You can now buy 'Every Step Of The Way -The Alan's Album Archives Guide To The Monkees' in e-book form by clicking here!
Well done, you made it to the halfway part of the
book (or halfway through our 'music' section at any rate!) We can't give you a
prize to celebrate I'm afraid, though you probably deserve one, but we can
shake things up a bit by moving outside talking about our respective AAA bands'
discography and moving on to what makes them stand out from their peers and
offer something no other band can. In truth these essays kind of run across the
whole book and you can read them in any order, but now we've reached the
halfway point it's quite useful to take stock of where we've been and why
before working out where we will go next. As far as The Monkees go it’s almost
time to take the last Train To Clarksville already – but they’ll be back for
three reunion projects to cme. The question is, which are the real Monkees to
bring back – the ‘real’ bunch of musicians, the ‘fake’ television characters or
the weird and uniquely subversive hybrid that existed towards the end of their
original run?...
In these essays in the middle of these books we’ve been trying
to look at what made a band unique and stand out, what made them special enough
for me to want to get to know them enough to write a zillion words on each of
them and why I believe they belong in this series. The Monkees is perhaps
Alan’s Album Archives’ most divisive band. To some of our readers they’re the
epitome of everything that went wrong with music and meant that we ended up
(*shudder*) with The Spice Girls that they’ve been campaigning against for
fifty years. For others they are the only manufactured group in history to
overcome their origins, turn the tables on their creator and spend half their
career laughing at the craziness of fame. When The Monkees sang on [ ] ‘Ditty Diego’ that they had a ‘manufactured
image with no philosophies’ though they were clearly lying. I put it to you,
dear reader, that The Monkees caused more subversism to the nation’s youth than
any other band of the 1960s (even The Beatles), but that they did so in such a
manner that they could get away with it at tea-time on Saturday nights (before
Dr Who and after Jukebox Jury). How did they do it?
Well, The Monkees suffered from being the only group on our list
that were dreamt up and marketed before they even existed. The infamous advert
that started the whole thing was tailored to teenagers of that particular point
in time (1965-1966): ‘MADNESS! Auditions: Folk & Roll Musicians &
Singers wanted for acting roles in new TV series. Want spirited Ben Franks
types. Have courage to work. Must come for interview’. That’s pretty specific
in as much as any short job advert can be – nowhere does it say that the
producers want rebels, philosophers, free-thinkers, radicals or even musicians
(the four Monkees were hired as four actors who could sound right saying the
lines and didn’t look too daft with instruments in their hands). However the
subversion is already there is you know where to look for it: if you’re
wondering who Ben Franks is, I don’t think they mean the rugby player or the
philosopher but the coffee house on Sunset Boulevard where post-beatnik
pre-hippie teenagers used to hang out. It is, not coincidentally, the site
where hippie rebellion first took flight in a big way against the law with the
famous ‘sunset strip riots’ of 1967 when teens were fed up of following a city
curfew and Ben Franks refused to cut their twenty-four-hour opening times (and
as references in Mike Nesmith song [ ]
‘Daily Nightly’ and TV episode ‘Find The Monkees’). It’s probably not a
coincidence too that the place was named after American president Benjamin
Franklin, but in a shortened slang-heavy version of his name that made him more
hip and contemporary. There was a feeling amongst 1960s American youth culture
that the adults had somehow got society ‘wrong’ : Vietnam was still raging,
Korea had just finished, they had been born into World War Two and lived under
the threat of conscription. They also lived in a land that was changing
societal rules everyday – women were slowly edging closer towards equality,
civil riots were slowly gaining coverage and mafia and gangs were slowly fading
out. The 1960s was in many ways an era that lied to itself (and itself from the
inside) when you scratch under the surface and realize exactly what was
happening, but at it’s best was a hopeful time that anything could happen and
that things could change. The Monkees, by being the group aimed at the youngest
audience of rock and roll and pop fans, was central to this in a way few people
realized (except perhaps Frank Zappa, who saw them as counter-culture rebels
and the perfect starting point for anarchy, which is why he appeared in both
their TV series and their one and only feature film).
