The Who "Face Dances" (1981) (News, Views and Music 137)

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The Who “Face Dances” (1981)

You Better You Bet/Don’t Let Go The Coat/Cache Cache/The Quiet One/Did You Steal My Money?//How Can You Do It Alone?/Daily Records/You/Another Tricky Day

What you get out of listening to ‘Face Dances’ depends on what you’re expecting. Play it back to back with the great 70s splurge of Who creativity (‘Who’s Next’ ‘Quadrophenia’ and as we’ve tried to argue on this site the lesser-known ‘Who By Numbers’ and ‘#Who Are You?’ too) and you’ll be bitterly disappointed. See it as (almost) the last Who release and it’s a less than fond farewell also, with the band floundering and coasting rather than taking on all-comers and sounding like the greatest rock band of all time. But see this album in the context of The Who’s problems, the fact that they’d lost original drummer (and so much more) Keith Moon and had to re-invent themselves all over again if they were to carry on at all, then ‘Face Dances’ is an intriguing sideways look at what the band might have sounded like a little older, a little slower and a little lyric rather than music-heavy compared to before. ‘Face Dances’ wasn’t received too well at the time, although there is a small handful of fans who now rate it among the better Who albums, but as a signpost to a new sound, its a fascinating one, with the band making good on their promise that ‘music must change’ (a song from 1978).

As we’ve seen on our ‘Who Are You?’ review, Pete Townshend took the sudden rise of the punk  movement hard, much more so than other aging rockers who either ignored or sought to emulate it. The fact that another generation was coming along demanding basic roots rock and roll with a snarl must have pleased Pete no end, after years of trying to make The Who fulfil this very dynamic – but that said, in Pete’s mind The Who still were the rawest and ,most powerful band out there and hated the idea that they were no out of touch and speaking for ‘my generation’, not every alienated and dis-affected youth. By this time The Who were all in their mid to late 30s, hardly old-sounding now that most of our AAA crew are still going in their 60s and 70s, but a frightening prospect for the genre of rock and roll that was always described as ‘youth music’ in its, well, youth. It’s to the band’s credit that, rather than fight the punks on their own terms (as per Wings’ unreleased and embarrassing ‘Boil Crisis’) or go the other way and embrace disco (as per The Stones on ‘Miss You’ in this same period)  or stay doing what they’d always done but louder (as per everyone else) The Who tried to invent a whole new style, a logical progression of a genre that was growing stale.

The only problem for us fans nowadays is that the experiment is unfinished. Apart from a   few glorious debut solo albums (and most of those recorded after years of being unknown, rehearsing a new sound and practising to get things right) inventing a new wheel takes time to get it right. Pete Townshend’s new composing self has only just going by the time of both this album and follow-up ‘It’s Hard’ in 1982 (perhaps a cry of help over the new style as well as a risqué double entendre) and we never get the pay-off when his style has reached its zenith, as we did with ‘Tommy’ ‘Who’s Next’ and ‘Quadrophenia’. Instead what we have here is the latter day equivalent of ‘A Quick One While He’s Away’, the second album by the band recorded when they were only half-sure of the direction they were going in.

Things aren’t helped by the fact that Townshend was working on his own records simultaneously with The Who albums in this period, in an alarming burst of post-alcoholic creativity that also saw him sign up to be consulting editor at publishers Faber and Faber. For Pete this fact is good news as he gets to experiment much more without risking the band’s career and gets to write his most autobiographical songs on great albums like ‘Empty Glass’ (1980 and our classic album review no 77) and ‘All The Best Cowboys Have Chinese Eyes’ (1982), songs too personal to give to Roger Daltrey to sing. Unfortunately for us Who fans taking all the personal admission and guilt out of Townshend’s writing leaves him writing ‘pop’ songs rather than rock songs or ballads, ones that are fascinatingly structured and ones full of wordplay than never before, but without the heart and soul of The Who at their best, the one band who in the past had always sounded like they meant what they said. The ‘title track’ is a case in point: attempted for this album but not released till Pete’s ‘Cowboys’ album in 1982 as ‘part two’ (we still haven’t had part one yet!), it’s the kind of love song that isn’t great in itself but would have made for enough humanity and emotion to make the other ‘Who’ tracks around it sound great. ‘Daily Records’ is a good case in point: its one of Pete’s wittiest songs, about how his need to write about what he’s feeling makes his songs sound like a kind of aural diary – but unlike the similar why-am-I-writing-this? Songs of the past two Who albums there’s no emotion and no gravitas to the song so, no matter how clever, it sounds like it has no point. Roger sounds especially badly served on this album, without the chance to ‘get inside’ Pete’s songs as he normally does so well (Pete’s songs often fall flat without Roger there to interpret them – you could write a whole essay about the vulnerable, weedy, empathetic Pete writing songs for the macho ‘Roger’ character and fulfilling his fantasies and in time we probably will) and he sounds awfully uncomfortable at times. For all of Roger’s complaints over Pete’s more personal songwriting throughout the 70s, as least he sounds as if he knows what’s going – on songs like ‘Cache Cache’ he doesn’t sound any the wiser as to what’s going on and if he doesn’t know then neither does the listener.

Instead, the only emotion we do have, heard in songs by Pete and John Entwistle, is bemused hurt and anger. Both Pete’s ‘Another Tricky Day’ and John’s ‘You’ make for a really unpleasant end to an album, both open letters to the rest of the band about how The Who has stopped being fun. Although Roger’s gone on record as saying he enjoyed making this album and the chance to do something different and Pete has remained un-characteristically quiet talking about this album, John often complained that this album was an awful experience to make. Roger and Pete often clashed in the studio but John reckoned that he and Keith were able, between them, to get them to make up and go back to work – left on his own, with only a new drummer to help out, the arguments got worse. Both of these songs are directly aimed at another member of the band but it’s hard to tell who – John sounds as if he’s singing to both Pete and John despite using the word ‘you’ (perhaps a different verse is about each of them?) while Pete’s ‘social crisis’ doesn’t seem to fit Roger or John. In the past Who songs about frustration, anger and bitterness, such as ‘The Real Me’ and ‘I Can’t Explain’ were direct and powerful, packed with pointed lyrics and musical riffs that somehow mirrored their contents. Here it just sounds as if the band are airing dirty laundry in public and need to get something off their chests.

Again, though, that doesn’t make this album bad. Had you come to this record fresh, without any knowledge of The Who’s powerful past, it’s still an enjoyable album (well, most of it). Like ‘Who Are You?’ this record is a curious blend of rock and pop, something the band hadn’t really done since leaving singles behind circa 1967,  with Pete’s quirky songwriting rather than his emotions on show. Just have a look at the subject, which is all very un-Who like: ‘Cache Cache’ is a philosophical argument about letting metaphorical bears out of their cages (!), ‘Don’t Let Go The Coat’ is a very Yoko Ono-ish song about letting your dreams fade without realising it and ‘How Can You Do It Alone?’ is a story-song, complete with a narrator who clearly isn’t Pete or Roger discussing the down-and-outs of life. ‘Did You Steal My Money?’ goes even further, being arguably the only anti-youth song recorded by one of the greatest teenage-association bands of all, actually taking the younger generation to task after a spate of attacks on war veterans (Pete will redress the balance with ‘I’ve Known No War’ on the next album, a sort-of attack on soldiers everywhere). Even the hit single and one song from this album that everyone knows, ‘You Better, You Bet’, is a kind of anti-love song about a relationship that’s clearly one-way and not the usual idea of true emotional love at all. In fact, in its own way this album caught the new wave slightly anti-sceptic feel of the early 1980s better than any other ‘old’ band ever did, with the result that this is a stylised, detached album very much like Blondie, Adam and the Ants, etc, but played through the medium of rock and roll.

One point fans often make when dismissing this album is that Keith Moon doesn’t play on it so the drumming must be awful. Actually poor Kenney Jones, drummer for The Small Faces and close friend of Keith, was the perfect choice for the way the Who were turning out at the end of the 70s a s slightly slower, less flamboyant beast. As anyone who knows the Faces albums well (and you should, they’re the closest the 1960s came to the out-and-attack of the early Who) they could rock like the best of bands. Both Keith and Kenney are flamboyant, driving drummers who can push a band on like never before and are arguably rock’s two most straight-forward drummers (without the jazz tinges of, say, Charlie Watts or Bobby Elliott). But there the similarities end: Moony made it his point to be all over the place, treating the drums as the lead instrument and adding bits that other drummers would never dream of coming up with; Kenney leads from the front with the main beat of a song the most important thing, no matter how many extra-curricular cymbals get smashed along the way. Personally I think he’s a great drummer, especially with The Small Faces but also with The Who (and particularly on the live recordings of the day, when he sounds much more energetic and committed than the rest of the band). It’s just a shame that the material Pete and John are giving him don’t give the room to breathe that they used to give to Keith. That said, the band will come close right at the very of their time together the following year, when the rat-a-tat-tat of closer ‘Cry If You Want’ will become the best Who song in years.

Perhaps a more crucial change to the band’s sound was Pete’s lack of confidence as a guitarist. After years of having Keith around to fill in the ‘gaps’ in his playing Pete suddenly heard his playing laid bare and sought to cover it in two ways. On stage Roger Daltrey, actually quite a promising rhythm player, began to play guitar in the group for the first time since 1962 (when seeing Johnny Kidd and the Pirates had inspired him to make The Who a power trio-plus vocalist). But even more significantly the band brought in a keyboard player for the first time, with John ‘Rabbit’ Bundrick the secret star of this album and adding a touch of colour to the retro rock of The Who. Again, ‘Rabbit’ really came into his own on tour but already on this record it’s his touches on the album that are the most memorable, from the opening flurry on ‘You Better You Bet’ to the one then-contemporary sound on the album, the criss-crossing ‘Did You Steal My Money?’

