Review: Monkee Business by Eric Lefcowitz
Rather surprisingly for such a hugely successful band, there are very few actual books on the Monkees. Other than annuals and fan cash-ins from the 60s, some ebooks that appear to be just articles culled from Wikipedia, some self-published fan-fiction on Lulu and a notoriously-inaccurate book called Monkeemania that at one point confuses Micky Dolenz with Micky Kantner from Jefferson Starship, there are only six real books I know of, and luckily for Monkees fans they all cover slightly different areas.
Davy Jones and Micky Dolenz have both written insubstantial autobiographies, there’s an unauthorised biography of Michael Nesmith, there’s my own book (a song-by-song critical analysis), there’s Andrew Sandoval’s day-by-day look at everything the band did (Sandoval has actually written probably another book’s worth of text on the band in his extensive liner notes for the band’s reissues), and there’s this book, the only narrative biography of the band I know of.
Originally published as The Monkees Tale, this was reissued in an expanded version this year – unfortunately just *before* the Dolenz/Jones/Tork reunion tour was announced, thus making what was an up-to-the-minute biography instantly dated.
How interesting it will be for fans will depend on how familiar the reader is with Lefcowitz’s source material. While he conducted a long interview with Peter Tork for the original book, and apparently interviewed Michael Nesmith on more than one occasion, almost every quote in the book from a band member appears to be traceable to two documentaries from the late 90s – Hey, Hey, We’re The Monkees and E! True Hollywood Story.
This may not, though, be Lefcowitz’s fault – all the band members, especially Jones, have spent the last forty-five years telling anecdotes about the same two-year period of their lives, and they have refined everything into smooth, streamlined, versions they can rattle off without thinking. Whenever he’s asked about Tork, Jones will say “Hare Krishna, brown rice and waterbeds”, Dolenz will always say of his trip to England “I’m told I had a great time”, and so on. It’s entirely possible that Lefcowitz’s interviews ended up revealing little that was not already available on the public record in the same words.
Rather less forgivable are the occasional factual errors – errors that access to Sandoval’s book would easily have cleared up. Lefcowitz claims, for example, that Tork had little involvement in Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn And Jones, Ltd, when Tork is on almost every track on that album. He also claims that Jones appeared in Coronation Street only after moving to London, when in fact Coronation Street is filmed in Manchester, where Jones grew up, and that Hal Blaine was a member of the Candy Store Prophets (he wasn’t).
The book also has a large number of typos and proofreading errors, possibly because it’s been published by a small press. Coronation Street is, for example, a ‘soap operation’. There are also some unusual stylistic quirks, like an overuse of hyphens, that a professional editor would probably have smoothed out.
Nonetheless, this is an engrossing book. Lefcowitz pulls everything together into a narrative, and one that does justice to the facts (rather than, as all too often, claiming the Monkees’ commercial failures began as soon as Don Kirshner stopped being involved). He is clearly passionate about the band and the music, and while this can be a double-edged sword (he dismisses outright everything the band did post-Pisces, with the exception of the Head soundtrack, and regards some of Nesmith’s best work as attempts at sabotage), his very personal viewpoint allows him to tell this as a story, rather than a recitation of dry facts.
This does, however, mean Lefcowitz plays favourites. The story that clearly comes through in most tellings of the Monkees’ career is a battle for dominance between Nesmith the artist and Jones the star. Here, though, Nesmith’s manipulation of the band (which at times can appear to have been near-psychopathic, though he appears to have mellowed enormously in the ensuing decades and may now be the most well-adjusted band member) is excused at every turn, as Lefcowitz appears to have a huge respect for him. Jones, on the other hand, is pilloried as a talentless, deluded narcissist, quisling and shortarse. It’s not surprising that Nesmith is the only band member who is thanked in the acknowledgements.
In this battle of the egos, the (comparatively) more modest Dolenz and Tork don’t get a great deal of discussion, though Lefcowitz’s admiration for Dolenz’s vocals is apparent. In particular, the Tork/Nesmith feud seems barely dealt with. It’s always seemed odd that the two band members who most wanted the band to be actual musicians fell out so completely, and Lefcowitz never explains this, just stating in passing three-quarters of the way through that the two loathed each other.
Tork seems, in fact, to be a fascinating character, and it’s a shame that he’s the only band member not to have had any kind of biography out, as he’s intelligent, articulate and musicianly.
It might seem that I’m being unduly harsh on Lefcowitz, but overall I was very impressed with the book. Yes, it has faults, and it’s not quite a definitive biography, but compared to some of the utter drivel that has been published about some of the band’s contemporaries, it’s a minor miracle that the one Monkees biography is this readable.
It won’t tell the die-hard fans much that they don’t already know, and I’d advise anyone reading it to have a copy of Sandoval on hand to double-check the facts against, but for anyone who wants to read the Monkees’ story, we can be glad that the one place to do it is as decent as this is.
Monkee Music: Instant Replay
A revised and improved version of this essay appears in my book Monkee Music, available as paperback, hardback, PDF, Kindle (US), Kindle (UK) and ePub (all DRM-free).
And here’s where I start being harsher about these albums. Head was the last truly great album the Monkees released, and after that album and film flopped so badly, the rest of the Monkees’ career was a panic, with the record label alternating between desperate attempts to regain the band’s commercial success and utter apathy about a ‘past it’ band. Meanwhile, the Monkees themselves were getting sick of being in the band, and looking to get out.
The first to leave had been Tork, who had left after the recording of the 33 1/3 Revolutions Per Monkee TV special, and as a result plans for the band’s next album to be a double, with one side for each band member, were discarded. Instead, this hodge-podge was released, a mixture of More Of The Monkees era outtakes (and remakes of those), a couple of experiments by Dolenz and Jones, and two decent-but-not-great tracks by Nesmith, who was clearly saving his best work for the solo career that would start within a year.
It’s surprisingly listenable, but could have been reduced to an EP without anyone even noticing. It’s a fundamentally lazy album, and it’s clear that everyone here is doing this, not because they ‘have something to say’, or even to entertain, but because they’ve got a contract that says they must release two albums of pop-music-like product a year.
Through the Looking Glass
Writers: Tommy Boyce, Bobby Hart and Red Baldwin
Lead Vocalist: Micky Dolenz
Producer: Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart
Other Monkees present: None
This plinky, McCartneyesque song about a girl who remains emotionally distant was first recorded during the More Of The Monkees sessions, but passed over (that version is on the More Of The Monkees deluxe edition, and is driven by acoustic guitar rather than piano, and has less orchestration). It was then rerecorded for The Birds, The Bees And The Monkees, and left off that album, but that recording was chosen to open this one.
It’s not a bad song, as such, just thoroughly nondescript. Boyce and Hart at their best were capable of producing garage-rock classics like She or Stepping Stone, and were also capable of pop like Last Train To Clarksville. Those songs pop and spark with life, but this just sits there and says “Are we done yet?”.
Don’t Listen to Linda
Writers: Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart
Lead Vocalist: Davy Jones
Producer: Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart
Other Monkees present: None
Oh dear. Another song with the same history as above – recorded for More Of The Monkees, left off, re-recorded for The Birds, The Bees And The Monkees and left off again – this actually feels like a conscious piece of sabotage.
The original recording (available as a bonus track on the More Of The Monkees deluxe edition) is a pleasant piece of chirpy pop, pitched somewhere between the country-pop of the Beatles’ Help! album and the music-hall revivalism of Herman’s Hermits, though somewhat closer to the latter.
Here, though, it’s slowed down and over-orchestrated, and Jones actually attempts to emote (always a mistake). Slowed down, and sung like they actually mean something, lines like “You’ll end up contender for the loser of the year” just sound abysmal.
I Won’t Be the Same Without Her
Writers: Gerry Goffin and Carole King
Lead Vocalist: Michael Nesmith
Producer: Michael Nesmith
Other Monkees present: Peter Tork (guitar)
A truly unusual song for the Monkees, this was actually a left-over from the The Monkees sessions (and a mono version of the track is available on the The Monkees deluxe edition), recorded at the same session as Sweet Young Thing. This track seems to have been modelled on (and possibly intended for) Phil Spector, specifically the Righteous Brothers (whose lead vocalist, Bill Medley, sounded a little like Nesmith), though the stomping chorus is more Ronettes.
Either way, though, this track is very Spectoresque, from its Wrecking Crew backing track (with the Dano bass here used not as Nesmith usually did, to double a bass part, but rather to double a guitar line in a very Brian Wilson touch) to the female backing vocals buried in the mix. (Not that it was all Spector’s influence – the drum pattern here is one that recurred in You Just May Be The One).
But then adding Nesmith’s distinctive vocals on top turns this into a country-soul song of a type that would not become normal for several years. By the time it was released, this song didn’t sound hugely out of the ordinary (though it was better than almost anything else on the album by a long way), but at the time it was recorded it would have been hugely avant-garde. Of all the leftover tracks on here, this is the only one that cried out for a release.
