his grubby Satanist uncle croaks. Soon various animals begin killing the locals while the nephew gets himself a sweet deal working at a gas station. 

No rational person would include The Devil's Partner on a list of classic horror movies, but it's reasonably well made with an effectively creepy lead performance from Ed Nelson (who most might remember from his regular role on Peyton Place, but those more likely to dig this flick will recall from the "Valley of the Shadow" episode of Twilight Zone), a tight little script, a fair dose of originality, and one genuinely creepily shot scene in which a horse stomps a rummy. 

Roger Corman liked The Devil's Partner well enough to scoop it up for his Filmgroup distribution company and slap it on a double-bill with his own Creature from the Haunted Sea in 1961. Loopier, trashier, and overflowing with anarchic attitude, Haunted Sea is definitely the more memorable picture, with its wacky Cuban counterrevolutionaries and cue-ball-eyed monster made of Brillo pads. However, The Devil's Partner is the picture that leads the Film Masters' new 4K-restored blu-ray double-bill. That's probably because Partner looks way better, nearly flawless, in fact, in a blemish-free presentation with natural grain and no irritating enhancements. Haunted Sea comes from rougher stock, but a restoration-comparison video included as an extra shows just how far the image came from the scratched, blurry 35mm print used for this very pleasing if imperfect restoration. I doubt you'll see the movie looking better, under the circumstances.

Both films are included in both their 16:9 theatrical and 4:3 TV aspect ratios, and both films gained a lot more information at the top and bottom of their respective pictures on the boob tube. Creature from the Haunted Sea also gains a whopping fifteen minutes of extra footage in its TV form. There are also audio commentaries (a silly one by some podcast guys for the main feature and a more impressive roster of Corman, location manager Kinta Zertuche, film historian Tom Weaver, and contemporary B-movie director Larry Blamire for Haunted Sea), two-Corman centric featurettes, and even a couple of booklet essays, making for a very nice package.

Review: 'Tim Burton's Nightmare Before Christmas: Beyond Halloween Town'

Unlike a lot of Generation X'ers with similar sensibilities to my own, I was never overly enthralled with Nightmare Before Christmas because I don't think there's much of a story there. Jack Skellington's biggest problem is he's sick of Halloween? Sorry, but I cannot relate.

However, I think that a lot of the members of the massive Nightmare Before Christmas cult are mostly enthralled by the movie's images, and that is something to which I can relate. It's a friggin' great-looking movie, with delightful character designs brought to life with marvelously organic stop-motion animation. While I tend to zone out half-way through the movie (which I rewatch more than I would if I didn't have a kid), it's impossible to be a total Nightmare Scrooge because of its style, visuals, and technique.

Review: 'Collecting The Simpsons'

As soon as The Simpsons went from being the thing that made people watch The Tracy Ullman Show to its own weekly entity in early 1990, the merchandising began. After all, no one knew how long the bugged-eyed, yellow-faced dysfunctional family would last, so might as well strike while the inanimate carbon rod was still aglow. 

Five billion years later, The Simpsons is still on television, running half-assed Disco Stu cameos into the ground for the remaining cockroaches and a landfill full of plastic Bart Simpsons. 

Review: 'Hardcore: The Cinematic World of Pulp'

Pulp had been at it for close to two decades when they finally joined the upper echelon of contemporary British pop with Different Class in 1995. For a band as erudite and self-aware, that kind of success doesn't go down easily, and their next album was an expression of that hard comedown.

Bleary and weary, This Is Hardcore is a weird centerpiece for a book like Paul Burgess and Louise Colbourne's colorful coffee table-ish Hardcore: The Cinematic World of Pulp. However, the album's artistic bona-fides make the choice less odd. The record spawned four lush music videos, inspired collages and paintings, and had one of the decade's most recognizable (and infamous) jackets, though Burgess and Colbourne mostly steer clear of exploiting that arguably exploitative image of model Ksenia Sobchak prone and in the buff. There is a completely hilarious image of the censored Malaysian version of that cover with an ugly gold sweater photoshopped onto Sobchak.

Review: Vinyl Reissue of Tommy Flanagan's 'The Cats'

With a quartet or his own simple, appealing tunes and one Gershwin classic propped on his piano, Tommy Flanagan led the session that produced his second album on April 18, 1957. However, he ceded credit to the one-off ensemble he put together for the occasion, which is probably what ones does when playing with such luminaries as Kenny Burrell and John Coltrane. Yet The Cats often is very much Flanagan's show. His searching, autumnal keys receive soft support from drummer Louis Hayes and bassist Doug Watkins on Gershwin's "How Long Has This Been Going On" while the rest sit it out. When the whole band joins in, which they do for the rest of these sides, they most definitely play as a very organized ensemble, Coltrane's melodic, tonally complex harmonies with trumpeter Idrees Sulieman providing much of the tangy flavor. 

Review: Nirvana's 'In Utero' 30th Anniversary Box Set

After what seemed like an interminable wait, Nirvana finally released their follow up to Nevermind--the album that almost single-handedly plopped the pre-fab term "Alternative Rock" into the mainstream--in autumn of 1993. The band's purported goal was to shake off all the meat-heady fans they'd acquired since putting out a slick disc of metal-ish sounding drums and guitars and big sing-along choruses. Did it work? Well, although In Utero only sold half of Nevermind's figures, that's still pretty damn good, especially for an album so challenging and, despite some mixed notices, rewarding. Nevermind is a great record, but it lacks the personal atmosphere and unsanitized urgency of the record released just six months before the band's main voice took his own life. And that isn't just romanticizing a tragedy. Even before Kurt Cobain died, In Utero stood out for its perfect mix of classic melodiousness ("All Apologies", "Heart Shaped Box", "Scentless Aprrentice", "Dumb") and terrifying abrasiveness ("Scentless Apprentice", "Milk It", "Tourettes"), Steve Albini's massive and filthily organic production, and the tendrils of sadness twining through Cobain's grisly surrealism.