One other thing that drags this album down is how much better it might have been had The Who stuck some of their more traditional sounding songs on it. The trio of outtakes that were recorded during these sessions and later released as bonus tracks on the album are all worthy of a place on the album. ‘I Like Nightmares’ might be a novelty song but Pete’s rare vocal in this period is a delight, with Pete laughing at his love of chastising himself and his run of moody albums in the 1970s by telling us that he even ‘loves nightmares’ and the fright and powerful feelings of guilt they give him, making him feel as if he’s alive. ‘It’s In You’ is even more Who-like, with a scatter-shot guitar-bass battle and a song where Roger sounds more at home than any on the album, urging his girl that she’s got the courage to make something out of life (and some curious references to ‘Moonie’ earning his ‘wraith’, as if someone is late in paying their respects). Best of all ‘Somebody Saved Me’ is perhaps the greatest Pete Townshend composition of any in this period, drawing on a real incident when an alcoholic and drug-fuelled Pete was nursed back to life by a fellow user, who actually died during Pete’s attempts to clean-up. Along the way the song got twisted and turned into a love-struck narrator thanking the girl of his dreams for keeping away because if she’d have paid him any attention ‘I’d have wanted you forever’. The way Pete slides off the song by sighing ‘somebody saved me’ on a sudden and unexpected change to a minor key is one of the most moving lines of his whole catalogue. Whilst I can understand why Pete kept it for his solo album (that version is inferior by the way, sounding like it’s been recorded after one take too many when the band aren’t ‘feeling’ it as here) it’s a crying shame that this song, at least, didn’t make the final running of ‘Face Dances’ because it would have made it a much more emotional, three-dimensional album, with some real feeling in amongst all the cleverness and re-invention. Even the 1979 incarnation of ‘How Can You Do It Alone?’ (heard here as a bonus live recording) sound better than the finished version, making you wonder just what was going on during these sessions and why an album with a fairly promising start to recording came as unravelled as it did.

Instead there’s only one great song and no, unlike most reviewers I’m not nominating ‘You Better, You Bet’ or even a Pete Townshend song. John Entwistle’s ‘The Quiet Ones’ is a fabulous noisy rocker – the only out-and-out rocker on the whole record – and is just so, well, Entwistle that it deserves to be better known. Frustrated at being pegged as the ‘quiet’ one of the band (chances are you’d be quiet too, surrounded by Townshend, Daltrey and Moon!) Entwistle talks about the positive benefits of being quiet (everyone listens to you the few times you do have something to say) and how communication is over-rated, before adding in a classic line ‘I ain’t quiet – everyone else is too loud!’ The fact that John chooses this of all songs to get The Who to play at their loudest says much about his sense of humour and it remains one of the three last great Who songs from their final days (the other being Townshend’s ‘Eminence Front’ and ‘Cry If You Want’ from next LP ‘It’s Hard’).

In fact, ‘It’s Hard’ – long neglected as the poorer selling, made-in-a-hurry contract-fulfilling sequel to this album – is actually the superior in every way. The band have come to terms with the ‘new direction they’re heading, a much tighter and more polished sound than their usual one and are writing material to suit it. Chances are we’ll be writing that review sometime soon, but then do any of you Who fans really need either LP? Frankly no – if you get the chance to download the three tracks I’ve highlighted then excellent, but apart from that The Who are clearly attempting an experiment here and its one that fails compared to The Who of old. Due to a combination of the loss of Keith, Pete’s doubts about his playing, the lack of emotion in the songs and the work going on with Pete’s solo albums there’s something about both of these albums that doesn’t really work. I’ll protect the other late-period Who albums for all I’m worth (hence ‘Who Are You?’ and the marvellous ‘Who By Numbers’ making it to our ‘main’ list of reviews), but although there are good things to say about both records and hints that The Who could have developed their ‘new’ sound into a workable and worthwhile series of recordings there’s simply too many mistakes to care. The Who also seem to have the ability to rock, something which is an absolute calamity for a band that had always been the greatest rock and roll band in the world (OK so the Stones used that slogan too, but they’re more a fascinating rock-blue-country-swamp rock hybrid than a logical update of the 1950s raw power as The Who are and were).

That said, to dismiss this album out of hand would be unfair. ‘Face Dances’ is far from the worst studio album in my collection as many fans point out (though farewell live album ‘Who’s Last’ is a strong candidate for worst live album). There are times when what The Who are trying to do really comes together, when the Who manage to successfully come up with a medium paced-strut that suits their aging vocals and playing well, when Pete’s words finally make sense in Roger’s hands and John’s bass roars out of the blocks as powerfully as ever. There’s one truly classic track here (and even that’s not up to the highest standards of the Who days of old) but there’s very little that’s really poor and the first side in particular is a lot better than this album’s usual reputation suggests. That’s especially true if you own the excellent CD version with the three excellent bonus tracks and had The Who carried on to do lots more albums like this one as a sort of ‘second career’ they might have been pretty good all round (‘It’s Hard’, an album that no one except me likes it seems, is better still). In fact, many songs are a curious hybrid of bits that work and bits that don’t. In fact ‘Face Dances’ is an apt name indeed for an album  that seems to dance about all over the place, never quite staying in one genre for long enough to define it.

Speaking of faces, the one true redeeming feature of ‘Face Dances’ is the cover, one where the band’s ‘four faces’ (shades of Quadrophenia there) really do dance across the cover. In keeping with the huge promotion that went into this album The Who came up with a grand design, commissioning our old friend Peter Blake (who made the ‘Sgt Pepper’s album collage) to orchestrate a series of paintings by other established and up-and-coming artists. The result is a patchwork quilt that reflects this album’s bittyness well and is certainly striking. David Hockney (who paints the far-right hand painting of Roger) and Richard Hamilton (the far-right hand painting of Pete) are the best known, but for my money the imaginative painting by ‘Colin Self Of Norwich’ of the ‘inner workings’ of Pete Townshend (third from the left) and the very accurate study of Roger (again third from left) by David Inshaw are the best. Quite what Kenney Jones thought of painter Joe Tilson drawing various parts of his anatomy that, presumably, weren’t out on display when the photographs were taken for the artists and re-drawn in cubist style is left un-recorded! The finished product was big news at the time and even hung in London’s Tate Gallery for a while (though sadly it was long gone by the time I went for a recce there to study the collection of JMW Turners!) In fact it was the success of this cover in shop-window displays (along with the unexpected hit status of single ‘You Better You Bet’) that made this the best-selling Who album in years, making #2 in the UK charts for the first time since 1973’s ‘Quadrophenia’. It’s also one of the most successful Who album covers for summing up the eccentric and piecemeal parts of the contents. If only the album had been up to the ones in the days of the old then this could have been the start of a whole new brave start for The Who – as it is this album’s directionless and the in-fighting during the sessions robbed them of any chance of a second coming.

The album leads off with it’s best known song ‘You Better You Bet’, the last Who hit (though the forgotten ‘Athena’ from ‘It’s Hard’ was the last single proper) and traditionally the closing spot for most Who compilations. Like much of this album, it kind of half-works really well and half falls flat on it’s face. The bits that work are the chirping keyboard synth opening by ‘Rabbit’ Brundrick’, the logical updating of the squeal of synths that started earlier 70s classics (back when The Who were the first to play around with synths rather than mellotrons) and the lovely sweeping melody that somehow manages to combine the power of the Who’s youth with a slightly more laid back mature feel. There’s also a classy chorus that seems to come out of nowhere, ably supported by Pete and John’s harmonies (ironic, really, that they sing together so much on this album when their friendship was at its lowest ebb) and Entwistle’s marvellous full-throttle bass riff. So what’s not to love? Well, the lyrics to be honest. The theme of the song is of how much love a relationship needs to work, with Pete arguing against his earlier song ‘A Little Is Enough’ by having a partner who ‘when I say I love ya you scream you better bet your life’. Only the narrator of this song is still left saying ‘I don’t care how much you love me, a little really is alright...’, making this a very confused song indeed. Like many of Pete’s songs in this period they’re about a confused relationship (‘I know that the match is rough!’ he memorably sang in 1980’s ‘A Little Is Enough’), but this song isn’t ‘about’ a confused relationship, it’s trying to offer some sort of advice about what to do in an older, mature relationship that’s set in its ways. It’s also, frankly, not as good as ‘A Little Is Enough’, which had a marvellous addictive hook (stolen from Prokofiev!) that perfectly matched the sentiments about knowing that a relationship is bad and not knowing how to leave it all the same. This song’s melody and words simply don’t fit and Roger struggles more than we’ve ever heard him trying to convey the message, singing at a slightly higher pitch then normal that really strains his vocal. That said there are some clever lines here that clearly hit a nerve with the Who’s aging audience, picking up on a real nostalgia feel when the narrator ‘escapes’ into the world of T Rex and ‘Who’s Next’, the band’s classy album released 10 years previously, a lovely self-reference that’s a nod to long-term fans who most likely were doing just that in their lives themselves. As with much of the album, there’s much to commend about ‘You Better You Bet’ but there’s an awful lot about this composition that rings false or sounds contrived and confused too.

The opposite problem could be said for ‘Don’t Let Go The Coat’, which features great lyrics and an awful tune and is the first Pete Townshend to be directly inspired by the sayings of Pete’s ‘guru’ Meher Baba since, well, ‘Who’s Next’ funnily enough. The song was inspired by a Baba teaching when he tells his followers they should ‘wear’ his sayings draped over their shoulders, as a ‘protection’ against life, but shouldn’t devote their full life to only following his word and neglecting themselves – or take the robe off completely and go against his sayings. Pete, feeling a spiritual neglect in the last half of the 70s, was clearly moved by the words. The song suits Roger’s more lived in and deeper voice well (he actually has a pretty high voice for a singer for most of the 60s and 70s, but with so much weight behind it that he ‘sounds’ deeper than he really is) and does a good job on what might well be Pete’s message to the rest of the band. He’s revealed in interviews since that at his lowest ebb in the late 70s, in a mess of booze and drugs, he asked the heavens whether he should be doing something more with his time than write rock and roll songs. The answer came back: ‘keep playing rock and roll till further notice’ (though whether a true vision or a hallucination Pete was never quite sure). Pete’s lyrics here , I think, are asking the band for help and forgiveness: the narrator realises he’s ‘lost’ contact with the spiritual force that gave him life (ie the band) and the ‘body’ the narrator needs isn’t a loved one but the ‘body’ of noise Pete can’t get on his solo albums. Equally, the line ‘It can’t be real rock and roll unless I’m hanging on to you’ only makes sense if Pete’s talking to the rest of the band.  In this context the line ‘I can’t bear to live forever as a loner’ is a really sad one that cuts much deeper than the usual ‘heartbreak’ songs and the line ‘I need your body, but I can’t just demand’ suggests that Pete really is trying to mend his ways. All this would have made for a terrific song had Pete allowed the band to put their touches onto the song as he promises in words – instead what we’re left with is a rather lumpy, leaden mid-tempo song. Entwistle’s bass has no room to work and Kenney Jones’ attempts to ‘do’ a Keith Moon by adding every touch of colour he can are easily his worst drumming on the album. Only Roger sounds as if he knows what Peter really means in this song, but its just too different and too, well, bland for Who lovers to take into their hearts as they should. Only the middle eight really comes alive, especially the harmonies that join in for the lines ‘I won’t let go like a stray at a heel’ (whatever that line means) and sound as if the band really is coming together at last.