There’s a difference here already. To get The Monkees on our
screens Bob Rafelson and Bert Schneider effectively sold this series to Screen
Gems as a cute series to hook teenagers that wouldn’t scare the mums and dads
away and with a huge marketing potential for tie-in records. They agreed to use
tried and tested (and very 1950s sounding) producer-writers in Tommy Boyce and
Bobby Hart, brrtought on board 1950s expert Don Kirshner (who was, truth be
told, more than a little confused by the new 1960s model of teenager) and most
of the staff writers on the TV series came from the world of sitcoms and music
hall, not the music worlds (lead writers Dee Caruso worked for The Smothers
Brothers and Gerald Gardner worked for Red Skelton, while they both worked for
secret agent comedy ‘Get Smart!’ – other writers Jack Winters worked for The
Dick Van Dyke Show and Treva Silverman – one of the first women scriptwriters
in the business – worked for The Mary Tyler Moore Show). The people making this
show are from yesteryear (actually they were all in their thirties at their
latest, but in a decade when things changed by the week this made a lot of
difference) and the youngest people were Bert and Bob in their late twenties.
It’s not exactly an attempt to get youth onto screen the way it really was by
using young people to write. Interestingly it’s the directors who buck the
trend (James Frawley ends up working for The Muppets and gets his directorial
debut with ‘The Royal Flush, making him surely one of the only directors to
ever get an Emmy award nomination for his first completed piece of work) and
the cast.
The Monkees was set up so that everything around them could be
safe and stable, something that elder generations could understand (which is
why so many of their jokes come straight out of The Marx Brothers, who in their
day were every bit as subversive as The Monkees’ first season). But they
weren’t: Bert and Bob could oh so easily have cast famous actors in the four
main parts. The Monkees themselves spoof the sort of thing an ‘adult’ version
of The Monkees might have become in ‘Head’ when Davy is going out with sweet
Annette Funicello and worrying about making enough money as a violin player. It
could have been awful – and that’s where ‘The New Monkees’ (a sequel launched
in the 1990s) went wrong: somehow things had changed by then so the 1960s was
the era of the adults and rather than be allowed to be teens from the 1990s
they were often the ‘oldest’ people in the room (the show isn’t actually that
bad but compared to the original is like comparing the original TV series and
film re-make of ‘Bewitched’, The Monkees’ closest on-TV predecessor in terms of
jokes and youthful energy). But they didn’t: The Monkees were four unknowns.
They could have been you watching at home. Indeed, the cleverness of the series
is that they were probably exactly like you watching at home at a time when The
Beatles inspired everyone to start a band and yet not everybody couldbe lucky
enough to make a living at it.
That in itself is huge and the entire ‘philosophy’ The Monkees
were centred around. Nobody on television was representing this particular
generation whose main drives weren’t always sex and gang warfare as before but
music. The ideal wasn’t being a sportstar, a politician or a purtlizer prize
winning writer but to be on stage with The Monkees (or date one of them).
Putting something on television is a subversive act if it’s something that has
never been seen before. There’s a reason Hitler spent so much of the Nazi
annual budget on films even at a time of great depression: he wanted people who
didn’t understand him to see the re-actions of people who did and feel they
were missing something. There had never been a series before The Monkees where
the youngsters were the heroes, not the punchline for a joke about long haired
layabouts. What’s so brilliant about the first TV series and to some extent the
first two albums is that The Monkees manage to straddle the line of beinbg just
cute enough for the parents to buy them or watch them – and cheeky enough for
the children to want to. There are so many additional first in the series too:
it’s easy to forget now every programme is twice and quick and fast but the
cuts made between scenes must have been incredibly tiring for a viewer at the
time of a certain age – and incredinbly exciting for their offspring (The
Monkees generally used twice as many camera shots as other programmes of the
day). The music ‘romp’ scenes too are quite unlike anything ever seen before
(if you somehow missed ‘A Hard Day’s Night’) and felt so different and fresh.