Just a Game
Writers: Micky Dolenz
Lead Vocalist: Micky Dolenz
Producer: Micky Dolenz
Other Monkees present: None
And so, with the fourth song on the album we finally get to something that isn’t a reject from a previous album. This song had been demoed instrumentally during the Headquarters sessions (and that demo was released on the Headquarters Sessions box set), but at that time Dolenz hadn’t yet written the lyrics.
Only the second song Dolenz wrote for the band, this is stylistically different from anything else the band did, even Dolenz’s other songs. It seems, in fact, to be styled after French chanson, with flurries of conversationally-sung words gesturing at a melody, rather than singing every note precisely on the beat, and with Dolenz’s feather-light vocal belying the lyric, which is painfully paranoid and insecure. The arrangement’s lovely, as well, being mostly harpsichord and a few strings, but with some jazz clarinet noodling on the instrumental fade.
It’s not hard at all to imagine someone like Scott Walker performing this on one of his early albums, and while it’s only one minute and forty-nine seconds long, it has more invention in it than half the rest of the album put together. Tork has often said that in his mind the great tragedy of the Monkees is that Dolenz never fulfilled his creative potential, and on the evidence of the handful of songs he submitted to the band, it’s definitely true. A lovely little track.
Me Without You
Writers: Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart
Lead Vocalist: Davy Jones
Producer: Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart
Other Monkees present: None
Oh look, this Boyce and Hart song was only rejected from one previous album (The Birds, The Bees And The Monkees, the box set version of which contains some very slightly different mixes of this). And it’s not actually terrible, as such, it just sounds like the theme tune to a bad sitcom. There’s also a mix, included as a bonus track, with some hideously inappropriate fuzz guitar and lazy ‘bop shoo-wop’ backing vocals.
Don’t Wait for Me
Writers: Michael Nesmith
Lead Vocalist: Michael Nesmith
Producer: Michael Nesmith
Other Monkees present: None
This is a generic Nesmith country song in the same way the previous track was a generic Boyce and Hart song for Jones. Admittedly that makes it one of the better songs of the album so far, but still the ultimate feeling one gets from this track, as with much of the album, is a sense of “Will this do?”
It’s pleasant enough – I’d go so far as to call it good, in fact – and a definite highlight of side one. But it’s hard to imagine that this mattered to Nesmith, in a way even a potboiler like You Told Me feels like it matters.
You and I
Writers: David Jones and Bill Chadwick
Lead Vocalist: Davy Jones
Producer: Davy Jones
Other Monkees present: None
Now this is more like it!
Not to be confused with the song of the same name on Justus, this is far and away the best Monkees track for which Jones ever took responsibility, and one of the highlights of the album.
This is utterly, absolutely unlike anything else Jones ever did. The structure of the song is actually closer to his ‘Broadway rock’ than it might appear, with its drops into 3/4 time to emphasise the end of verses, but it’s utterly transformed in the production.
Neil Young takes lead guitar here, and the track actually sounds far more like Young’s own work with Crazy Horse than anything else – but while Young’s guitar style is, of course, one of the most distinctive in rock music, this is actually a much harder rock track than anything Young had attempted himself at this point. In fact, given that Young’s Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere wouldn’t start recording til six months after this track, and given the incredible similarity in sound, it’s not unreasonable to say that this track is where the loud, grungy Neil Young style starts.
But what really makes this track is the lyric. Originally by Chadwick, but rewritten by Jones, it’s an attempt to look back calmly and understandingly at the way the Monkees’ career had rapidly gone downhill. It starts resignedly (“You and I have seen what time does, haven’t we?”, probably the best opening line of any of Jones’ songs) but soon becomes very bitter (“In a year or maybe two, we’ll be gone and someone new will take our place/There’ll be another song, another voice, another pretty face…”)
For once Jones is singing about something that matters to him, personally. He’s clearly utterly furious about what he perceives as his mistreatment by the record label and TV producers, and the result is Davy Jones inventing grunge in mid 1968. Utterly astonishing.
While I Cry
Writers: Michael Nesmith
Lead Vocalist: Michael Nesmith
Producer: Michael Nesmith
Other Monkees present: None
A leftover from The Birds, The Bees And The Monkees, this is one of Nesmith’s better ballads from this period, and has some nice backing vocals from Nilsson.
The problem is that at this point Nesmith’s dragged his own baseline up so high that a merely very good song like this leaves little to discuss. We expect miracles from him, so when all we get is a nice country song, there’s a vague feeling of disappointment. It’s still one of the best things on the album, but it’s just average for Nesmith.
Tear Drop City
Writers: Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart
Lead Vocalist: Micky Dolenz
Producer: Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart
Other Monkees present: None
Dug out of the vaults and sped up, this recording dated back to October 1966 (the recording can be heard at its original speed on the More Of The Monkees deluxe edition, but was hugely improved by being sped up), and was essentially a reworking of Last Train To Clarksville , being based like that track on a train rhythm and three seventh chords.
This would have been rather racy had it been released at the time, with its mild drug reference (a sound of inhalation right before the line “I was high on top but I didn’t know it”), but while it’s pleasant and catchy enough, it’s a filler track that should have been used for a romp scene in the TV show. As it is, though, it was released as the album’s single, and only reached number 56 in the US chart.
The Girl I Left Behind Me
Writers: Carole Bayer and Neil Sedaka
Lead Vocalist: Davy Jones
Producer: Davy Jones
Other Monkees present: None
This Sager/Sedaka schlock had been tried three times in total, first during the More Of The Monkees sessions, then for The Birds, The Bees And The Monkees (that version can be heard on the The Birds… deluxe version and on the Music Box box set) and finally here.
Frankly it didn’t deserve even one go. It’s not that it’s bad, as such, although it is. It’s just that like much of the rest of this album, this song is just there.
A Man Without a Dream
Writers: Gerry Goffin and Carole King
Lead Vocalist: Davy Jones
Producer: Bones Howe
Other Monkees present: None
This track was produced by the legendary Bones Howe, who amongst other accomplishments was just about to produce the music for Elvis’ comeback special. As a result, it feels more alive that most of the album, and Howe’s pop-soul arrangements suit Jones very well.
There are hints in various parts of this album and the outtakes around it that the Monkees were considering going in a direction similar to, say, Dusty In Memphis, with slick, horn-driven soul-lite arrangements of pop songs. If you put together this with, say, Rose Marie, I Won’t Be The Same Without Her,Changes, Little Red Rider and a couple of others you could have had a truly interesting album in that style. But as it is, Instant Replay seems the work of people who aren’t sure what they want to be doing. This track, at least, is the work of people working towards a clear goal, and it shows.
Shorty Blackwell
Writers: Micky Dolenz
Lead Vocalist: Micky Dolenz, Coco Dolenz
Producer: Micky Dolenz
Other Monkees present: None
But the album ends on Dolenz’s masterpiece, an attempt to write something in the style of A Day In The Life, about Dolenz’s cat.
Well, ostensibly about his cat, anyway. How many cats are involved in the record-making process (“Everybody’s talking faster, “Hurry up, get me a master,””), are unhappy, spend a lot of money on cars, “speak very crude”, own a house on top of a hill, and could be said to have “finally gotten everything you wanted/and you’re taunted by the power/that you really don’t want anymore,” ? It just might be possible that this is about someone else.
Whoever the mystery subject of the song might be, this is a psychedelic masterpiece. We start with a huge bombastic fanfare, before cutting to Dolenz singing, off tempo and a capella in a silly voice, before the first verse proper starts, with McCartney-esque tack piano and Coco Dolenz singing lead (the first time on a Monkees record that someone other than the four band members has sung a lead vocal).
We then get the addition of horns, bass and Micky Dolenz doubling his sister for a second verse. So far, this sounds like a typical sunshine pop record of the kind that the Association or the Cowsills might make.
But then we get two verses with doomy orchestration, all trombones and tympani, both ending with the line “he’s going mad”. The song has started to get very strange. And it continues to as we have a long section with the Dolenzes singing “he’s going mad” over and over more frantically as a trumpet squeals the opening vocal phrases, slowly turning into a full horn section fanfare.
We have one more verse with the same musical material as before, before going into a completely different section (“Black and shiny…”) based on a tick-tock musical phrase, which then goes into a performance of Sobre las Olas, with the Dolenzes eventually joining in and singing in sarcastic, high-pitched voices. We then get another verse with an orchestra overwhelming everything else, before going into a jazz version of the Sobre las Olas musical material in 5/4 time to fade.
It’s quite, quite bizarre, one of the most ambitious pieces the Monkees ever did, and comparable with great pop-psych tracks like My World Fell Down or Heroes And Villains. This just shows what this band were capable of when they bothered.
A demo of this can be heard on the The Birds, The Bees And The Monkees box set.
Oh, and on a totally different subject…
“The house, originally owned by Doris Day, sat high on top of a hill in Beverly Hills and cost Michael $200,000. Then he proceeded to spend an additional $50,000 in remodelling the house that he named “Arnold”.”