‘Cache Cache’ is also an experiment too far and a song that I still don’t understand despite reading that Pete’s inspiration for it came one night when his insomnia was bad on holiday and he went out walking in Vienna till he found a zoo, staring back at the bears in the cage. The words, such as they are, are a series of rhetorical questions asking if the listener has ever had to put up with a series of hideous incidents, adding a very new wave ‘o-o-o-o-h’ singalong chorus. It could be that, like ‘Who Are You’ (the single), this is Pete trying to attack the younger generation on their own terms, claiming ‘I’m one of you’

Whilst at the same time looking down at youth from the hazy rose-tinted glow of middle-age. Pete seems to be putting down his own younger self at times in this song, laughing at the preposterous idea that he could ever believe that music could change the world and that ‘a smile’ can cure all and that a ‘happy face’ can keep you warm at night. The song ends with Roger’s narrator finally finding a golden bed of flowers, with all the contedness he’s ever dreamed of and sleeping there ‘for a hundred hours’ – his message seems to be to his younger self that, yes, I sold out and became all the things the younger generation now hate me for - but I couldn’t sleep in that rat-infested hobble anymore. The slightly turned-down tone of the band’s backing makes sense here, then, but sadly Roger’s at a loss for the words and the ‘o-o-o-o-oh’ backing and whispered ‘cache cache’ chorus quickly tires. There’s a neat frantic guitar solo, too, in which Pete out-classes all the punks 20 years his senior (alas there aren’t many of his solos on this album, which is a great shame). Also, at least Pete sounds inspired writing about his past in such a surreal way that only monkeynuts reviewers like me think they can ‘connect’ with what he’s writing and frankly I’d rather hear the ‘what the hell is going on?’ feel of this track than tired repeats on an old formula. I still don’t quite get where the bears fit in however (I don’t remember them being references in ‘My Generation’, to which this song is yet another reply by the elder Townshend, still shocked that he didn’t die and instead grew old).

My favourite track though, as we’ve seen, is Entwistle’s dementedly noisy ‘The Quiet One’, on which The Who rock as well as they ever did and John’s husky voice sounds like he’s been smoking a thousand packets of cigarettes a day. Pete is inspired to turn in another blinding solo, far more controlled and emotional than his normal recent solos and Kenney Jones proves that even if he can’t quite keep up with Keith Moon he can keep closer to him than most. The lyrics are, of course, hilarious, even for one of ‘The Ox’s songs: The Who’s heaviest song since ‘The Real Me’ eight years before is matched to a series of lyrics about how great it is to be quiet and how, unlike blabber-mouths, you can get more shock factor with what you say with the least amount of effort. Entwistle was, of course, unhappy with the band in this period and felt his ideas were being over-ruled (he was especially cross at the record company insisting that Roger had to sing most of his songs, although luckily he gets to keep this one fort himself). Perhaps that’s why he decides to scream this song rather than sing it and why it’s all so wonderfully loud. Many fans don’t like this track, seeing it as closer to heavy metal than rock, but frankly that’s wrong: players of The Who’s ability are simply too good to sound all leaden and lumpy like every example of that genre seems to be (being noisy for the sake of it starts being boring by track two of any heavy metal album) and Pete in particular adds the passion and emotion that the majority of heavy metal songs just don’t possess. Anyway, the band could be playing tubas and be backed by the spice girls and I’d still love this song for the great pay-off line ‘I ain’t quite, everyone else is too loud!’ (sung, naturally, at the top of John’s voice and across a barrage of heavy drumming!) This song sounded particularly good live, as you can hear if you own the CD copy of this album (even Pete says ‘that was most enjoyable’ at the end!)

‘Did You Steal My Money?’ is another song I love and no one else does, a very unique song for The Who that sounds closer to Madness’ blend of ska and rock than anything else the band ever did. Really taking sides against the youngsters now, this is Pete arguing that having no respect for anybody is a bad thing, especially in a moving middle eight about a war veteran banged on the head and robbed for his gold watch (he gets to keep his stitches, as Roger sings and Pete writes at their most sarcastic). The song is highlighted by a classy overdubbed multi-tracked vocal from Pete asking the title question over and over and finishing each other’s sentences, with Roger’s lead vocal sounding as if he’s being batted from side to side and doesn’t know how to escape. Hearing Pete and Roger bounce off each other is a delight (and doesn’t happen as often on this album as before) and Daltrey, especially, is on tremendous form, cajoling pleading patronising and demanding the question of the listener, not taking no for an answer. There’s also an interesting second verse that takes the song away from youths beating people up to look at other more respectable ways of doing the same thing (asking ‘did you steal my money?’ of agents, lawyers, managers and bankers) that give the song more depth. If only, though, the band had developed Pete’s two-line opening to the middle eight (‘How we can forgive a grievance now that we all live with demons?’ a very Townshend couplet about repercussions and ripples from certain actions that could have made for an even stronger song, especially with Pete singing the lines about how everyone has something to be sorry for in such an angelic falsetto!) Wow, two great tracks in a row, perhaps this album isn’t so bad after all?

Then again the second side of ‘Face Dances’ is quite possibly the weakest The Who ever made. The only listenable song out of the four tracks that make up this slab of vinyl happens to be the first one, ‘How Can You Do It Alone?’ and even that song sounded better as a rock-heavy jam heard in a few concerts during the first post-Moon shows (one of which is heard on the CD as a bonus track). Another unique song in The Who’s back catalogue, this piece is a story-song, with four verses that find the narrator accidentally coming across the people society has deigned are ‘wrong’ (sexual perverts, under-age girlie mag readers and eventually the narrator himself for wanting sex with his girlfriend when all she wants is a shower). I might be on shaky ground here but its easy to read this song as yet another in a long line of songs relating to Pete’s childhood trauma of abuse by an uncle (a fact that only came to light when Peter, researching the idea, logged onto a restricted pornographic site and was ‘cautioned’ by police). Like the less savoury passages on ‘Tommy’ (‘designed’ by Pete but given to Entwistle to write when Pete found them too hard to write), this song sounds like Pete trying to come to terms with offenders who do something wrong but that he and the band have deliberately white-washed the song so that it’s about people naked under raincoats and teens buying adult magazines rather than something worse. Roger copes well with another song far away from the usual Who type of material and Entwistle’s busy bass with the wandering hands is the perfect accompaniment. That said, the band could have made of the central idea of the chorus (namely ‘how can you do it alone?’), added in a proper resolution (the song merely fades on the chorus) and taken some of the repetition out (we hear the same identical chorus four times). There’s also a curious  instrumental burst using what sounds like bagpipes played on a synth (darn, there’s another one I could have added to our bagpipes top five a few weeks back!) and military drumming from Kenney Jones, which are impressive in and of itself but bear no resemblance to the rest of the song. A bit hit and miss then.

Frankly it’s an awful lot better than the tired new wave outburst ‘Daily Records’. As we’ve seen, the lyrics to this one are fine, if a bit oddball: Pete’s so into his songwriting that he thinks his suffering is good for his music and is anxious when he’s contented because for a songwriter that’s bad. Pete bemoans about growing older more directly than he ever has done before (‘no sooner do I work out how to wear my hair then they change it’ – compare with Quadrophenia where a change of style is a chance to be someone different and a new opportunity to define who you are). There’s also some great lines about how Pete’s records are ‘daily records’ about his life and growing older, about how this ‘stage in life’ is difficult because Pete still has to perform these songs on stage and, best of all, how everything that made him a ‘big star’ with his peers (booze, drugs, money, sex and rock and roll) ‘don’t impress’ his children who care nothing for such things. Had we heard this song with a normal Who backing or even as a gentle Townshend demo I’d love it – but oh God the backing to this song is dreadful. It’s as if The Who have lost all knowledge of how to rock and that they’re trying to ape a genre (new wave) that they don’t understand in an attempt to sound trendy, the very antithesis of what this song is all about. Roger sounds awful (like an old man singing along to his children’s records), Pete and John’s backing vocals are irritating beyond belief, Kenney Jones is all over the place, Entwistle struggles to find a place for him in this new alien style of music and over-plays for perhaps the only time on a Who record and Pete’s brief guitar solo is as bored and lifeless as they come. Only ‘Rabbit’ Brundrick comes out of this song well, adding some spoof-Abba piano chords to Townshend’s dramatic lines about a ‘stage’. Amazingly, worse is still to follow...

‘You’ is the second Entwistle song on the album and an awful disappointment after the greatness of ‘The Quiet One’. It’s the first in a pair of songs that end ‘Face Dances’ on a very down note indeed and seem to be about the problems within the band. While hearing about inter-band politics can be highly revealing (CSNY made it an art-form in the 1970s, with all four writing about each other time and time again), both of these songs sound like one long whinges. Enwtistle never spoke about this song as far as I know so we’ll never know, but for the record I think the first verse (about ‘making music’ before a ‘slap in the face’) sounds like Pete’s alcohol-fuelled mood swings of this period) and the third (about a ‘girl’ blowing hot and cold, depending on their mood with ‘poisonous eyes’) sound like Roger (the second is a rather generic verse seemingly added to make the song sound more like it’s about a marriage). John clearly wasn’t happy in this period being trapped in between Pete and Roger’s arguments without Keith there to soften the blow and to be honest nobody sounds that happy in the recording studio either. Roger tries to have fun with the sneering vocals but they cut too deeply to be the sort of song you can have ‘fun’ with and John’s menacing strutting bass line makes the whole sound more like a horror film than a pop song. A bit of a mess to be honest.

The album fizzles out altogether on ‘Another Tricky Day’, which is a lighter song from Townshend on the same subject, about how a friend gets off on their own ‘social crisis’, with every slight thing built up out of proportion. At long last Townshend lets rip on the guitar riffs as per The Who of old, but it’s on the wrong song: this is another curiously faceless MOR song that could have been recorded by anyone, with only the typical interplay between Pete and Roger to give it a ‘Who’ sound. It could be that Pete is getting his own back on the rest of the band and defending his actions on the last song, but then again the character having histrionics doesn’t sound like either John or Roger. Could it be that Pete is attacking himself in song again? Certainly the subject of the song seems to be some form of musician (hence the ‘rock and roll will never die’ in the end of the last chorus, sung more sadly than on ‘Long Live Rock’ in 1973). Certainly this song is pessimistic in the extreme, outdoing even Pete’s great 1967 masterpiece ‘Melancholia’ in how ‘life is worthless’ and the papers ‘bring heavier rain’. Me, I’m all for sad songs when the situation calls for it, but having a sad song about your inability to write anything happy is odd in the extreme and for all the gusto The Who put into this piece it’s a sorry end to conclude an album with. Like the rest of ‘Face Dances’ there are positives though: again ‘Rabbit’ is on top form, with his open chords nagging the narrator on to greater things and a sweet reflective moment near the end of the song that promises great things before sadly falling back on a straight fourth repeat of one of Pete’s less inspiring choruses.