Filmed on the hoof by a young unknown cast and shot by unknown hungry
directors, it’s a radical re-think of how TV programmes were made and particularly
on screen rather than in the studio The Monkees was a genuinelty daring
pioneering programme that at least half of the shows on today owe something of
their DNA to, if only for the directors and programme-makers who were inspired
by it.
The brilliance too is in the casting which manages to give a
little something for everybody: Davy is cute – but they don’t try to soft-soap
his very 1960s teen outlook; Mike is responsible and in charge – but that
doesn’t stop his character butting heads, thinking he can do better and running
for mayor over crooked politicians or fighting for justice; Peter is sweet and
silly, but also very mystical and doing his own thing, as early as the first
episode ‘proper’ where his belt buckle is out of line to everyone else’s; Micky
is groomed as the perfect teen hearthrhob with the gorgeous voice – but he’s
also wildly unpredictable, so that you never know what he’s going to do next.
The Monkees, especially in 1966, is a triumph of getting the mixture just right
between what will work on television in 1966 and what will work with audiences.
The Monkees’ production team stumbled out it remarkably quickly too, although
in retrospect it’s no surprise the oddly angular and unlikeable characters in
the pilot went down so badly on first viewing (the characters are much sharper
in ‘The Royal Flush’ where instead of being introduced the programme makers
assme we’re already friends and that we’ll ‘catch up’). It worked too: across
1967, when The Beatles and The Rolling Stones got too heavy and serious, The
Monkees outsold them both combined – the only act to outperform on the charts
round the world that year was, err, the cast of ‘The Sound Of Music!
Then the big revolution of 1967 happens and the world’s critics
get the odd idea that The Monkees aren’t a real band but hired actors (no shit
Sherlock: that’s why they had auditions!) and The Monkees stop being cool. The
confusion comes from a variety of sources though that the programme-makers
probably couldn’t have predicted. There had never been a series quite like The
Monkees before and nobody quite knew what the rules were. At the same time The
Monkees were aping a band and a movement for whom authenticity was king – it’s
no surprise that the bands who actually lasted, rather than being a short-lived
craze, were the ones for whom music was a matter of life or death. For The
Monkees in the series too music was a serious matter of life or death. Plus the
band were unknowns who used their own names rather than stage ones (though
Micky was supposed to be ‘Micky Braddock’ until the elevbenth hour, his acting
nom de plume from the ‘Circus Boy’ days). Musicians came from nowhere and
somehow ended up as actors (just look at A Hard Day’s Night) so surely this was
the same? But of course it wasn’t. The Monkees was an artificial construct, as
opposed to simply using a real existing group of musicians who already played
together because that’s not how the programme was sold – it was intended at
first to be a programme about the 1960s youthful revolution shot from the
outside, not experienced firsthand from the inside.
The revolution where The Monkees took back control from Don
Kirshner, with Bob and Bert letting them, was perhaps the bravest thing any TV
cast has ever ever done. Micky compares it to ‘Leonard Nimoy becoming a Vulcan’
after years of telling us it was like ‘Pinocchio realy becoming a little boy’.
It’s the first time that fictional creations had attempted to become ‘real’.
And The Monkees philosophy changes overnight: they are no longer made for
younger teenagers who think they’re cute but for slightly older, even more
subversives. Parents aren’t meant to love The Monkees of the second TV series
the way they do the first series. The scripts become full of improvised jokes
about drugs and sex and see guest appearances from Frank Zappa and Charlie
Smalls (one of the first black people to appear on TV in a documentary segment
that wasn’t *about* black musicians and their colour or ‘subversive music’).
The Monkees act more like themselves, from their hair to their clothes to their
improvised remarks to the fact that they have a bigger hand not just in the
music but the scripts (with one episode written by Micky) and direction (with
Micky and Peter both in charge for episodes). This is actually a bigger
revolution: Leonard Nimoy, Vulcan or not, didn’t start filming all things Star
Trek until the 1980s and no other cvast had as much imput into their acting
work as The Monkees did. The problem, though, is that the revolution happened
so fast on TV that the production team aren’t ready for it yet: there aren’t
legions of fans who’d grown up on The Monkees and wanted to write for them and
there were no other junior writers, so the establishment figures were instead
asked to write ‘groovier’ and The Monkees lose the balance they once had.