Total Control: The Monkees Michael Nesmith Story By Randi L. Massingill
Bonus Tracks
Someday Man
Writers: Roger Nichols and Paul Williams
Lead Vocalist: Davy Jones
Producer: Bones Howe
Other Monkees present: None
Another Bones Howe production, this song shows how desperate for a hit the record label were – or how little concern they had for the Monkees at this point – as it’s the first time they were ever allowed to record and release a song from a publisher other than Colgems.
And it’s an absolute masterpiece. Easily the best Monkees single to feature a Jones lead, this song should have been as big a hit as Daydream Believer, which it resembles slightly in the chorus. It’s a dizzying kaleidoscope of different musical styles, but Howe’s arrangement (which writer Paul Williams duplicated almost exactly when he used this as the title track to his 1970 solo album) guides us through the shifts in tempo and style so smoothly they’re almost unnoticeable. And Jones steps up to the challenge, delivering one of his best vocals.
In a just world, this should have rekindled the Monkees’ career. Certainly it’s the first thing since Daydream Believer to have felt like ‘the next Monkees single’ (D.W. Washburn and Porpoise Song are great but don’t feel like singles, and Tear Drop City feels like ‘the Monkees single from two years ago’). Unfortunately, this isn’t a just world, and this track only hit number 81 in the US charts.
Smile
Writer: David Jones
Lead Vocalist: Davy Jones
Producer: Davy Jones
Other Monkees present: None
One of Jones’ best ballads, this sounds like nothing so much as early McCartney, with its brief descending chromatic guitar passages and two-part harmonies. It could very easily have been an album track on Beatles For Sale or something McCartney gave to Peter & Gordon. It also ends rather cleverly, building to a big climax that never actually happens. The only problem is some very poor multi-tracking on Jones’ lead vocal.
St. Matthew
Writer: Michael Nesmith
Lead Vocalist: Michael Nesmith
Producer: Michael Nesmith
Other Monkees present: None
And finally, in an unreleased bonus track, we get Nesmith on top form. This great sludgy, violin-led production sounds very like his early Sweet Young Thing. Nesmith’s yearning melody (with his vocal put through a Leslie speaker in the mix heard here, though not in the early mix available on Missing Links Vol 2) contrasts wonderfully with the driving rock riffs underneath. This track sounds like nothing more than a country Phil Spector, with no individual element audible on its own; there are guitars, organs, violins, drums, but they all just merge into one great noise.
As for the lyric, it’s one of Nesmith’s most inscrutable. Fortunately, he’s tried to explain it (that explanation can be found in the Sandoval book and in the liner notes for Music Box). Unfortunately, that explanation seems to bear no resemblance to the lyric itself. Apparently, this song was intended as a commentary on what Nesmith saw as Dylan’s subconscious incorporation of the Biblical figure of the Holy Ghost into his lyrics.
But it doesn’t really matter what it’s about, this is one of the great Monkees-era Nesmith tracks, and it’s a real shame this got left on the shelf while merely decent tracks made the album.
Monkee Music: Head
A revised and improved version of this essay appears in my book Monkee Music, available as paperback, hardback, PDF, Kindle (US), Kindle (UK) and ePub (all DRM-free).
And so we come to the last album the four Monkees would all appear on until the mid-1990s.
Head is a wonderful trivia-quiz question supplier – “What album, compiled by Jack Nicholson, features Neil Young, Frank Zappa and Bela Lugosi?” as an example – and by far the strangest album the Monkees ever released.
In late 1968 the Monkees released their film Head. Written by Jack Nicholson and Bob Rafelson from ideas that the group had supplied, the film is a collage of loosely-interrelated sketches and what would now be called music videos, a psychedelic montage which tries to link the Monkees’ status as plastic pop idols with the Vietnam War, with both being regarded as traps of the mind, to be escaped from by attaining mental or spiritual freedom. It features, among many other scenes, Peter Tork punching a female impersonator, the Monkees as dandruff in Victor Mature’s hair, and Davy Jones beating Sonny Liston in a boxing match.
The film is bizarre, and utterly unlike anything you might imagine from the phrase ‘a Monkees film’, but is in its own way a masterpiece. Probably the closest comparisons are Frank Zappa’s 200 Motels and Monty Python’s The Meaning Of Life, both of which came out much later, and neither of which were aimed at an audience remotely comparable to the Monkees’. On top of this, the film had an…interesting…advertising campaign, based around the ideas of Marshall McLuhan, which didn’t bother with giving information like the fact that Head was a film, or that the Monkees were in it, choosing instead just to show the head of advertising executive John Brockman with the cryptic slogan “What is Head? Only John Brockman’s shrink knows for sure.”
The film was, understandably, a gigantic flop, and inspires mixed emotions in the band members these days. Nesmith, when he will speak about the Monkees at all, regards the film as a masterpiece. Tork is proud of it as a technical achievement, but dislikes what he sees as its overly cynical attitude. Jones, on the other hand, loathes it, blaming the film for the destruction of the band’s career.
That may or may not be the case, though from singles sales the band were probably doomed as soon as the TV show went off-air, but what Head did do, very successfully, was show future generations of fans that there was more to the band than the TV show and hits, when shown on late-night TV. Tork, Jones and Dolenz acknowledged this in their most recent (as of this writing) reunion tour, by opening the second half of their show with all the songs from Head.
It’s not the place of this book to go into the film in any more detail, but anyone with any interest in the band should read the slowly-updating but exhaustive analysis of the film and its making by comedy site Some Of The Corpses Are Amusing [FOOTNOTE: http://head.sotcaa.net/ ].
The soundtrack album is, in its own way, as interesting as the film. Edited together by Nicholson, the album was inspired by The Mothers Of Invention’s We’re Only In It For The Money, and mixes the seven songs from the film with collages of dialogue (both from the film and from bits of other films excerpted in the film) and orchestral soundtrack music. All of this was taken out of context, so for example the line “Boys, don’t never, but never, make fun of no cripples” from one scene in the film is followed by “Somebody come up and giggle at ya, that’s a violation of your civil rights” from a vox-pop section, while the question “Are you telling me you don’t see the connection between government and laughing at people?” is followed by Tork’s “Well, let me tell you one thing, son, nobody ever lends money to a man with a sense of humour.”
The result preserves many of the best lines from the film while recontextualising them, and the repetition of different snippets of songs and dialogue gives the album a through-line that’s missing from many of the Monkees’ other records. While this is the Monkees’ most ‘experimental’ album, it’s also, without a doubt, the one that has the greatest feeling of unity to it, thanks largely to Nicholson’s editing.
It’s also, after the largely solo The Birds, The Bees and The Monkees, slightly more of a group effort. While only Ditty Diego (and the live version of Circle Sky used in the film but not the album) features all four Monkees, the majority of the tracks feature two of them. And after Tork’s near-absence from the previous album, and Dolenz’s general lower profile, the two dominate this album at the expense of Nesmith and Jones, who only get one song each. The level of group control over the creative process in this album can be seen by the fact that it’s the only 60s Monkees album to feature no Boyce & Hart tracks.
After this, the Monkees only did one more project as a quartet, the deeply strange and uncommercial TV special 33 1/3 Revolutions Per Monkee, the music from which has never been released on CD, before Tork left, frustrated that the four were no longer working together in the studio as a unit.
While the two albums that followed have their moments, this is really where the Monkees meet their end.
All the actual songs on the album are credited as produced by The Monkees, with the exception of Porpoise Song which is produced by Gerry Goffin.
While a 3-CD deluxe edition of this album does exist, it has relatively little in the way of new music, featuring mostly alternate mixes, some live tracks from the concert that was filmed for the Circle Sky scene, and lots of promotional material (radio adverts, interviews with Jones and so on) that doesn’t really come under this book’s remit.
Opening Ceremony
This track starts as a collage of lines from various parts of the film, over sections of music from Porpoise Song , As We Go Along, Daddy’s Song and Circle Sky, while two people say, as dialogue, “Head” ,“Soon”, over and over.
It then cuts to a speech from the opening scene from the film (the dedication ceremony for a bridge), overlaid by additional sound effects.
Porpoise Song (Theme from Head)
Writers: Gerry Goffin and Carole King
Lead Vocalist: Micky Dolenz and Davy Jones
Producer: Gerry Goffin
Other Monkees present: None
This is Goffin and King being all cod-psychedelic, but it works here. While the lyrics are gibberish (where they’re not in-jokes like “riding the backs of giraffes for laughs”, a reference to Dolenz’s child stardom on Circus Boy), the music is perfectly put together.
The verses are, roughly, inspired by A Day In The Life, in their stately rhythm, especially with the piano chords early on, while the bridge and chorus are both tips of the hat to A Whiter Shade Of Pale , being as they are progressions based on a single chord each but with a scalar descending bassline. This is most notable in the organ part, which sounds near-identical to the Procol Harum song.