‘Face Dances’ ends on a sorry note, as if the band arguments and frailties and the doubts of whether a band in their mid 30s should still be making rock and roll music are peeking through the surface of how this is The Who’s big re-invention of themselves as an older, mature band. There are good points to be had on nearly every song on this album, but hardly any of these songs actually congeal into anything as substantial as in the days of old. Had the band continued I fancy I’d have liked ‘Face Dances’ a lot more, as the flawed attempt to find a new sound before the band finally mastered the art of sounding older and wiser without losing the raw power that made the band’s name. To be honest The Who had to do something after Keith Moon died and it’s good that at least they tried to adapt to their new, slower sound rather than trying to sound like they used to, but worse. But then arguably Pete Townshend had been trying to adapt and change the band’s sound ever since day one (and especially since Keith began to fall apart and play more erratically somewhere around 1973). This album proves how great the original Who sound was more by what’s missing than what’s there and to be honest is an album made for Who aficionados only – although then again, after going through the highs and lows of The Who story and heard just how much empathy and emotion is in most Who recordings how we could we all be anything but Who aficionados? 

A complete collection of Who reviews:

'The Who Sing My Generation' (1965) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2014/07/the-who-sing-my-generation-1965.html

'A Quick One While He's Away' (1966) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2010/07/news-views-and-music-issue-67-who-quick.html

'Sell Out' (1967) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2008/07/19-who-sell-out-1967.html

‘Tommy’ (1969) http://www.alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/the-who-tommy-1969.html

'Live At Leeds' (1970) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2008/07/review-33-who-live-at-leeds-1970.html

'Lifehouse' (As It Might Have Been) (1971) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2010/11/news-views-and-music-issue-81-who.html

'Who's Next' ('Lifehouse' As It Became) (1971) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2008/12/news-views-and-music-issue-14-who-whos.html

'Quadrophenia' (1973) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2008/07/review-60-who-quadrophenia-1973.html

'The Who By Numbers' (1975) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2008/07/review-69-who-by-numbers-1975.html

'Who Are You' (1978) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2008/07/review-72-who-who-are-you-1978.html

'Face Dances' (1979)  http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/news-views-and-music-issue-137-who-face.html

'Empty Glass' (Townshend solo 1980) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2008/07/pete-townshend-empty-glass-1980.html

'It's Hard' (1982) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.com/2013/11/the-who-its-hard-1982-album-review.html

'Endless Wire' (2006) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.com/2016/11/the-who-endless-wire-2006.html

‘WHO’ (2019) https://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.com/2019/12/the-who-who-2019.html

'Quadrophenia' (Director's Cut Box Set) (2012) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/abeach-is-place-where-man-can-feel-hes.html

Surviving Who TV Clips 1965-2015 https://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2017/09/the-who-surviving-tv-and-film-clips.html

Non-Album Recordings Part One 1964-1967 https://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2017/09/the-who-non-album-recordings-part-one.html

Non-Album Recordings Part Two 1968-2014 https://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2017/09/the-who-non-album-recordings-part-two.html

Pete Townshend “Scoop” 1-3 https://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2017/08/the-who-pete-townshends-scoop-demo.html

The Best Unreleased Who Recordings https://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2017/09/the-who-best-unreleased-recordings.html

Live/Solo/Rarities/Competition Albums Part One 1965-1972

https://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2017/10/the-who-livesolocompilationrarities.html

Live/Solo/Rarities/Competition Albums Part Two 1972-1975 https://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2017/10/the-who-livesolocompilationrarities_9.html

Live/Solo/Rarities/Compilation Albums Part Three 1976-1982

https://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2017/10/the-who-livesolocompilationrarities_16.html

Live/Solo/Rarities/Compilation Albums Part Four 1983-1990 https://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2017/10/the-who-livesolocompilationrarities_23.html

Live/Solo/Rarities/Compilation Albums Part Five 1991-2000 https://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2017/10/the-who-livesolocompilationrarities_30.html

Live/Solo/Rarities/Compilation Albums Part Six 2001-2014
https://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2017/11/the-who-livesolocompilationrarities.html

Landmark Concerts and Key Cover Versions http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.com/2018/07/the-who-five-landmark-concerts-and.html

Essay: Who Are You And Who Am I?: http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.com/2018/07/the-who-essay-who-are-you-and-who-am-i.html

News, Views and Music Issue 137 (Intro)

March 10th:

Good morrow dear readers, has another week gone by so quickly?! Well, actually it hasn’t – you may have noticed these newsletters are becoming earlier and earlier the last few weeks. The reason for that is partly because I’m making the most of peace and quiet if I know I’ll have a few hours on my own to write to you all and partly because I can feel another CFS crash coming and want to give myself a bit of spare time. Of course we also had the sad passing of Davy Jones which I just had to mark – how strange that day was, I’d literally just logged off from starting work on a review of ‘The Monkees Present’ when the news broke and I had poor Davy’s face looking back at me from Yahoo News. Doubtless we’ll return to that review in the future but after a week of saluting Davy and playing Monkees albums all week I thought I’d write about something different entirely. So, what have I been up to since the last review? Youtubing mainly – I am now the proud owner of lots of 10cc B-sides I never thought I’d ever get to hear, a whole host of early Simon and Garfunkel tracks their makers have been trying to bury since the mid-60s (you really shouldn’t chaps, they’re ever so good considering the young age at which you made them) and most of three solo CSN albums that cost a packet to buy now they’re out of print (‘Oh Yes I Can!’ ‘Stills Alone’ and ‘Songs For Survivors’ respectively). In the meantime I see my twitter followers have grown to a tremendous height (236 now, welcome all!) and our website hits have gone up steadily and have now reached 14900! Excellent! Now is the time to take over the world I think hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahah  ahahahahahahahahahaha! (well I can’t make more of a mess of it than David Cameron surely?)

Talking of which, there have been two Cameron speeches that have got me really mad this week (even more than usual!) First up, is it just me or can Cameron not take a question from a female MP without resorting to some sort of innuendo? His ‘I’d normally love to pleasure my honourable friend but I can’t at the moment’ wouldn’t have been out of place in a Carry On film. And what was all that horrendous speech about the state of our country all about? ‘We should be fairer and more democratic’ ran the headlines in the papers, alongside details about how the Coalition never actually won a majority of the public vote and shouldn’t be in power at all! (For those who read the Daily Mail and don’t know, their first act in office was to over-rule the law regarding coalition Governments formed when no party won a majority of the vote, which should till 2010 have only lasted six months before we all head to the polls again). David Cameron gone by Christmas, that’s what we say.

By the way, we don’t include them as fully formed AAA members but some of you may be interested to know that Jethro Tull are working on a sequel to my favourite of their LPs ‘Thick As A Brick’ (the one that’s all one long song and featured a replica of a newspaper as part of the artwork). We’ll keep you posted how things are going and wonder which AAA albums we can expect sequels of sometime too (Sgt Pepper’s OAP Band? The Hollies ‘Evolution vs Creationism’? The Moody Blues ‘Days Of Future Long Since Gone’?  Neil Young’s ‘After After The Goldrush’?) OK I’ve run out of bad puns now, it’s on with the news...

                                                    

♫ Beatles News: There’s a repeat of the little heard and fascinating ‘McCartney on McCartney’ interview series starting on Friday in the 4am documentary slot on BBC4. First on air in 1988, the year before Macca’s big ‘touring comeback’, its especially fascinating for Macca’s thoughts about the solo and Wings years and is the most comprehensive interview around for Macca’s thoughts about the early 1980s (Lennon’s death, the Tokyo prison incident, working with Michael Jackson and Stevie Wonder, etc).

♫ Belle and Sebastian News: BBC6 are celebrating their 10^th anniversary with a series of programmes dedicated to each year from the past 10 years and the sessions recorded especially for the channel. That’s a very good idea and a good chance for collectors to get hold of some badly needed repeats, although sadly it means the station is concentrating on the ‘nightmare wilderness of music’ years 2002-2012. So not much AAA music going on there then. The one exception is a B+S broadcast in the ‘2006’ show which aired last Friday in the 3am ‘Live Music Hour’ slot (and should be available on BBC I-player for a while). Alas this show is centred around the less than wonderful ‘Life Pursuit’ album, although the songs sound rather better than they did on the record.

ANNIVERSARIES: Here we go again for another week of AAA birthdays, this time around for musicians born between March 6^th and 12^th: David Gilmour (guitarist with Pink Floyd 1968-94) who turns 65 on March 6^th and Micky Dolenz (drummer and actor with The Monkees 1966-70) who turns 67 on March 8^th. Anniversaries of events include: The Rolling Stones record their first live album – Got Live If You Want It – during a gig in Liverpool on March 6^th 1965; The Beatles release their last ever single in the UK with ‘Let It Be’ on March 6^th 1970, over a year after it’s recording; the first time British stars fill up the whole of the UK top 10 (including AAA members The Searchers at no 5 with ‘Needles and Pins’ and The Rolling Stones at no 6 with ‘Not Fade Away’) (March 7^th 1964); The Beatles appear on the radio for the first time singing ‘Dream Baby’ on ‘Teenagers Turn’ a full seven months before their first single release (March 8^th 1962); The legendary Fillmore East venue - or ‘Fillmore Esat’ as they famously mis-spelled it on their advertising banner – opens in San Francisco and will become home to the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane among others (March 8^th 1968); Pigpen aka Ron McKernan, organist and founder of The Grateful Dead, dies of liver failure on March 8^th 1973; The Beatles release their last ever EP after breaking every EP record in the book over the past four years (‘Yesterday’, which never was a single in the UK, is released on March 10^th 1966); The Blue Jays – Moody Blues members Justin Hayward and John Lodge – perform their first gig at the Albert Hall (March 10^th 1975); Paul Simon gets a gold record for his best-selling solo single ’50 Ways To Leave Your Lover’ (March 11^th 1976); Paul and Linda McCartney tie the knot at Marleybone Registry Office (March 12^th 1969) and finally, John Lennon gets evicted from Los Angeles’ Troubadour Club after heckling the Smothers Brothers, an act that makes him question the wisdom of continuing his ‘lost weekend’ (March 12^th 1974).

