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 29th. 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 30th 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 1/3rd 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 19th
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.
No comments:
Post a Comment