Both Dolenz (on the verses and bridges) and Jones (on the choruses) turn in stellar performances, but what really makes this track is the extraordinary arrangement by Jack Nitzsche, one of the great unsung heroes of American music in the 60s. He manages to combine a string arrangement perfectly in the style of George Martin (using only double basses and ‘cellos) with the Procol Harum organ, but then adds reverbed, clanking bells to remind the listener of the sea.
This is especially effective on the extended mix used for the single, which features an extended instrumental coda for strings, bells, organ and cymbals that is one of Nitzsche’s most beautiful pieces of work.
The whole thing seems to be a response to the Beatles’ psychedelic work, saying in effect “Okay, we can top that” – an effect which is added to on the album by the police sirens at the beginning, giving a reminder of I Am The Walrus. Unfortunately, the Monkees weren’t able to take the teen audience with them the way the Beatles had, and this single only reached number 62 in the US charts.
Ditty Diego-War Chant
Writers: Bob Rafelson and Jack Nicholson
Lead Vocalist: All four Monkees
The last pre-reunion track to be released featuring all four Monkees, this is a parody by Nicholson and Rafelson of the Monkees Theme, with verses alternating between skewering the band themselves (“Hey hey we are the Monkees, you know we love to please/A manufactured image, with no philosophies” “Hey hey we are the Monkees, we’ve said it all before/The money’s in, we’re made of tin, we’re here to give you more”) and describing the film’s plot and structure (“We know it doesn’t matter, ’cause what you came to see/Is what we’d love to give you, and give it one, two, three/But it may come three, two, one, two, or jump from nine to five/And when you see the end in sight the beginning may arrive”).
This chant, spoken at times by the full band and at times by individual members, is spoken over a barrel-house piano part reminiscent of silent-film comedy accompaniments, and the whole thing is then sped up and slowed down to sound like the tape is stretched and distorted, before there’s a sharp cut to the band exhorting a concert audience to “Give me a W! Give me an A! Give me an R! What’s that spell?!”
This track is so breathtakingly cynical about the Monkees themselves, it may be the bravest thing ever recorded by a major band. It’s not, however, worth listening to the twenty-two minute session excerpt on the deluxe box set more than once.
One of the oddest moments in Tork, Dolenz and Jones’ reunion tour of the late 80s was that they performed an abbreviated version of this in a hip-hop style.
Circle Sky
Writer: Michael Nesmith
Lead Vocalist: Michael Nesmith
Other Monkees present: None (studio version)/Micky Dolenz (drums), Peter Tork (bass), Davy Jones (maracas and organ) (live version)
The closest thing to a hard rock track the band ever recorded, this is for the most part just hammering away at a single chord in a manner inspired by Bo Diddley (apart from the instrumental breaks, which are just descending bar chords from B to D, and the middle eight, which is the minor-chord equivalent of the breaks). Lyrically, it’s a stream-of-consciousness description of Nesmith’s impressions of a Monkees tour (“Colours, sounds/all around”), although the themes of circularity and repetition (“it looks like we’ve made it once again”) work well with the themes of the rest of the album and of the film.
This song was very specifically written to work well for the band in a live setting, and the performance in the film is taken from a real live show – possibly the first time a rock band had used actual live footage rather than mimed performances in a film like this. However, strangely, the version on the album is a nearly-identical studio take, performed by Nesmith with studio musicians.
This upset the rest of the band, especially Tork, who blamed Nesmith, but Nesmith himself now says that he prefers the live version and had nothing to do with its replacement on the album. Either way, the live version is now included on all CD reissues along with the studio performance.
The band later rerecorded this for the Justus album, making the only song to have been released by the band as part of two proper albums. That version will be dealt with in that chapter.
Supplicio
Some Moog wind effects, a snatch of orchestral music, a cymbal with backwards reverb, and a voice saying “Quiet, isn’t it, George Michael Dolenz? I said…” (the latter taken from a scene in the film where Dolenz becomes delirious in a desert).
Can You Dig It?
Writer: Peter Tork
Lead Vocalist: Micky Dolenz
Other Monkees present: Peter Tork (guitar and vocals)
This is possibly the most 1968 piece of music ever, with pseudo-Indian sitarish acoustic guitar, bongos, and a chorus that goes “Can you dig it?/Do you know?/Would you care to let it show?”, as well as a long instrumental freak-out at the end.
However, it’s also the Monkees track that changed most from its original conception. Before becoming the minor pop-psych masterpiece it started out as a ragtime-ish acoustic guitar piece that sounded equal parts Blind Blake and Bert Jansch (this version can be heard on the Headquarters Sessions box set), with a bridge that didn’t make it to the final version.
To my ears, that version is even better than the finished record, but the track as heard on the album, with its lyrics about the Tao and ‘exotic’ textures, is still one of the best things Tork ever brought to the group.
The song was originally intended to have Tork singing lead, but Dolenz recorded a new (and extremely good) lead vocal at the request of Rafelson, without any objection from Tork. However, the version with Tork singing lead is available as a bonus track on all CD releases, and Tork now sings this song live.
Gravy
Side one finishes with Jones saying “And I’d like a glass of cold gravy with a hair in it please”.
Superstitious
A snippet from the 1934 Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi film The Black Cat, briefly seen on a TV in the film. This just consists of David Manners saying “Sounds like a lot of supernatural baloney to me”, with Lugosi replying “Supernatural, perhaps. Baloney, perhaps not.”
As We Go Along
Writers: Gerry Goffin and Carole King
Lead Vocalist: Micky Dolenz
Other Monkees present: None
This gorgeous little ballad is notable for having possibly the most unnecessarily-stellar group of session guitarists ever. The wall of acoustic guitars in Jack Nitzsche’s arrangement, mostly just strumming chords, includes Neil Young, Danny Kortchmar, Ry Cooder and Carole King.
The only song in the film to feature only one Monkee, this is a delicate, yearning ballad, which Dolenz sings perfectly, despite its difficulty. The song is one of the most metrically difficult things the Monkees ever did – starting out with an extended intro in 5/4, once Dolenz’s vocal comes in we have a verse of three bars of 5/4 (in one of which the bass accentuates the wrong beat, adding to the metrical confusion – the bass seems to be implying that these fifteen beats should be broken up 6,4, 5 rather than the 5,5,5 everything else implies) one of 6/4, three of 3/4 and one of 6/4. The chorus, though, is in pretty straight sixes.
This is the kind of song with which King would later have a huge amount of solo success, but as the B-side of Porpoise Song this failed even to make the top 100 in the US. A shame, as while the song is very different from the rest of the Head material, it’s a beautiful, gentle track that deserves a wider audience.
Dandruff?
A quick reprise of Lugosi’s line, before brief snippets of three sections of the film – a factory tour in which the band are told “the tragedy of your times, my friends, is that you may get exactly what you want”, a policeman calling them weirdos, and the band being directed to act like dandruff in a commercial.
Daddy’s Song
Writer: Harry Nilsson
Lead Vocalist: Davy Jones
Other Monkees present: Michael Nesmith (guitar)
This Nilsson song was originally recorded during a Nesmith session, with Nesmith singing lead (this version is available as a bonus track on the CDs, and is much better than the released version, with Nesmith’s heavily-processed vocals working wonderfully with the muted trumpet).
The song is one of Nilsson’s more heartfelt, talking about his relationship with his father as a small child, and his sadness and confusion at his father abandoning his family when Nilsson was aged three. Unfortunately, Jones seems to have ignored the lyrical content and treated this as Cuddly Toy part two – understandably, since the songs share a bouncy tempo and 1920s musical style.
There is a longer version of the track, which features both some Nilssonesque additional scat vocals by Nesmith and a much slower rendition of the verse starting “the years have passed and so have I”, where Jones does seem to sing that part sadly – but there, he’s hamming it up to the point of schmaltz.
It’s a great song, but only an adequate performance. If you want a good version of the song, either listen to Nesmith’s subtler vocal or get hold of Nilsson’s own version (on Aerial Ballet).
Poll
A collage of spoken snippets from the film, starting with Frank Zappa’s response to Jones’ performance – “That song was pretty white”, and followed with Nesmith saying “And I’ll tell you something else too, the same goes for Christmas”, from a different section of the film, before various other lines of dialogue, sound effects, bits of the vox-pop sections and snippets of Circle Sky.
Long Title: Do I Have to Do This All Over Again?
Writers: Peter Tork
Lead Vocalist: Peter Tork
Other Monkees present: Davy Jones (backing vocals)
This song was actually intended to have an even longer title, as Tork introduced it in a rare solo gig in the 1970s as “Long Title, colon, Do I Have To Do This All Over Again, question mark, Or , comma, The Karma Blues”
An enjoyable rocker with some extraordinarily mobile bass playing by Tork, this song’s lyrics (“Do I have to do this all over again?/Didn’t I do it right the first time?”) do seem to sum up some ideas about karma (as does the music’s brief drop into waltz time, like a turning wheel always getting back to the same place) but were written about Tork’s frustration with being in the Monkees.