Things are easier going in the music world. The musician half of
The Monkees (Mike and Peter) had been trying to get more involved from the
beginning and Nesmith especially had been producing sessions from almost the minute
The Monkees were cast. Faced with letting The Monkees become a rejected con in
the same way Milli Vanilli were twenty years later, Bert and Bob sensibly let
The Monkees prove just how much they can do. They got lucky. The odds are huge
against four people hired as actors with some musical background also being
great composers and before The Monkees only Mike had ever tried (with varying
success). Somehow The Monkees became four talented composers all with their own
distinct styles. All four would have individually been heralded as the big
creative voice in any band formed around them – The Monkees got four (even
Davy, the last to start writing, becomes arguably the best by the time of the
split in 1970). They went out on concert tours where they actually played their
own instruments in front of millions of fans (and sounded a lot better than
many bands in the 1960s too). They made albums where they played every single
note except a tiny bit of bass work and some strings were by them and them
alone (far less outside work than that used by, say, The Beatles) and then came
clean on the back sleeve. They started picking the material – and a subversive
lot it was too. Until 1968 Harry Nilsson couldn’t get a song placed with any
act because he was seen as a bit too daring and revolutionary – [ ] ‘Cuddly Toy’ one of his most subversive
songs about a gangbang with The Hell’s Angels and a biker chick, ended up on
both album and in the TV series. [ ]
‘DStar Collector’, about a groupie looking for sex, ends up being sung by teen
idol Davy. [ ] ‘Zor and Zam’ is the cry
of a generation – two fat Kings nobody voted for in an endless feud where
everybody suffers until the population dodge the draft and refuse to turn up.
Tork comes up with [ ] ‘For Pete’s Sake’
in which a whole generation have got to be free and that peace, love and
understanding will win (back in the vaults Peter’s [ ] ‘Lady’s Baby’, about how sex results in
children when you really love somebody, is also daring as hell for 1968). Micky
comes up with a song named [ ] ‘Randy
Scouse Git’ – something even The Beatles wouldn’t dare use – and later [ ] ‘Mommy and Daddy’, a song that I still
consider one of the most ground-breaking songs by any act (especially in the
unreleased version, but also the censored one, with it’s cries to ask teenagers
and pre-teens to see through their parents’ fakery and to ask uncomfortable
questions about American Indians and The Wild West, about pills, about JFk’s
assassination and wars). Even Davy gets into the act with [ ] ‘War Games’ as classy an anti-war protest
song as anything The Monkees’ competitors were writing.
Somehow that still wasn’t seen as enough though. The Monkees had
been sold so spectacularly as something ‘safe’ that elder potential fans
couldn’t see past the marketing strategy. Younger fans too dropped The Monkees
like a hot brick for the most part when the music papers (and their older
siblings) decided that if they didn’t play their own instruments they couldn’t
be ‘cool’ (even though The Beach Boys and The Mamas and Papas didn’t either and
nobody ever mentioned that; oh and as well as making twice as many records as
most bands The Monkees also filmed fifty-six TV shows in a two year period –
over one a fortnight. It’s a wonder they found the time to make ‘Headquarters’
by themselves).