News, Views and Music Issue 136: Davy Jones Tribute Special

Davy Jones Obituary 1945-2012

We’ve lost an awful lot of leading lights since I started writing Alan’s Album Archives and now, just 20 issues on from Bert Jansch, there’s another glittering star shining brightly in the sky, because Davy Jones, the youngest of the Monkees, has died of a heart attack in the early hours of February 29^th. To the outside world it might seem strange that there’s been so much fuss over an actor/musician who came from a ‘manufactured band’ and who last had a substantial hit over 40 years ago, with his TV appearances since then few and far between too. But to us fans Davy’s loss is monumental because all of us thought we knew him well – even those like me who never actually met him –with each new generation given the chance to fall in love with The Monkees via repeats of the episodes played all over the world. The thought that there are only three Monkees left in the world from that magical place in our childhood is an awful realisation, like the death of Santa Claus or the tooth fairy.

Generous to his fans, with a twinkling mischievous smile, self-deprecating wit, a unique spirited ‘Davy’ dance and the perfect mix of a musical and acting background needed for the world’s first multimedia experiment, Davy was one of the most natural stars of the 1960s, flamboyant but down-to-earth and seemingly more ‘at home’ with the often wayward world of celebrity than other teenage heroes of the day. How thrilled the creators of The Monkees must have been when a real life star walked into their office to audition for the part of a teenage Beatles-wannabe. You only need to watch the audition tapes of Davy (as featured at the end of the pilot episode of the TV series and now found complete on Youtube) to realise how much of a star Davy was even before he was in the band/TV series that shaped the rest of his life. Millions upon millions of fans, especially the teenage girls it has to be said, were more thrilled still when the TV series made it to the airwaves and turned Davy into perhaps the teen idol of the 1960s (back in the pre-Justin Bieber days when being a teen idol was still a good thing to aspire to). Despite being hired primarily as an actor playing the part of a musician, Davy also got the hang of the whole singing and writing thing pretty well too, creating some of the greatest of all Monkees songs on their later albums and singing lead on two of the band’s biggest hits ‘Daydream Believer’ and ‘Valleri’. Even if the years after the band’s break-up in 1970 were fairly quiet, Davy had experienced more in those four years than most stars do in a lifetime and yet still came out of it the same grinning, exuberant, enthusiastic star who went into it. Davy was everything you could ask of a star and filled his role with good grace, leaving the music and acting world now with a hole an awful lot bigger than the 5”3 frame Davy filled on Earth.

Even without the Monkees parts in it, the Davy Jones story is still a fascinating one, a real rags-to-riches tale of a teenager from Openshaw, Manchester, born into comparative poverty who overcame everything to become a star. Born on 30^th December 1945 – three years to the day after fellow Monkee Mike Nesmith – Davy spent most of his childhood caught between the pull of the showbiz lights and the excitement of the horse-races that his dad Harry took him to. Davy’s first ever stage appearance was at his school Christmas play (as a ‘spear-holder’), with acting the highlight of an education he claimed not to enjoy and Davy quickly worked his way up to more prestigious parts, clearly relishing his time in the spot-light. At the same time he had very serious dreams about becoming a jockey, spending most of his ‘family time’ with his dad at local race-tracks and submersing himself in the world of racing. Davy was still idly chasing both dreams when his mother Doris passed away of emphysema, a lung disease, when Davy was just 14, after a long protracted illness – incidentally, the same age as the 1960s’ other heart-throb, Paul McCartney, when he lost his mother. Perhaps realising that life was too short to spend doing something he didn’t want to do, Davy successfully managed to convince his dad to leave his school-days behind him and, too shy to push for a showbiz career just yet, sent off to become an apprentice jockey at Newmarket Racetrack (after an advert was posted in the Manchester Evening Post).

Davy did well, with his 5”3 height a great asset to him and those who were there in his early days remember being impressed with the sheer effort Davy put into not only riding the horses but all the extra work involved such as mucking out stables and grooming the ponies. However Davy quickly fell foul of his trainer by absent-mindedly singing pop songs round the stables and scaring the horses! Impressed by his singing – and a series of impromptu concerts Davy had starred in at the local town hall - Davy’s close friend at the stables Basil Foster managed to convince an agent friend of his into having a look at the lad in action. The agent was impressed with what he saw, promptly added him to his list of clients and Davy apparently knew nothing about it until Foster gave him a lift back to his lodgings and passed on the good news. Davy spent the rest of the journey cracking jokes about being a ‘jockeying actor’ and thought little would come of it – but it did. Davy soon got the part of a ‘juvenile delinquent’ for a now-forgotten radio play called ‘There Is A Land’, still only aged 15, which led to an appearance on the TV show ‘Z Cars’. After that he secured Manchester’s equivalent of the big time: playing the part of Colin Lomax, Ena Sharples’ grandson on Coronation Street! Davy didn’t last on the programme very long – only half a dozen or so appearances – but his profile was clearly on the rise, which led to a touring production of ‘Peter Pan’ signing him up to play the part of Michael, the brother of Wendy in J. M. Barrie’s play.

As luck would have it, Wendy was played in that production by Jane Asher (later the fiancé of Paul McCartney) and it was she who encouraged Davy to put his name forward when the creators of Lionel Bart’s musical ‘Oliver!’, based on the Dickens novel Oliver Twist, were in urgent need of a teenager to play the ‘Artful Dodger’. Davy passed the audition and the show became one of the big successes of the day, later ending up on Broadway - Davy even secured a Tony award nomination for his role. Jones, now aged 18, was clearly already set to be something of a star even if The Monkees hadn’t come along – until another quirk of fate came into his life. Davy had agreed to sign up as part of ‘Oliver!’ when it went touring round the States and by chance the travelling troupe ended up performing on the very same Ed Sullivan Show as The Beatles’ first American appearance – the very same edition that still holds the record today for having the biggest teenage audience of any programme.

Although he’d sung in ‘Oliver!’ and enjoyed his records, Davy had never before considered music as a career choice, seeing himself as more of an actor. But watching the screaming girls fall over themselves to get to The Beatles made him think about making records of his own and, while touring with a follow-up production of ‘The Pickwick Papers’, took time out to record the ‘Davy Jones’ record for Colpix. A curious mix of novelty English pop (‘Any Old Iron’ and ‘Maybe It’s Because I’m A Londoner’ – back in the days when Americans assumed every Brit was a cockney rather than a Merseybeater) and some actually pretty good contemporary power ballads, ‘Davy Jones’ was a respectable seller for an unknown, scoring at the bottom end of the charts (which is, actually, more than the last Monkees record managed to achieve in 1970!) The slight success of the record even led to the first ever Monkees fanclub dedicated just to Davy. Jones himself later referred to the record as ‘garbage’, but for an untested 19-year-old in his first professional recordings made in a foreign land (Davy had been in America just months when he made it), it’s actually pretty darn impressive, with Davy already confident with his vocals and developing a style that was all his own. (You can see the sleeve for this record in the ‘Monkees At The Movies’ episode of the TV series’ first season, when the Monkees are trying to groom Davy as the latest beach movie star). However, in retrospect the greatest move that Davy made in this period was to sign with Columbia Pictures, who continued to groom Davy for stardom in a number of B-movie films, a guest part in the series ‘The Farmer’s Daughter’ (in which he sings Boyce and Hart song ‘I’m Gonna Buy Me A Dog’, soon to be recorded by Davy in The Monkees, oddly enough) and own the rights to his music releases. One television idea written around Davy that sadly never happened is a series about a policeman who is the only person in the world who can see a leprechaun, a format loosely based on the successful (and often Monkees-related) show ‘Bewitched’ with its witches and warlocks in a ‘mortal’ setting. When that project fell apart, some considerable time into the planning stage, Davy was offered ‘The Monkees’ as a sort of compensation for taking up so much of his time.

It wasn’t till the 1990s that Davy revealed that, contrary to the usual story about how The Monkees met, he’d never actually auditioned for the TV series. Instead, as one of Columbia’s up and coming stars, he was an obvious choice for the pencilled-in sketchy idea for a TV show Bob Rafelson and Bert Schneider had come up with to mop up the ‘mop tops’ Beatle craze sweeping the nation and with his acting and musical background was an obvious choice to play the part of a musician (even though, uniquely among The Monkees, he never learnt how to play an instrument). At this point, in mid 1966, Davy is very much signing up to play the part of a musician and only later gets involved in the music side of things – despite being, along with Mike Nesmith, the only Monkee to have any professional recording experience. Apparently Davy was even present at the audition dates for Mike and Peter Tork, with Rafelson and Schneider looking for his input over the other members to cast, and only really started auditioning with the others when the lengthy auditioning process had gone down from around 2000 applicants to the final eight.

That might account for why, at first, relations between the four men weren’t too strong. One story that’s gone down into folklore is an early pre-filming day when the four Monkees-to-be were left together to have a meal. More used to fame than his colleagues (barring Micky Dolenz, who’d been a child star in ‘Circus Boy’) and still full of his working class British upbringing, Davy is meant to have fumed ‘you three all eat like pigs!’, causing a huge in-take of breath from everyone around the table, waiting for an explosion that would see him or them fired. Realising that he had gone too far and trying to defuse the situation, Davy picked up a salad bowl and then started oinking like a pig, something that set all three fellow Monkees laughing and was said by all four men to be what broke the ice between them all. In the end The Monkees did became close, despite what you may have read in the press, finding much in common despite coming from four very different backgrounds, with Davy even sharing a house with Micky before money from the band came through (similarly Peter Tork spent his first few weeks on the project sleeping on local lad Mike Nesmith’s couch!) Another food-related tale says everything you need to know about Davy’s upbringing. For most of Davy’s childhood his family had been unable to buy anything more than a staple diet so when Davy became ‘big’ in his own right – during the early days of ‘Oliver!’ – he made up for lost time by ordering steak for every single meal for a time, including breakfast!