Another hard-rock song in the same style as Circle Sky, this is obviously from the heart, and Tork is almost screaming with frustration by the end. It also, though, makes a perfect end point for the film, which ends at the same point at which it starts.
Swami–Plus Strings, Etc.
Abraham Sofaer, the actor who played the head Genie in I Dream Of Jeannie recites some warmed-over Timothy Leary (with a bit of Thomas Kuhn thrown in, and a touch of Buddhism) as a Maharishi-esque character, while various other bits of the film are heard under him, before we get a chunk of the Porpoise Song and a sprightly Mozart-esque string instrumental by Ken Thorne from the film soundtrack.
The key part of this – and one of the messages of the film – is “Where there is clarity, there is no choice, and where there is choice there is misery.”
Bonus Tracks:
Happy Birthday
Writers: Mildred and Patty Hill
Lead Vocalist: Micky Dolenz, Peter Tork and Davy Jones
Other Monkees present: None
Some sepulchral (and very effective) block harmonies over a spooky church organ lead into an off-key rendition of Happy Birthday To You sung to Nesmith in the film.
California, Here It Comes
Writers: Buddy DeSylva, Al Jolson and Joseph Meyer
Lead Vocalist: Peter Tork
Other Monkees present: None
A snippet from the end of the 33 1/3 Revolutions per Monkee special, this track consists of a heartbeat, TV producer Jack Good repeating “the end”, and a busked banjo-and-trombone run-through of the old musical number for a few seconds. The lyric change to ‘it comes’ from ‘I come’ was apparently meant to imply an earthquake that will supposedly destroy California.
This is the only track from 33 1/3 Revolutions per Monkee to have been released on CD in any form, as most of the master tapes for that special are missing (and also it wasn’t very good, musically), but it’s fitting, as this really was ‘the end’ of the Monkees, at least as a four-piece band.
Monkee Music: The Birds, The Bees And The Monkees
A revised and improved version of this essay appears in my book Monkee Music, available as paperback, hardback, PDF, Kindle (US), Kindle (UK) and ePub (all DRM-free).
For this album, unlike any of the others under discussion, I’m afraid I have to discuss a lot of music which can not, at present, be legally acquired.
By late 1967, the Monkees were working to all intents and purposes as four solo artists, with only minimal involvement with each other’s work. And by the time The Birds, The Bees And The Monkees came to be released, each man had recorded almost a full album’s worth of material, which was cut down into one fairly strong single album, though some of the best tracks were left off.
Some of the tracks made their way onto future albums or onto compilations, but in 2010 Rhino Handmade released a comprehensive, exhaustive three-CD box set which showed the sheer depth of talent that went into making this album. And they made it a limited edition. So much of this music became unavailable within a month of two of release. Apparently Rhino Handmade don’t like money.
But if you can manage to obtain the music (I would of course never countenance the illegal downloading of music, and would suggest instead you purchase one of the vastly overpriced second-hand copies which occasionally come up for sale at a hundred pounds or more, and from which all of the money would go to a speculator and none to the artists or record label) you can see that The Birds, The Bees And The Monkees should have been the Monkees’ White Album.
The album released at the time, though, wasn’t as strong as its immediate predecessor. While Nesmith’s tracks, in particular, are outstanding, the album suffers from having far too many Davy Jones ‘Broadway rock’ tracks, and from the near-complete absence of Peter Tork (whose only contribution to the album as released is a piano part on Daydream Believer). It’s much as if the White Album had been cut down to a twelve-track album by someone with a vendetta against George Harrison tossing coins.
While the album’s production credit is to The Monkees (with the exception of the previously-released Daydream Believer, credited to Chip Douglas), in reality a variety of producers worked on the album, though usually employed as ‘arrangers’ to keep up the pretence, including Boyce and Hart, Shorty Rogers and Lester Sill, though band members did also produce their own tracks.
Dream World
Writers: David Jones & Steve Pitts
Lead Vocalist: Davy Jones
Other Monkees present: None
The album opens with the best of Jones’ Broadway-rock tracks, one of several songs written in collaboration with his friend Steve Pitts, apparently for submission for the Monkees’ forthcoming film.
The song seems to have been an attempt at writing in the pre-Beatles early-60s style of Jones’ pre-Monkees Colpix solo album, and has a whiff of Adam Faith about it, though the lyric is at times quite biting (“Always pretending that everything’s fine when it’s not/Why must you lie when you know that you’ll always get caught?”). However, Shorty Rogers’ arrangement, with its harpsichord part and horn solo, brings it up to date.
Still among the weaker tracks on the album, this is a pleasant enough opener.
Auntie’s Municipal Court
Writers: Michael Nesmith and Keith Allison
Lead Vocalist: Micky Dolenz
Other Monkees present: Michael Nesmith (guitar and backing vocals)
Nesmith’s first composition on the album, a jangly guitar-led country-psych song, is one of only two songs on the album that could legitimately be called a track by the Monkees, plural, rather than a Monkee singular, having as it does two band members on it – along with several of the band’s regular recent collaborators, like Harry Nilsson, Bill Chadwick and Eddie Hoh.
This is Nesmith at his most psychedelic, stringing together words almost without regard for meaning, in a vaguely skipping-rhyme rhythm (“fine man, crazy man, he can’t see/Sound of the sunset, sound of the sea”), rather than the precise, affecting choices of his earlier and later work. However, the country guitar-picking clearly grounds this in Nesmith’s comfort zone, at least until the psychedelic freak-out reverbed ending.
We Were Made for Each Other
Writers: Carole Bayer and George Fischoff
Lead Vocalist: Davy Jones
Other Monkees present: None
This is actually the Monkees’ third attempt at this track. The first version, recorded three months earlier, and available as a bonus track on the box set version of the album, is quite an interesting track, driven by fast picked banjo, though it’s missing a lead vocal.
The finished version, on the other hand, is horrible. It sounds like Jones’ voice has been sped up, making it sound ridiculously thin, and it’s just a wash of bad strings and tinkling harpsichord, over which Jones sings Bayer’s banal lyrics. The stereo version is moderately better than the mono version in this respect, with the rhythm section more to the fore, and the strings being used as colouring rather than the major feature of the track, but that just elevates it from terrible to bearable.
Tapioca Tundra
Writer: Michael Nesmith
Lead Vocalist: Michael Nesmith
Other Monkees present: None
Another of Nesmith’s forays into psychedelia, this is a surrealistic poem (“Silhouettes and figures stay/Close to what we had to say/And one more time a faded dream/Is saddened by the news”) over a vaguely Latin-inflected backing track (almost all played by Nesmith, apart from the drums by Eddie Hoh), a wash of acoustic guitars and hand percussion.
The music seems to show the influence of both the pre-rock country music Nesmith had been listening to recently (especially in the fingerpicked-and-whistled intro, but it shows up more consistently in the acoustic demo of this track, which could almost be Jimmie Rodgers at times, and doesn’t have the psychedelic effects on the intro) and of the newer hard rock music that was becoming popular.
In particular, the between-verses riff, although similar to a lot of the playing with suspended chords that the Byrds and the Searchers did in their early folk-rock songs (and the feel of this track is such that the first comparison that would spring to mind is the Byrds’ Feel A Whole Lot Better), is identical to that used by LA bands Love and The Leaves in their proto-punk versions of Hey Joe from 1966.
It also actually shows Nesmith self-plagiarising slightly, as the melody for the middle eight of this (“Sunshine, ragtime, blowing in the breeze…”) is near-identical to the middle eight of The Girl I Knew Somewhere (“Someway, somehow, the same thing was done…”).
There’s a very strange alternate mix of this with a double-tracked vocal, with one of the vocals emoting very differently to the performance used in the finished version, and with reverb drenched all over everything, but the finished version, with a filter on Nesmith’s single-tracked vocal, is one of the most interesting records the band ever made. Certainly, I can think of very few other surrealist garage-punk Latin country-psych tracks to have made the top forty.
Davy Jones has claimed in recent years that Nesmith got his songs regularly on the B-sides of the band’s singles, and that this made Nesmith far more money than the rest of the band, but in fact this was only the second of his songs to be released as a B-side (as the B-side of Valleri) and the first lead vocal he’d ever taken on either side of a single. Valleri was so popular that this reached number 34 in the US charts on the back of that success.
Daydream Believer
Writer: John Stewart
Lead Vocalist: Davy Jones
Other Monkees present: Micky Dolenz (backing vocals), Michael Nesmith (guitar), Peter Tork (piano)
In many ways, this is the last Monkees record. It’s certainly the last studio recording of an actual song to feature all four band members until 1996′s Justus reunion album. It’s also the last track produced by Chip Douglas to be released during the band’s career, though several of the bonus tracks on the CD versions of this album feature Douglas’ bass playing.