What bothers me is that The Monkees never pretended to be
anything other than what they were. Watch enough TV series and you soon get the
jokes that this is an artificial construct (more on that in our essay on The
Monkees and postmodernism here) – the scriptwriters all live in a hut and don’t
speak English while being ordered to write by a man with a whip, the series
being born out of perspiration not inspiration; the director often gets
involved asking for the cast to do something differently; the stage-hands and
prop dressers often get involved – they’re even introduced to the viewer in the
Christmas episode. The big one though and the revolutionary bit that people
miss is the invention of the ‘one minute short’ segments that appeared almost
from the first (when ‘The Royal Flush’ was genuinely under-running) . Putting
the characters aside, we see real questions asked to real people and see a
whole new side to The Monkees: Peter is suddenly much more serious, Mike much more
angry and Micky much shyer (only Davy ‘fakes’ his character self for many of
the chats). The subjects covered range from what they got up to between filming
sessions (proving they have a life) to the impact of their sudden fame (proving
they are different to the characters of the show) to the generational divide
(something nobody was speaking about on television – and certainly not on the
side of the kids). Nowadays every programme seems to have its own outtakes
section (something else Shrek nicked from The Monokees, along with the humour
and ‘I’m A Believer’!); none did before The Monkees where reality and fiction
live hand in hand with each other. Even on the records The Monkees were one of
the first to include un-posed shots of people actually making music
(headquarters) or that mentioned the songwriters involved proudly on the back
covers (see Don Kirshner’s rolecall on ‘More Of The Monkees’, an odd thing to
do in retrospect at the height of the ‘don’t play their own instruments’
backlash).
This is one of the great ironies of our times, with The Monkees
dismissed as being irrerverent and philosophy free pap pop not worth listening
to. The Monkees, in their new-look period, had reached the point where they
encouraged to be outright revolutionaries. There has never been nor will there
ever be a TV show as astonishing as ‘The Monkees In Paris’ (in which The
Monkees get fed up of always doing the same old jokes and take off for an
episode long romp set to music, before coming home to do the same thing all over
again – complete with a genuine outtake thrown in where an elder guest star
gets stroppy over their unprofessionalism). There has never been music as
groundbreaking as ‘You and I’, where Davy actiuvely taunts his audience for
making him yesterday’s news and moving on to a new face. And there will never,
ever be another ‘Head’, where a supposed pop act use their last throw of the
dice (with the funding for the film so far ahead it couldn’t be pulled) to
attack everything fake:Hollywood, the music business, the way TV shows are
made, societal norms, war as something real rather than a sport and ultimaterly
the band themselves who try so hard to break free and even commit suicide to
escape their fate, but still somehow end up as props carted away to the warehouse
at the end of the film (‘33 and a Third too’,m the biggest difference being
that this latest production team clearly hate The Monkees too – Head still
loved them). Far from being a fake and empty bit of pop, The Monkees are as
real as any band that doesn’t exist can be and as revolutionary as any show on
at tea-time on a Saturday can be. Anyone who doesn’t get that or thinks The
Monkees aren’t a ‘proper’ band who ‘count’ as anything other than marketing
frolics is so badly missing the point.
That’s left a problem though. The Monkees keep returning because
their audience want them so badly – in 1976, 1986, 1996 and err 2012 (I had
money on a reunion in 2006!) But what Monkees ought to return? For the most
part it’s the original fictional Monkees as they were created: teenage
heart-throbs still trying to get a job (the music videos for ‘Pool It!’ like
[ ] ‘Heart And Soul’ get this spot on as
three Monkees wake up after twenty years in a freezer to find they need to make
a music video – and the low budget video for [
] ‘Every Step Of The Way’ is exactly what ‘our’ Monkees would have made;
less so in ‘Episode 761’ which just has The Monkees stuck where they always
were until the end – when suddenly this infamously penniless band is suddenly
popular and remembered with a love and respect that doesn’t quite fit). On
stage too The Monkees generally play with an outside band and sing the songs
they did in their early years (which must have sucked no end – especially for
Peter who once gave us [ ] ‘Can You Dig
It?’ and [ ] ‘Long Title’ and finds
himself back to singing [ ] ‘Your Auntie
Grizelda’ for a living). But even then The Monkees sneaked a bit of extra in:
amongst the hits and the regular tours are ones like the four-way one in 1996
(when The Monkees played every single note themselves again, garage band style)
and 2002 (when, minus Mike, Peter became the band’s de facto music director and
they started doing rarer, more unusual and more adult material). The most
recent reunion, 2016’s ‘Good Times’, is an odd hybrid – half the time The
Monkees are their cute younger selves updated for the 21st century;
at other times gthey’re the subversive band they were in 1969 before fate – and
lessening record sales – took them right back to where they started, with Micky
and Davy singing other people’s cutesiepie pop songs for a living. The Monkees
career is a rollercoaster ride and fans of one era don’t necessarily like the
others. However one thing no one can ever claim (if they are looking) is that
this is a band who were manufactured behind the image – or that they had no
philosophies. The Monkees had several, the most notable being to always be
authentic and true to yourselves in life – even if, as a band or as hired
actors to be a band, they couldn’t.