The Monkees’ story itself wasn’t all plain sailing, however. An early edit of the TV Pilot had been shown to an invited audience who simply didn’t understand the series at all, complaining that there were too many camera-cuts (The Monkees series has almost as many as current times and at least three times more than the average 1960s TV show) and not enough, well, Monkees. Rafelson and Schneider were so angered by the reception that they actually hid the results from their superiors, afraid that the show would be prevented from making it to the air without a chance to prove itself. Instead, it became a big hit with youngsters practically everywhere. Like the other three, Davy’s character was a struggling wannabe musician, one who loved The Beatles and wanted a piece of their fame, a condition experienced by so many youngsters of the day that The Monkees TV show was all but guaranteed some form of success. Davy ends up taking the lead role in a majority of the early episodes, suggesting perhaps that the producers trusted Davy’s background more than the other three and the writers quickly came up with the on-screen personality of ‘Davy’ as a fun-loving girl-chasing romantic lovesick teenager. One notable aspect of ‘Davy’s character as portrayed in the TV show was his conscience, with his guilt over getting his latest conquest into trouble over flunking her exams, his shame over his hand-to-mouth existence when his dad pays him a visit and his concern for a princess who nearly drowns in the sea outside The Monkees’ beach home just a few examples of the early episodes. Basically Davy was a kind, groovy teenage heart-throb, one with his own unique ‘Monkee’ dance and who was clearly ‘now’ with his long-hair and Englishness (very in fashion in America in The Monkees years) but a straightforward personality that mothers and grandmothers could love alongside their teenage daughters. As Micky later put it, The Monkees helped put ‘long haired youths’ onto television for the first time in a positive setting, something that’s often under-estimated by modern reviewers. Whilst Davy was never the ‘lead singer’ as the obituaries in this week’s papers put it (the whole point of The Monkees was that it was a democracy), Davy nevertheless played an important part as the ‘heart-throb’ of the band, both on screen and on record. However it was never explained in the series how a kid from Manchester ended up living in America (or why the other three Monkees came from different states for that matter!)

Remember the Monkees episode where Davy’s dad comes to see him and Davy, unwilling to break his heart over what a mess he’s made of his life, gets the other Monkees to pretend that he’s really a big star? In actual fact, the truth was pretty much the opposite to that. One of the most requested clips from The Monkees’ interviews (often included on the end of under-running episodes) is Davy’s tale of when he went back to Manchester at Christmas 1966 acting like a big star – and his dad wouldn’t let him in the house until he’s had a haircut. The first wasn’t short enough for Jones senior so Davy was sent round to the barbers to get another one! Davy always ended the story by adding ‘...so I bought him a house and now he can’t kick me out, however long I grow my hair!’ In actual fact Davy had ‘bought’ his dad a house at the earliest opportunity because his dad Harry was growing steadily more ill in this early Monkees period and had been forced to leave his job. This must have been all the more difficult for his son, still only 20 when The Monkees TV series first aired and an ocean away from his family, to cope with. Harry Jones eventually passed away sometime during The Monkees years (none of the reference books I have say quite when), leaving Davy an orphan in his early 20s and having to deal with that fact a whole ocean apart from most of his relatives, something Davy coped with stoically and never admitted to while The Monkees were still a unit.

Davy threw himself into his work and it was just as well he did because there was an awful lot of work to do. As well as his ‘role’ in the series, almost by default Davy found himself becoming the band’s second-lead singer. It had been decided early on that as the TV series was about a bunch of wannabe musicians they should make music a key part of the show’s appeal. Whilst Nesmith and Tork were the band’s natural musicians, Colgems (the record-subsidiary of Columbia Pictures) felt that Davy’s suddenly in-fashion ‘English’ vocals were more suitable for many of the songs written for the band (mainly by Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart, then later Neil Diamond, Carole King, Leiber and Stoller and many more) and, alongside Dolenz, Jones ended up spending many a long day in the recording studio alongside his work on the film-set. As we’ve said before on this site, The Monkees’ work-rate between 1966 and 1968 was staggering: music for five albums, several singles and all 58 episodes of their TV show in an 18 month period – other musicians may have moaned about the band not ‘paying their dues’ going to gigs in dirty transit vans, but The Monkees truly were worked to the bone in this period. And all that meant that Davy Jones, groomed from the beginning as the heart-throb of the band, was suddenly everywhere, on the radio, on the TV and in the press.

However, the wheels began to fall off the Monkees’ travelling circus almost before it began. When Mike Nesmith admitted to a reporter that the band didn’t always play on their records (but wanted to) the repercussions were immense, with several (mainly jealous and struggling) bands who didn’t get the point about The Monkees being first and foremost a television project doing everything they could to attack the band. Of The Monkees themselves, both Nesmith and Tork had been growing tired of having no input into ‘their’ band (infamously the four of them actually had to buy a copy of second album ‘More Of The Monkees’ to find out what was on it, because no record company official had bothered to consult them) and over time Dolenz too was beginning to agree with their point of view. Eventually even Monkees creators Bob and Bert agreed the Monkees should have their chance in the studio. But Davy, still thinking of himself as a hired actor first and musician second, was reluctant to jump ship when the band were proving to be such a success (he was, after all, trying to pay for the upkeep of his poorly dad). This resulted in one of the strangest moments in early Monkee history when the band’s ‘musical producer’ Don Kirshner recorded a series of sessions with just Davy’s involvement, eventually releasing Davy’s first vocal on a single on a cover of Neil Diamond’s ‘A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You’. The single was released under the title ‘My Favourite Monkee – Davy Jones Sings!’, which tells you everything you need to know about how Davy, the youngest of the band, was being groomed for stardom. Aghast at having their ideas ignored Bert and Bob fired Kirshner from his role as ‘musical executive’ and gave the band their chance to break free, recording ‘Headquarters’ between the four of them (plus producer Chip Douglas – of The Turtles – an occasional guest bassist and a violin section) and started to cut the ties of their old way of life. It says much about Davy’s easy-going side that far from being ousted or distanced by the others he became a key part of the resulting album sessions, recording some of his best vocals for the album and making the most of the new-found freedom by recording in his more natural baritone voice (not a ‘tenor’ part as most of the early Monkees sessions had made him). He also played a pretty mean tambourine, adding a much needed regular rhythm to a still-learning band (Micky, especially, had only had about half a dozen drumming lessons before making the record and the band’s arrangements often used Davy’s percussion in this period as the main rhythm section, something he coped with admirably). Davy was also an enthusiastic part of The Monkees’ touring show, performing ‘I Wanna Be Free’ ‘I Can’t Get Her Off My Mind’ and ‘Forget That Girl’ to a whole sea of crowds all chanting ‘Davy! Davy! Davy!’ at him. The band even hired the then-unknown Jimi Hendrix Experience as an opening act – the future guitar star spent most of his first tour in his own act playing to the same seas of crowds chanting ‘Davy! Davy! Davy!’

For the moment Davy was safe, willing to go along with the band’s new ideas even whilst he didn’t want to bite the hand that fed him, but another incident in July 1967 nearly spelled the end even more dramatically. Despite being a British citizen, Davy was deemed to be ‘American’ by virtue of living in the country to work – and so was unlucky enough to be eligible for the dreaded draft during the middle years of the Vietnam war. The news that Davy was now in uniform was even reported as fact in many teen magazines of the day and the show producers even went as far as talking to Mickey Rooney’s son about becoming Davy’s replacement, but in the end it was pleaded to the draft board that Harry Jones’ medical condition meant he was relying on his son for income. Back in 1967 it was a written rule that such circumstances for Americans would automatically be exempt from the draft – but Davy’s circumstances were unusual in that his family still lived in England and Davy was still paying for his father’s upkeep by wiring funds out to Manchester, instead of keeping them within the country. The situation was a delicate one that took lots of negotiation to resolve and was a worrying time for Davy and the band, even if much of it was kept out of the press at the time.

Instead The Monkees trundled on, although the response to ‘Headquarters’ was surprisingly lukewarm, with an open field day declared on The Monkees despite their resolve to play on all their material. As a result the band’s second TV series slipped slowly down the ratings, with the band clearly showing the strain of 18 months of ridiculously hard work and many complaints from the four Monkees over the recycled scripts passed over for the first series. Many of the Monkees got involved with the backstage craft of the series (Micky and peter directed an episode each and Micky wrote the final episode ‘The Frodis Caper’), but Davy was content just to be an actor. However away from the series he got more and more involved in both recording and promotion during this period, with Davy even commissioning the distinctive ‘silhouette’ cover for fourth album ‘Pisces Aquarius, Capricorn and Jones Ltd’ from a friend. He also discovered and co-produced a Texas band called ‘The Children’, who made it all the way to #2 in the Billboard charts with their single ‘Picture Me’, although sadly it ended up becoming the only hit the group ever had. Ever busy, Davy also started two boutique businesses in the tail end of the 1960s, including ‘Zilch’ (named after a Monkee song – well, Monkee spoken gibberish – from the ‘Headquarters’ album) and ‘The Street’. For both of these ventures Davy worked with his friend and own stand-in from the TV series David Pearl, although sadly Davy was forced to cancel both ventures after a few years when it turned out Pearl had been ‘mismanaging funds’ (Davy won a resulting court-case looking into the affair).

Perhaps most importantly, Davy also got involved in writing his own songs, co-writing his first piece with Monkees roadie Charlie Rockett and session musician Kim Capaldi, creating ‘Hard To Believe’ for the ‘Pisces, Aquarius’ album – again, note Davy’s willingness to work with people from the show despite his supposedly ‘lofty’ status as a ‘star’. Soon after, Davy writing regularly with a songwriter named Steve Pitts, creating lots of loved songs including many on our ‘top ten’ list below and some of the Monkees’ bravest material such as the anti-Vietnam ‘War Games’ (sadly not released till the 1980s). In fact I’d go so far as to say that Davy was the band’s most consistent writer, creating several classy (if too often forgotten) songs on four of the band’s nine albums, unlike the up-and-down careers of Nesmith, Dolenz and Tork. More of a fan of lyrics, Davy tended to write the words to a set of chord changes Pitts came up with before the pair of them would work on a melody-line. Davy then went on to work with Monkees auditionee Bill Chadwick, writing a last flurry of songs that remain among The Monkees’ best material. Perhaps the most interesting collaborations, however, were never released, when Davy collaborated with up-and-coming musicals writer Charlie Smalls (later co-creator of ‘The Wiz’, the African-American version re-working of ‘The Wizard Of Oz’). The pair wrote lots of songs together and apparently recorded a few of them for The Monkees (sadly still not released) – a snippet of the pair singing ‘A Girl Named Love’ in one of the final episodes of the TV series is all that’s been issued to date. Davy continued to write songs on his own after The Monkees’ breakup, adding his own compositions to both of The Monkees’ reunion albums ‘Pool It! (1986) and ‘Just Us’ (1997), as well as a small handful of solo albums. Around this time, in early 1968, Davy also sang lead on two of the better known Monkees singles, ‘Daydream Believer’ (a song by John Stewart) which became the band’s last number one single and ‘Valleri’, a Boyce and Hart song with an odd history (Radio DJs, starved of Monkees music, began taping the soundtrack of the Monkees’ TV series where a 1967 recording of ‘Valleri’ became their  most requested song – alas a Monkees agreement that only songs recorded or produced by them should be released meant that the band had to record a second version for release as a single the following year).