Written by John Stewart of the Kingston Trio, this became the band’s fifth consecutive gold single, and remains probably their most-loved track. Everything about the track is precisely right, from the audio verite at the beginning (“7a” “What number is this, Chip?”, “7A”, “OK, no need to get excited man, it’s ’cause I’m short, I know”), to Tork’s simple arrangement, to the oblique lyric.
The piano part and arrangement for this track turned out to be the only contribution Tork made to the finished album (several of his songs were considered for it, including the two that eventually made the Head soundtrack), but given that this record is such an absolute pop classic, one has to wonder what would have happened had the four members continued to work together, rather than drifting apart.
Incidentally, there was one lyrical change that was made by the band from Stewart’s demo – where he sang “now you know how funky I can be”, the word ‘funky’ was changed to ‘happy’, presumably because the idea of Davy Jones ever being funky was such an absurd one. In later recordings, Stewart himself changed the lyric of the last chorus, singing “and an old closet queen”.
This track was reissued in the 1980s, in a remixed version with a new drum part (full of gated reverb and ‘sonic power’) and handclaps. That version should be avoided at all costs.
Writing Wrongs
Writer: Michael Nesmith
Lead Vocalist: Michael Nesmith
Other Monkees present: None
And here we get to possibly the most controversial record in the Monkees’ ‘canon’.
There are two schools of thought about this track. One of them (which seems to be the one to which almost every Monkees fan belongs) thinks this is dreadful. The other (to which I, and very few others, belong) considers this possibly the best single track the Monkees ever recorded.
An epic at 5:05 (for the mono mix) or 5:09 (for the stereo), this is very much the Monkees’ equivalent of A Day In The Life or Surf’s Up. Nesmith here plays all the keyboard and guitar parts on what is easily his most ambitious Monkees track.
Starting with a two-chord tick-tock rhythm on piano, Nesmith comes in on vocals with his most impenetrable lyrics yet. Seemingly apocalyptic (“Did you know the water’s turning yellow?/Had you heard the sky was falling down?”) the lyrics seem to reference things that have some meaning at least to Nesmith (“Have you heard about Bill Chambers’ mother?”), while the piano keeps tick-tocking and an organ drones underneath.
Suddenly the piano changes to straight fours – “You have a way of making everything you say seem unreal…” – as the organ rises in volume. This, what we must consider the chorus, lasts for two lines, then we get eleven beats in 3/4 time, and a sudden stop.
We then enter the jazz freak-out section. Over latin flavoured drums and a single, briskly strummed, guitar chord, the piano starts playing around with a couple of three- and four-note scalar riffs, while the organ plays different variations of the same patterns.
The whole thing is almost wilfully difficult. There is a consistent pulse to the music, but each instrument is playing against that pulse, rather than with it, and against the other instruments. Were one to listen to this instrumental piece out of context, the first thought might be that it was by Sun Ra or someone rather than The Monkees.
After two minutes and ten seconds of this – the length of many normal Monkees songs – we return to a shortened version of the original musical material, with similarly oblique lyrics (“And I hope Bill Chambers’ mother’s better/Oh dear, the moon just disappeared”), and fades on a repeat of the instrumental section.
It’s a draining, exhausting piece of music, quite unlike anything else the band recorded, but quite astonishingly good.
I’ll Be Back Up On My Feet
Writers: Sandy Linzner and Denny Randell
Lead Vocalist: Micky Dolenz
Other Monkees present: None
This is a remake of a track that had originally been recorded during the More Of The Monkees sessions with Jeff Barry producing. This version is much better, being faster paced, and with a very interesting arrangement by Shorty Rogers, especially a bizarre sound in the bass register which comes from a percussion instrument called a quica which is unlike anything I’ve ever heard.
The song itself is not hugely impressive, though, being patterned after the kind of material with which Sandie Shaw was having some success at the time, a sort of cod-Bacharach without Bacharach’s harmonic or rhythmic unpredictability.
What is impressive, though, is the stylistic range of this album, where something like this could follow something like Writing Wrongs and have neither track sound more out of place than the other.
The Poster
Writers: David Jones & Steve Pitts
Lead Vocalist: Davy Jones
Other Monkees present: None
Easily the worst song on the album by a long way, this is Being For The Benefit Of Mr Kite as rewritten by a very literal-minded five-year-old with no sense of poetry or imagery, and sung slightly out of tune. Except not as interesting as that sounds.
Jones got the idea for this song from one Edith Sidebottom, a woman in her mid-eighties who had written a song that ended ‘and the circus is coming to town’. She later threatened to sue him, but he settled out of court.
P.O. Box 9847
Writers: Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart
Lead Vocalist: Micky Dolenz
Other Monkees present: None
This is actually a cover of a track Boyce and Hart had previously released under their own names, as a B-side. Boyce and Hart’s original is actually rather better than the Monkees’ version.
This song came from an idea by Bob Rafelson, one of the producers of the Monkees’ TV show, about someone writing a classified ad. It’s actually one of Boyce and Hart’s cleverer songs, with each verse being a classified ad leading up to the chorus, which is just the title repeated, leading back into the verse with a different line each time, but all along the lines of “I’ve described me very poorly, better try again”.
Not only is it an extremely good song as a song, it also manages to work very cynically on the teenage girl listener. Each verse is slightly more grounded and realistic than the one previous, and it’s easy to imagine poor Micky trying vainly to describe himself, while only you – yes YOU teenage American girl – can really understand him.
Listening to Boyce and Hart’s original version, it’s very obviously inspired by John Lennon and George Harrison’s work on Revolver, but the two versions by the Monkees move further from that inspiration (though the piano part in the released version bears a family resemblance to the Taxman riff).
There are two very different versions of this song recorded by the Monkees (both based on the same basic take, but with very different overdubs). The more conventional of the two, driven by an eerie Bernard Herrman-esque string part, is the one that made it on to the album, but the other version, based around a Moog rather than the strings, is slightly better in my view. Either way, though, this is, other than Daydream Believer, the strongest non-Nesmith track on the album.
Magnolia Simms
Writers: Michael Nesmith
Lead Vocalist: Michael Nesmith
Other Monkees present: None
The most straightforward of Nesmith’s songs on the album, this is a note-perfect attempt at recapturing the feel of 1920s and 30s ‘old-time’ music, from a time when country music and jazz were much closer than people now think (see for example Jimmie Rodgers and Louis Armstrong recording together).
There was a brief fad for this kind of nostalgia at this time, more in Britain than in the US, with bands like the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band recording 1920s novelty songs, and even the Beatles would follow a few months later with Honey Pie, which, like this song, had added surface noise to replicate the sound of an old 78. Nesmith also has a filter on his vocal, to sound more like the 1920s singers who used a megaphone to be heard above their bands.
The stereo mix of this song, in fact, only plays in one channel, because the music it was emulating was in mono. However, the box set reissue of this album contains a true-stereo remix, without the noises.
This is Nesmith’s slightest piece on the album, but accessible and catchy, and shows his mastery of this style, both as a songwriter and a vocalist.
Valleri
Writers: Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart
Lead Vocalist: Davy Jones
Other Monkees present: None
This is another remake of a song recorded earlier in the band’s career. In this case, the song had featured on the TV show, and was being played by DJs, but had never been released commercially.
The original version, produced by Boyce & Hart, was deemed unusable as all tracks now had to have a ‘produced by the Monkees’ credit. So Boyce & Hart were called back in to re-record it, as close as possible to the original recording, but had to give the Monkees credit for production.
The song itself has been called by Nesmith “The worst song I’ve ever heard in my life,” and there’s some truth to that assertion. Its genesis began when Boyce & Hart were asked by Kirshner if they had a girl’s-name song for the TV show, said ‘of course’, then wrote it in the car on the way to see him. As a result, the song just consists of four chords repeated over and over – a descending sequence by whole tones from I to V7 – with the most moronic possible lyrics (rhyming good with could and door with before, with the chorus just being the word “Valleri”).
However the production and arrangement are a truly impressive piece of turd-polishing, with a fuzz-guitar riff inspired by Satisfaction (though sounding more like Hungry Freaks, Daddy by the Mothers Of Invention), a Stax-esque horn section and blisteringly fast acoustic guitar playing from Louie Shelton. While the song may be dreadful, the record is a great piece of pop music.
This was the Monkees’ last top ten single in the US, peaking at number three and going gold. Perhaps not coincidentally, it was also the last single they released to feature in their TV show.
Zor and Zam
Writers: Bill & John Chadwick
Lead Vocalist: Micky Dolenz
Other Monkees present: None
A rather intense nursery-rhyme like song telling the story of two kingdoms preparing for a war that never happens because nobody showed up, this song is possibly best known for popularising the anti-war slogan “what if they gave a war and nobody came?”, a paraphrase by the Chadwicks of “Suppose they gave a war and no-one came?”, the title of a magazine article, which was itself a misremembering of a line from a poem by Carl Sandburg.