A NOW COMPLETE LIST
OF MONKEE ARTICLES TO READ AT ALAN’S ALBUM ARCHIVES:
‘The Monkees’ (1966) http://www.alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/the-monkees-1966-album-review.html
‘The Monkees’ (1966) http://www.alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/the-monkees-1966-album-review.html
'More Of The Monkees'
(1967) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2015/09/more-of-monkees-1967.html
'Headquarters' (1967) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2008/07/review-10-monkees-headquarters-1967.html
'Pisces Aquarius, Capricorn and Jones LTD' (1967) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2008/07/review-18-monkees-pisces-aquarius.html
'The Birds, The Bees and The Monkees' (1968) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2009/06/news-views-and-music-issue-34-birds.html
'Head' (1968) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2008/07/review-27-monkees-head-1968.html
'Instant Replay' (1969) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2010/06/news-views-and-music-issue-64-monkees.html
'The Monkees Present' (1969) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/news-views-and-music-issue-148-monkees.html
'Changes' (1970) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2011/04/news-views-and-music-issue-95-monkees.html
'Headquarters' (1967) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2008/07/review-10-monkees-headquarters-1967.html
'Pisces Aquarius, Capricorn and Jones LTD' (1967) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2008/07/review-18-monkees-pisces-aquarius.html
'The Birds, The Bees and The Monkees' (1968) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2009/06/news-views-and-music-issue-34-birds.html
'Head' (1968) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2008/07/review-27-monkees-head-1968.html
'Instant Replay' (1969) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2010/06/news-views-and-music-issue-64-monkees.html
'The Monkees Present' (1969) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/news-views-and-music-issue-148-monkees.html
'Changes' (1970) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2011/04/news-views-and-music-issue-95-monkees.html
'Pool It!' (1986) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.com/2014/01/the-monkees-pool-it-1986-album-review.html
‘JustUs# (1996) https://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2017/09/the-monkees-justus-1996.html
'Good Times!' (2016) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.com/2016/06/the-monkees-good-times-2016-or-are-they.html
‘Christmas Party’ (2018) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.com/2018/12/the-monkees-christmas-party-2018_24.html
'Only Shades Of Grey' :
The Monkees In Relation To Postmodernism (University Dissertation) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2013/09/university-dissertation-monkees-in.html
Auditions, Screen Tests
and Pre-Fame Recordings http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2016/04/the-monkees-auditions-and-screen-tests.html
Surviving TV Clips http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2016/04/the-monkees-surviving-tv-clips.html
The TV Series -
Season One (19966-1967) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2016/05/the-monkees-tv-series-season-one-196667.html
The TV Series - Season Two
(1967-1968) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.com/2016/05/the-monkees-tv-series-season-two-1967.html
'HEAD/33 and a third
Revolutions Per Monkee/Episode #761' http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.com/2016/05/the-monkees-head33-and-third.html
Monkee Sidetrips: The
Boyce and Hart Catalogue http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.com/2016/05/monkees-side-trips-boyce-and-hart.html
Live/Solo/Compilation
Albums Part One 1967-1975
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.com/2016/05/the-monkees-livesolocompilation-albums.html
Live/Solo/Compilation
Albums Part Two 1976-1986
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.com/2016/06/the-monkees-livesolocompilation-albums.html
Live/Solo/Compilation
Albums Part Three 1987-2014 http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.com/2016/06/the-monkees-livesolocompilations-part.html
Key Concerts and Cover
Versions: https://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.com/2018/05/the-monkees-five-landmark-concerts-and.html
Essay: A Manufactured
Image With No Philosophies? https://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.com/2018/04/monkees-essay-manufactured-image-with.html