With The Monkees a dying brand the band discovered that they were still contracted to appear in a film, commissioned at the peak of Monkeemania. Creators Bob Rafelson and Bert Schneider, realising that anything they released would probably flop anyway, decided to drop their ideas of expanding a TV episode and make ‘Head’, a surreal boundary-breaking film that sought to end their involvement in The Monkees’ story (following its release the pair back out of the Monkees to work with a then-unknown Jack Nicholson, who co-wrote the ‘Head’ screenplay). Perhaps surprisingly, all four Monkees were enthusiastic supporters of a film that has very little in connection with the band’s TV show or indeed any other film ever made. A tirade against show-business falseness, breaking the ‘third-wall’ by showing how a film is produced, channel-hopping between genres every few minutes and most controversially including the first ever footage of a real death on screen (a Vietnamese soldier being executed, shown in between Looney Tunes cartoons and dandruff adverts as an ‘outcry’ against how life is treated in the then-modern world), ‘Head’ is the pinnacle of The Monkees’ story, a glorious mind-expanding film that was guaranteed to lose money at the box office (the fact that promotions made no reference to The Monkees or that Head was even a film only exacerbated the fact). Davy only gets to sing one song on the soundtrack (‘Daddy’s Song, a Harry Nilsson number) but he’s a key figure in the film, getting to box with heavyweight champion Sonny Liston (and Davy really does appear to get hurt, unlike a similar episode in the TV series), finding himself locked in a box where everything plays in monochrome (Davy’s best dance sequence) and finding himself trapped in a giant vacuum cleaner.

Against all odds The Monkees kept going, lasting for one more TV special as a foursome (’33 and 1/3^rd Revolutions Per Monkee’, another brave idea ruined by a TV strike, poor sound and a less sympathetic script) before Peter Tork left. The Monkees were clearly a dying species, but that didn’t prevent Davy from making some of his best recordings with the group, from the fiery ‘You and I’ (complete with Neil Young guitar solo) to the timeless ‘Time and Time Again’) on the next two albums ‘Instant Replay’ and ‘The Monkees Present’. Finally Mike Nesmith left the band and Micky and Davy recorded one last LP ‘Changes’ under the Monkees name and a further single under their own names before calling it a day.

Davy also got married secretly to first wife Linda Haines in this period, during a secret ceremony in 1968, almost at the same time that Micky got married to Top Of The Pops presenter Samantha Juste. The pair also had children at a similar time, with Davy’s first daughter Talia Elizabeth born in October 1968, making Davy a dad at the age of just 23. Three other daughters followed, Sarah Lee in 1971, Jessica Lillian in 1981 and Annabel Charlotte in 1988 and two other marriages, the most recent being to television presenter Jessica Pacheco in 2009. Davy managed to keep his first marriage secret until late 1969 when a news reporter broke the story and helped to end the series by putting off so many of Davy’s loyal fans. Despite The Monkees being pretty un-news worthy by 1969, shots of heart-stricken fans waving banners saying ‘Davy, you should have told us!’ still managed to make front-page headlines.

Davy said later that the biggest regret of his career was trying to continue as a musician and an actor in the two markets that had been so tarnished by The Monkees’ name and that he wished he’d gone back to horse-racing straight away, still very much a hobby for him at the time. But if so that would have robbed us of some of Davy’s best music, especially his first solo single ‘Rainy Jane’ in 1971, now seen as something of a pop classic. Another five singles followed in the early 70s, including ‘Girl’ , a track that won Davy many new fans when he sang it on an episode of ‘The Brady Show Bunch’. Davy’s cameo was so successful that this led to a whole new line of work in children’s shows, with Davy appearing in ‘The Brady Show Movie’ , doing voice-overs for ‘The Scooby Doo Show’, appearing in two episodes of ‘Here Comes The Brides’ and in more recent times ‘Sabrina The Teenage Witch’ ‘Hey Arnold’ and even ‘The Spongebob Squarepants Movie’ (where, in a very Monkees-style pun, he plays ‘Davy Jones’, who has a locker at the bottom of the sea).

Meanwhile Davy had never quite left the Monkees behind. Along with Micky and the Monkees’ original songwriters he toured as Dolenz, Jones, Boyce and Hart for a while in the mid-70s, recording a somewhat patchy album (although psychedelic single ‘Moonshine’ is as good as any Monkees recording) and undergoing a couple of very successful tours (especially in Japan where the band were as big as they ever were). However the reunion didn’t last, with the four going their separate ways soon after. Perhaps Davy’s most lasting achievement in this period was in returning to the stage, again with a Monkees connection when Davy appeared alongside Micky Dolenz in regular Monkee songwriter Harry Nilsson’s musical ‘The Point’ in 1978. Now sadly forgotten, the play-musical was a big hit at the time and inspired a slight return of interest in the Monkees. The play/musical ran in London’s West End for a long time, with Davy playing the ‘good’ and Micky the ‘bad’ inhabitants of a world of exotic creatures who are all born with ‘points’ at the top of their heads (except for Davy, who doesn’t have one and is therefore ‘pointless’). The success meant Davy moved back to England properly for the first time in 15 years and he alternated between a base in Manchester and Philadelphia, America for the rest of his life. Micky moved to England too and the pair socialised more than they ever had in The Monkees days (with their children becoming great friends), although sadly a falling out towards the end of the show’s run put paid to any Monkees reunions for the time being and meant the two former best friends didn’t speak to each other for some years.

However the 1980s saw an even bigger resurgence in the Monkees’ reputation and fortunes. The TV series was a natural choice to be repeated for the new MTV channel (ironically the successor to an idea Monkee Mike Nesmith had taken to the makers of the cable network channels) and at the same time record label Rhino bought up the rights to The Monkees’ discography and produced the first compact discs of their albums. The well presented re-issue series (which saw all four Monkees interviewed for fascinating sleeve-notes and the record vaults at Columbia searched for dozens of unreleased songs and alternate takes) saw all nine original Monkees albums making the charts again, including those, like ‘Changes’, which hadn’t sold enough copies to make the charts the first time round. There was even an album of much-anticipated outtakes cleverly titled ‘Missing Links’ (with two further volumes following in the 1990s). The time was clearly right for a Monkees reunion and, after sitting out the 1983 reunion (credited to Micky and Peter), Davy was on-board for the 1986 record ‘Pool It’ and the 1987 tour which became the biggest grossing  of all that year, outselling Madonna and Bruce Springsteen. However a falling-out with MTV meant promotion for the album was less than hoped and The Monkees disbanded again before re-uniting properly in 1997, teaming up with Mike Nesmith for the first time in 28 years to produce a TV special and ‘Just Us’, the first album to feature the band playing their own instruments since ‘Headquarters’ 30 years earlier. A further tour (without Nesmith) followed in 2002 and the three had just finished a final tour in the Summer of 2011, receiving ‘probably the best reviews of our career’ as Micky remembered in obituaries this week. Davy was working to the end too and was partway through a solo American tour at the time of his death (with his last ever show taking place on Sunday, February 19^th at Thackerville, Oklahoma, according to his official website Davy Jones Dot Net).

However Davy’s happiest moment in what turned out to be his final years were arguably all connected with his love of horse racing. Among his purchases after The Monkees ended was ‘Grenville Hall’, an old mansion with its own stable located near Portsmouth and as well as owning his own race-horses began to compete against ‘professional amateurs’ in local races. His biggest moment came in February 1996 when Davy rode the horse ‘Digpast’ (actually owned by his daughter Sarah, another big equestrian fanatic) to victory in the Ontario Amateur Riders’ Handicap, winning by two and a half yards. Some 35 years after leaving horse-racing behind, Davy had finally achieved his dream of riding a winner. He remembered that moment as one of his ‘proudest’ in one of the last interviews he gave earlier this month, fittingly not to a national paper or a Hollywood rag but to a Newmarket newspaper covering the patch where Davy had started his career all those years before. Typically, too, the story was not about Davy being a star but Davy’s kind heart and how he was helping pay for the care of Basil Foster, the very same man who’d signed Davy up against his knowledge to become a ‘star’ and believed in him long before anyone else, now that he had returned ‘home’ after years living as a guest on one of Davy’s American farms (Davy had also named one of his race-horses after his mentor). The fact that Davy’s last media coverage in his lifetime was about his well known generosity makes perfect sense to fans who saw their idol patiently hand out autographs and help out at charitable events tirelessly, long past his period in the spotlight.

The Monkees story, meanwhile, continues onward. At the beginning of the year Davy came top in a poll of the ‘greatest ever teen idols’ (two previous polls had also put him firmly in the top 10). Only last week Davy was seen (alongside Micky) talking about his old group for the BBC documentary ‘I’m In A Boy Band’ (the second part of which, ‘I’m In A Girl Band’ is broadcast this week), remembering his role as a teenage idol with a big smile and some typically witty anecdotes. As we write there’s also a Monkees musical, named ‘Monkee Business’ and loosely on the Monkees’ TV series, due to premiere in the UK at the end of this year. Fittingly for Monkees fans, its first performance will be in Manchester, Davy’s home town. Certainly the Monkees’ music and the TV show will live on long after his death, discovered afresh by each new generation every time that ‘Last Train To Clarksville’ ‘I’m A Believer’ and ‘Daydream Believer’ are heard on the radio as well as every time the Monkees’ series is repeated (once every generation or so).

In the few days since Davy’s death all of his fellow Monkees have paid their own lovely tributes, Peter Tork bidding ‘farewell to my fellow adventurer, the Manchester Cowboy’, Mike Nesmith adding a long speech about how Davy’s soul is still among us and Micky Dolenz somehow managing to get to the end of an emotional interview on Piers Morgan’s chat show where he called Davy ‘my brother’ and revealing that he had his own premonition that one of the four was poorly, after complaining to his wife about ‘one of the worst night’s sleeps I ever had’. But we’ll leave the last word to Davy and two messages to his fans written on his official website in May 2010 and January 2011: “I wrote some time ago that not everyone has dreams and hopes that come true. Mine have. Regrets, yes—if you don’t have them you’re a fool. However, I thank all of you—yeah, you—for your support and love. I have high hopes for all of us... I thank all of you, and I hope I can live up to your expectations. I hope I can perform for you all for many years to come.” Sadly those performances are not to be but Davy still leaves behind an impressive body of work on film, TV and record which any star would be glad to have. Davy will be sorely missed by his many thousands of fans and we at Alan’s Album Archives send our heartfelt sympathies to anyone who meant anything to Davy, his family, his friends, his fellow Monkees and – in true Davy Jones style – his fans.