The line as used by the Monkees became one of the most powerful slogans of the Vietnam era, though few remembered where it had come from.
Bonus Tracks
Alvin
Writer: Nicholas Thorkelson
Lead Vocalist: Peter Tork
Other Monkees present: None
A charming 24-second a capella piece by Tork’s brother, about missing a pet alligator who’s been flushed down the toilet.
I’m Gonna Try
Writers: David Jones & Steve Pitts
Lead Vocalist: Davy Jones
Other Monkees present: None
Described (accurately) by Jones as ‘just a throwaway thing, really’ [FOOTNOTE: quote taken from Sandoval, p. 172], this harmlessly pleasant example of Jones’ ‘Broadway rock’ style would nonetheless have made a much better track than The Poster, which was recorded at the same time.
Lady’s Baby
Writer: Peter Tork
Lead Vocalist: Peter Tork
Other Monkees present: None
This simple ballad by Tork, which went unreleased until the 1990s, was his obsession at this period, taking twelve sessions to record, including musicians like Stephen Stills, Dewey Martin (the drummer from Buffalo Springfield) and Buddy Miles.
It’s odd it took so long, and went through so many versions (of which several are included on the box set version, and one more on a bonus single that came with the initial copies of the box set), as the basics of this simple song were in place from the start, and any of the multiple takes and mixes that have seen the light could easily have been released.
A nice, gentle song about being at peace with his then-girlfriend and her son, this is much better than much of the material that made it to the finished album, and it’s a shame Tork’s perfectionism drove him past a point of diminishing returns.
D.W. Washburn
Writers: Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller
Lead Vocalist: Micky Dolenz
Other Monkees present: None
This was the first Monkees song to be a flop, ‘only’ reaching number 19 on the US singles charts, thanks to being the first single the band released not to be featured on the TV show, and to The Coasters releasing a version almost simultaneously.
It’s a shame, because this is an enjoyable Dixieland pastiche in a style that was suiting the Monkees well at the time, being stylistically close to Cuddly Toy in its mixture of rather dark lyrics (from the point of view of a homeless alcoholic refusing the help of the Salvation Army) and upbeat music. And Leiber and Stoller were one of the most reliable songwriting teams of their age.
Nonetheless, while this was not a big hit (though still far more successful than any singles from the rest of their career), it’s still a great track, with the clanking banjo and Dolenz’s mannered vocal bringing the song to life beautifully.
It’s Nice to Be With You
Writers: Jerry Goldstein
Lead Vocalist: Davy Jones
Other Monkees present: None
Written by the co-writer of I Want Candy and My Boyfriend’s Back, this sappy ballad unfortunately has little of those tracks’ energy, being exactly what you imagine Davy Jones singing a song called It’s Nice To Be With You would sound like, with a plinky, over-orchestrated background. As the B-side of D.W. Washburn this scraped to number 51 in the US charts, but did better internationally.
Carlisle Wheeling
Writer: Michael Nesmith
Lead Vocalist: Michael Nesmith
Other Monkees present: Peter Tork (banjo)
Musically, this is almost a rewrite of Nine Times Blue, although lyrically it is very different, looking back with age at a happy romance that has almost but not quite dulled into complacency.
Nesmith was never very happy with this song, but nonetheless he attempted recording it several times – this version, a similar version during the Instant Replay sessions, a version on his big band instrumental album The Wichita Train Whistle Sings and a solo version in the early 70s.
It’s easy to see both why he was unhappy with it and why he tried to make it work. Melodically it’s quite beautiful, but lyrically the metaphors at times grow very strained. But then there are also moments of lyrical brilliance – “So forgive me my dear if I seem preoccupied/And if the razor edge of youth filled love is gone” is as good a couplet as Nesmith has ever written.
Rosemarie
Writer: Micky Dolenz
Lead Vocalist: Micky Dolenz
Other Monkees present: Peter Tork (acoustic guitar)
This horn-driven riffy soul track is as close to being funky as the Monkees ever got, and wouldn’t sound out of place on an early-70s blaxploitation film. There are three versions of this track, all with different lyrics. The version on the The Birds… box set is an early mix with no lyrics at all on the bridge, the version on the Missing Links CD has the most properly-thought-out lyrics, but the best version by far is the version released as a bonus track on Instant Replay.
That version has Dolenz singing gibberish lyrics and imitating various musical instruments vocally, and is just superb. But all the versions of this – all of which derive from the same basic track – are an intriguing look at a musical direction the Monkees never really took, but which Dolenz in particular was well suited for.
My Share of the Sidewalk
Writers: Michael Nesmith
Lead Vocalist: Davy Jones/Michael Nesmith
Other Monkees present: None
Lyrically, this is about as simplistic as Nesmith gets, but musically it’s more interesting. This is the most metrically irregular thing the Monkees ever released.
Starting with an intro of four bars of five/four, it then goes into a first verse which breaks down as two bars of seven/four, two of four/four and one more of seven/four. The second verse, while sounding similar, is actually six bars of four/four and one of seven/four. There’s then a vocal bridge of eight bars of twelve/eight, an instrumental break of four bars of twelve/eight, then the whole thing repeats from the start, then repeats again til end of verse two and fades on a repetition of the five/four intro.
What’s interesting about this as well is it shows what a difference each Monkee could make vocally. When Nesmith sings this, in a rough version without the full orchestration, it sounds like a cool jazz piece, like it could be sung by Mose Allison or someone. By contrast, when Jones sings it, it sounds like the kind of all-round family entertainment that could easily have been used on any variety show of the period.
And while I’ve sometimes been harsh on Jones’ vocals in this book, this shows that when he puts his mind to it he can do a remarkable job. He sings this in his ‘Broadway-rock’ style, but manages to navigate these horrendous changes (and some bad syllabics – the stresses to this lyric don’t fall at all well) without sounding like he’s even trying, as well as managing the rangey melody far better than Nesmith (who croaks his way through the high notes in what is, admittedly, a demo).
Little Red Rider
Writers: Michael Nesmith
Lead Vocalist: Michael Nesmith
Other Monkees present: None
There are two versions of this recorded as The Monkees. The version on the The Birds…box set is a simple acoustic demo, while the version on Missing Links vol 3 is a country-soul number that sounds a lot like the music Elvis Presley was making at the time, or the country-soul blend Dan Penn, Chips Moman and Spooner Oldham had come up with. An enjoyable track, it’s possibly more of a stylistic experiment than a proper song (though again, like Rose Marie, it’s interesting to see the soulful direction various band members were taking). Nesmith later rerecorded this with The First National Band on his first solo album, Magnetic South.
Ceiling in My Room
Writers: Don DeMieri, Robert Dick and David Jones
Lead Vocalist: Davy Jones
Other Monkees present: None
A dreadful, dreadful song, this is some kind of self-pitying cross between My Way (though of course this was before that horror was ever written) and It’s Nice To Be With You, with some inspiration from the Beach Boys’ In My Room, and with backing vocals that are more bellowed than sung. Abysmal.
Come On In
Writer: Jo Mapes
Lead Vocalist: Peter Tork
Other Monkees present: None
This song, in a sunshine pop version, was a hit for harmony-pop band The Association, but this is a drastically different arrangement. In fact, this track sounds like Lady’s Baby part two, having the same slow/fast tempo changes, and like that track features Stephen Stills and Lance Wakely on guitars, along with Dewey Martin.
A nice, gentle song performed by excellent musicians, with a heartfelt vocal, this is nothing mindblowingly special, but it’s a nice track. This kind of music would become incredibly popular a couple of years later, performed by people like Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Jackson Browne or James Taylor, but by that point Tork had retired from music.
Tear the Top Right Off My Head
Writer: Peter Tork
Lead Vocalist: Peter Tork, Micky Dolenz
Other Monkees present: Micky Dolenz (backing vocals)
On the other hand, this kind of thing never became hugely popular, being as it is a novelty banjo-and-harmonica driven love song which occasionally turns into a hippy comedy hard rock number for a few bars.
There are a few versions of this track on the box set – Tork’s original vocal, a version with Dolenz singing which doesn’t really work, and a version (with Tork’s vocal) sped up to be about a tone faster, which comes together much better than the other versions, but this never quite works, though no matter how often I listen to it I can’t put my finger on why.
Merry Go Round
Writers: Peter Tork and Diane Hildebrand
Lead Vocalist: Peter Tork
Other Monkees present: None
Musically an interesting track, this mournful organ-and-piano driven waltz was recorded in a few different versions. Easily the best version is the solo acoustic version on this box set. The two fuller versions that have been released, here and on Missing Links Vol 3, both have interesting production choices, but are taken at too slow a speed for Tork’s comparatively weak voice, and then fatally damaged by Tork double-tracking himself sloppily. There’s an interesting idea in here, but other than the acoustic demo it’s not something you’d want to listen to regularly.