There are many great Davy Jones moments to choose from, so for this tribute we’ve gone for a whole top 10 of Davy’s lead vocals. Many of the songs on this list are Davy’s own, either written or co-written during the band’s run of classic albums – I’ve made no secret of my admiration for Davy’s songwriting elsewhere on this site and invite all curious Monkees fans who only know the ‘hits’ to hear some of his rarer work. 

1) Early Morning Blues and Greens (‘Headquarters’ 1967):

For me, Davy’s greatest moment on record - from the Monkees’ third album - wasn’t his choice of song at all. With The Monkees all selecting material for ‘Headquarters’ it was actually Peter Tork who picked up on this lovely Diane Hildebrand song (Peter went out with her for a while a year later) and its much more in line with his own folky style than Davy’s then-usual Vaudeville pop. Davy does this lovely song proud though, singing in his deeper style for pretty much for the first time and showing real sophistication in his vocal, a world away from the teen romance stories of the band’s first two albums (and Davy’s solo work from 1965). In fact, so different was Davy’s sound that many fans weren’t at all sure which Monkee was singing. All The Monkees excel on what is one of the best group recordings the four of them ever made, but it’s Davy’s stark bleak vocal, bemoaning his empty lonely world, that really makes the recording so believable. At first Tork was said to be unhappy that the song had been passed to Davy, rather than himself, to sing – but on hearing the finished product he changed his mind, saying that Davy had ‘surpassed himself’ and that he couldn’t compete.

2) You and I (‘Instant Replay’ 1969):

Davy’s best song remains perhaps the best comment about The Monkees’ declining fortunes. Bill Chadwick wrote the great first verse (‘You and I have seen what time’s done haven’t we? Such a pity what a shame...’) about rising fortunes in general, before taking it to Davy who really identified with the song and extended it to talk about the band’s own experiences (‘In a year or maybe two we’ll be gone and someone new will take our place...’) Among the hardest, rockiest songs in the whole of the Monkees’ catalogue, Davy gives yet another vocal miles removed from his romantic pigeonhole and makes the most of a song whose great riff notches the tension higher and higher with each successive lyric. The icing of the cake comes from a snarling guitar solo played by fellow AAA artist Neil Young, then on one of his many ‘breaks’ from the Buffalo Springfield. After Davy and Bill spent a fruitless day auditioning session musicians who could ‘play like Neil Young’ they decided to get the real musician in after getting in contact with Stephen Stills (Peter Tork’s old room-mate). Neil Young fans rightly regard his passionate outburst in the middle of this song as one of his greatest moments too. 

3) Shades Of Gray (‘Headquarters’ 1967):

Another of ‘Headquarter’s first class songs is this Barry Mann/Cynthia Weil composition, which was another Peter Tork choice for the album (Peter gets to sing his own delightful lead vocal on the song’s second half). Again Davy’s deeper, more resonant tone is the perfect fit for a serious song about growing older and finding the gap between heroes and villains is no longer as clear-cut as it was. Tork and Nesmith rightly won plaudits for their lovely arrangement (the string parts were hummed by Tork and notated by Nesmith) and again the whole band play more tightly than ever before or since. But its Davy’s uncharacteristically deep (in both sense of the words) beginning on ‘When the world and I were young...’ that make the hairs on the back of the neck sit up and reveals how much depth their really was to this supposed teen idol.

4) War Games (‘Missing Links’ 1987):

People forget how daring some of The Monkees’ own songs were. Mike’s ‘Tapioca Tundra’ and ‘Daily Nightly’ are opaque songs about civil unrest and riots whilst Micky’s ‘Mommy and Daddy’ is singlehandedly the most damning song about modern society in my collection (despite a running time of under two minutes!) Sadly fans didn’t get to hear Davy’s own risqué song till 1987, when this lovely slab of anti-war protest finally came out on a rarities set. For some reason ‘War Games’ isn’t that loved by most fans but for me it’s a gem, with Davy’s sarcastic words about war being a ‘spectator sport’ turning into a flag-waving rousing chorus about ‘cries...’ and ‘fear that it’s not over’. If this song had come out on, say ‘The Birds and The Bees’ album in 1968 (for which it was recorded) it would have made quite a stir slap bang in the middle of the Vietnam war at a time when few other groups were brave enough to speak out against it. Davy’s vocal is as great as his song, the right blend of sarcasm, innocence and knowing and the orchestral arrangement (by Davy and Steve Pitts together) is subtle but heart-felt. A real overlooked gem.

5) Time and Time Again (‘Changes’ (Bonus Track) 1970):

The other side of Davy’s songwriting can be heard in this lovely ballad, written by Davy with Bill Chadwick and again sadly missed out of the band’s original recordings (it was recorded during the sessions for ‘Instant Replay’ in 1969 and in the running for last album ‘Changes’ in 1970 till the last minute, before being eventually released by Rhino as a bonus track on the latter CD in the early 1990s). A gloriously breathy, dreamy ballad about girls letting the narrator down again, it sounds like many of Davy’s earlier ‘teen’ songs for the band but better, with an especially glorious middle eight and a nagging circular melody that sounds like it’s been around for years and years. Considering it was recorded during The Monkees’ peak years of orchestration and horn sections, its lovely to hear such a simple song played with such a simple arrangement, with an early synthesiser filling in for most of the orchestra and a mournful horn solo adding a dash of colour in the middle. A delightful song and proof of how good a writer Davy was becoming in the final Monkees days.

6) Daydream Believer (‘The Birds, The Bees and The Monkees’ 1968):

‘Daydream Believer’ seems to be everywhere this week, which is no surprise as it is  Davy’s biggest hit with the band that dominated so much of his life. It’s also pretty much the last time (till 1997 anyway) that the four Monkees played together in the same studio (albeit with Eddie Hoh playing drums, not Micky). The opening patter where the rest of the band appear to disagree over which take this is (‘7A!’) is true and a glimpse into the tensions of these final ‘just us’ sessions, but the anger is for the wrong Monkee – it was actually Peter Tork who kept getting things wrong and Davy recorded over his line to add to the ‘put upon, escapism’ feel of the song. However, Davy’s performance in the main song is all fluffy light and rainbows, with a dreamy hazy vocal about daydreams and fantasies with a killer chorus (‘Wake up, sleepy Jean!’) and a perfect video broadcast repeatedly in the band’s second TV series that gave plenty of space for Davy to strut his stuff with his special ‘Davy’ dance and grin his way into the hearts of millions. The song was by John Stewart and wasn’t Davy’s choice at all, but despite all the many cover versions since only Davy has managed to give this pretty song the innocence and cuteness it deserves to make it work.

7) Dream World (‘The Birds, The Bees and The Monkees’ 1968):

This song was Davy’s and one of his first – in fact this was the first song Davy worked on with Steve Pitts and was loosely based on ‘Dream Girl’, Davy’s favourite song from his 1965 pre-Monkees album. Good as that song was, this one improves on it in every way, with a truly exciting rousing orchestral arrangement and a repetitive chorus that finds Davy’s narrator urging his girl to come out of hiding and face real life. Given Davy’s troubles at the time (this was recorded about the time that his father died, with his mother dead nine years earlier) it’s tempting to see this song as Davy speaking about himself, chastising himself for ‘pretending everything’s alright when its not’ – certainly there’s an urgency and despondency about this song that makes it one of Davy’s most heartfelt compositions, pulling at the heart-strings with every sweep of the violin-strings. Unlike pretty much all of Davy’s songs it features a minor key on the verses, traditionally a more melancholic (and autobiographical) way of writing. The song works well as a dramatic opener to ‘The Birds, The Bees and The Monkees’) too,which is probably Davy’s strongest album of all for The Monkees for both vocals and songs.

8) Someday Man (Monkees single, 1969):

More evidence of Davy’s later, mature voice on this lovely song, recorded late on in the Monkees days and one of their last charting singles. It’s low chart placing says more about the band’s low reputation of the day than the song, though, which is a classy Paul Williams piece about believing in success for the future and not letting the pressure of the hustle-bustle of the people around you shake you from your path in life. The middle eight (‘Tomorrow’s a new day baby...anything can happen, anything can happen at all!’) with its sudden yell and its surging, criss-crossing harmony vocals is one of the most thrilling 10 seconds in the whole of The Monkees’ canon. Alas Davy didn’t get much of a chance to continue in this vein after this lovely song (the last two Monkees albums sees him back to recording pop fodder or breathy ballads, many from the vaults and recorded earlier in 1966 or 1967) and that’s a terrible shame because Davy really had a feel for big expressive songs like these. 

9) A Man Without A Dream (‘Instant Replay’, 1969):

Like the last song, this was the only other release from the band’s short-lived association with producer Bones Howe, who believed in utilising Davy’s lower baritone voice on more mature songs. This song is in many ways the negative image of ‘Someday Man’, with a man who seems on the surface to have everything still feeling low and empty because he has no ‘dreams’ to achieve. Like the last song, there’s a real see-saw effect between the despondent verses and the optimistic choruses where the narrator finally reveals it’s the loss of the girl who believed in him and pushed him forward that’s left him feeling so low. An unusual song for Davy, it suits him well and gives him a chance to show off more of his vocal range than possibly any other recording he made.

10) Rainy Jane (solo single, 1971):

Our final choice is the pick of Davy’s post-Monkees work, a moody power pop ballad very much in line with the last few Monkees releases from 1970. A moody opening finds Davy complaining that his friend is now a ‘shadow’ of herself after having her heart broken and urging her to go back to enjoying life sometime, like an upbeat version of The Beatles’ ‘Dear Prudence’. The result is very Davy, a feel-good song that tries to take a positive spin on things no matter how bad they are and deservedly made the bottom of the charts (for the one and only time for Davy’s solo work), despite the fact that The Monkees had never been more unfashionable. Alas Davy only recorded another four singles in this period before taking a break until 1978 (and recorded only intermittently thereafter, on such novelty singles as ‘Hey Ra Ra Happy Birthday Mickey Mouse’). But for a time there Davy seemed to have the whole world in front of him again, with a vocal range that was second to none and a feel for a whole range of styles.

And that’s all for now. Strangely enough I was working on a review of ‘The Monkees Present’ when the new of Davy’s death broke – I shall return to it sometime soon but had to spend this week bringing you Davy’s incredible life-story instead. Next week we’ll go back to another AAA band but for now R.I.P Davy and thankyou for all the great music you left us.