War Games
Writers: David Jones and Steve Pitts
Lead Vocalist: Davy Jones
Other Monkees present: Michael Nesmith (acoustic guitar, version one only)
Attentive readers will have noticed that I’m not the hugest fan of the songwriting talents of Jones and Pitts, and the two of them trying to write an anti-war protest song is about as poor as you’d expect.
But in fact, one of the two versions of this, the first version, works quite well. With a backing band led by Nesmith, the two-chord verse is slashed through at quite a fast pace, and the arrangement is a straight rip-off of 1965 Dylan, all Hammond organ and acoustic rhythm guitar.
Version two, though, is taken at a much slower speed, and mixes tinkly harpsichord with a marching band feel, to horrible effect.
Laurel And Hardy
Writers: Jan Berry and Roger Christian
Lead Vocalist: Davy Jones
Other Monkees present: None
This isn’t actually a Monkees track at all. It’s a Jan And Dean one, though neither Jan nor Dean appear.
To explain – Jan And Dean were a successful pop duo in the early and mid sixties, consisting of Jan Berry, who was a driven, unpleasant, ambitious man who wrote their hits (usually in collaboration with Roger Christian, Don Altfeld and/or Brian Wilson), produced them and sang on them, and Dean Torrence, a nice person everyone liked, who didn’t. [FOOTNOTE: This is probably an exaggeration. But the vocal parts Torrence took live were, often, performed in the studio by P.F. Sloan or, less frequently, Brian Wilson].
Jones was friendly with both of them, and when Berry was seriously brain-damaged in a car accident stepped in to help, spending a lot of time helping Berry re-learn basic life skills.
Both Jan and Dean, separately, decided to record new ‘Jan and Dean’ material to try to keep the brand alive, with Torrence’s solo concept album Save For A Rainy Day being released as a Jan And Dean album while Berry was still in hospital.
Berry responded with Carnival Of Sound , a psych-pop album that remained unreleased until 2010, and Jones assisted with some of the vocals, as Berry was at the time unable to sing.
This track, which is based on a sitar rendition of the Laurel And Hardy theme before going into more familiar Jan And Dean musical territory, was written by Berry with lyricist Roger Christian, who had co-written many of Berry’s previous hits as well as Beach Boys songs like Little Deuce Coupe and Don’t Worry Baby.
The track is very much in the novelty vein of albums like Jan And Dean Meet Batman, although this version, with Jones singing lead, doesn’t go so far in the novelty direction as the version, with a different lead vocalist, released on the Carnival Of Sound CD, which has a verse about Laurel And Hardy on a roller-coaster with the Maharishi.
Don’t Say Nothin’ Bad (About My Baby)
Writers: Gerry Goffin and Carole King
Lead Vocalist: Micky Dolenz
Other Monkees present: None
A generic twelve-bar rock-and-roll track, this sounds like the kind of thing that could have been a minor hit for Danny And The Juniors in 1958 or Shakin’ Stevens in 1981. It has absolutely no distinguishing features.
Shake ‘Em Up and Let ‘Em Roll
Writers: Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller
Lead Vocalist: Micky Dolenz
Other Monkees present: None
There are two different versions of this track, both identical but for the vocal take used. It’s a pleasant R&B number with an incongruously amusing trad jazz clarinet part, and in fact was recorded in 1970 as a single by Kenny Ball and his Jazzmen.
Astonishingly, though, this is the second time, after D.W. Washburn, that Dolenz would sing a Leiber/Stoller song very shortly after the Coasters recorded a version. In this case the Coasters’ version was recorded less than a fortnight before the Monkees’ version, and one has to wonder what they were thinking. Perhaps wisely, after the Coasters’ release had helped sink Washburn on the charts, this remained unreleased despite being a very pleasant, though outdated, song.
Changes
Writers: David Jones and Steve Pitts
Lead Vocalist: Davy Jones
Other Monkees present: None
A Jones/Pitts collaboration intended as a title track for the Monkees’ forthcoming film (later retitled Head), this is actually not half-bad. The arrangement is in the same sort of muscular soul-rock range as that of Little Red Rider, and while the song itself isn’t particularly good, this has a nice Dusty In Memphis feel to it.
I Wasn’t Born to Follow
Writers: Gerry Goffin and Carole King
Monkees present: None
An instrumental backing track of a country-rock (with harpsichord) song which had recently been released by The Byrds, no vocal was ever recorded for this.
The Party
Writers: David Jones and Steve Pitts
Lead Vocalist: Davy Jones
Other Monkees present: None
A very pleasant track, and one of the better Jones/Pitts collaborations, this has something of the feel of Changes about it, but a less impressive (and more string-dominated) arrangement. A minor piece, but enjoyable on its own terms.
I’m A Man
Writers: Barry Mann & Cynthia Weill
Monkees present: None
An unused backing track, produced by Chip Douglas in clear, blatant imitation of Phil Spector’s style, this is actually one of the better Spector imitations I’ve heard, though the instruments are much clearer and more separated than Spector’s usual style.
Monkee Music 4(5th Anniversary!) – Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones Ltd
A revised and improved version of this essay appears in my book Monkee Music, available as paperback, hardback, PDF, Kindle (US), Kindle (UK) and ePub (all DRM-free).
Today is the 45th anniversary of the debut of the Monkees’ TV show, so I saved this piece on their masterpiece, which I was originally going to post on Saturday, til today. Which is quite handy, as I’ve been off ill with a migraine today and wouldn’t have been able to write a proper post.
Also, I’ve got a mock-up of the cover to the book of these I’m doing. Let me know what you think:
Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones, Ltd.
The second and last of the albums where the Monkees provided the bulk of the instrumentation is their absolute masterpiece. While Dolenz was no longer playing much on the records, the band were still working as a unit in the studio, albeit an augmented one, and all four members were contributing creatively.
The result is one of the great mid-60s albums, that easily stands up with Revolver, Absolutely Free, Forever Changes, Smiley Smile and so on as a serious piece of work. The fact that this was recorded by a band who were being dismissed as pre-teen pabulum (and who were having to work on a TV show full time at the same time) is nothing short of extraordinary.
If you want a sense of what was possible in popular music as 1967 drew to a close, you could do far, far worse than Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones, Ltd, where influences as diverse as Frank Zappa, the Beatles, bluegrass, Mose Allison and Robert A Heinlein collide, and the result is something unlike anything else in popular music.
All tracks produced by Chip Douglas.
Salesman
Writer: Craig Smith
Lead Vocalist: Michael Nesmith
Other Monkees present: Micky Dolenz & Davy Jones (percussion and backing vocals), Peter Tork (possible guitar).
One can see from the very first song on Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones Ltd that this is something very different from the earlier Monkees albums. For the first time ever, Nesmith is taking a lead vocal on a song he didn’t write. In fact, Nesmith dominates this album vocally, after previously having taken no more than three leads per album, here he takes five, of which he only wrote one.
This song was written by Nesmith’s friend Craig Smith, of the psych-pop band The Penny Arkade. Smith later changed his name to Satya Sai Maitreya Kali and recorded his own version of this with Mike Love of the Beach Boys singing lead.
The recording is loosely modelled on She’s About A Mover by The Sir Douglas Quintet (which was itself based on She’s A Woman by the Beatles), which Nesmith liked for its “Tex-Mex oompah”, and like both those earlier records is driven by a prominent bass-line with stabbing guitars on the off-beat.
This song caused some controversy for the drug references (more blatant in the extended mix, which features a monologue by Nesmith about different cigarette-rolling machines), with NBC not wishing to feature it on the TV show. Actually, the song is at least moderately anti-drug, or at least anti-dealer, with its portrayal of a salesman selling ‘every pot’ and ‘sailing so high’ but who has a ‘short life span’.
On many of the band’s other albums, this would have been a highlight, but on an album where nearly every song is a minor masterpiece, this is ‘just’ an album track.
While the Monkees were no longer playing together as a band in-studio, this album does feature a band of sorts, with Nesmith on guitar, Tork on guitar and keyboards, Chip Douglas on bass and Eddie Hoh on drums on almost every track. In this case it’s unsure whether Tork played on the track, but this studio unit would feature on nine of the thirteen tracks on the album.
She Hangs Out
Writers: Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich
Lead Vocalist: Davy Jones
Other Monkees present: Michael Nesmith (electric guitar), Peter Tork (organ), Micky Dolenz (backing vocals)
Pisces, Aquarius almost alternates between two very different types of song. The first type is either sung or written by Nesmith, and is a country-psych-pop track with oblique lyrics. Salesman, the opening track, is an example of this type.
The other type features Jones on vocals and is at least mildly misogynist. This great pop track is an example of the second type. One could write an entire thesis on the attitude towards women displayed on Jones’ tracks on this album, which is all the more bizarre when one considers that they were all written by different outside songwriters, and two of them were co-written by women.
Either way, this is one of the less offensive of these tracks, and the catchiest, being based around a warning – “How old you say your sister was? You know you’d better keep an eye on her” – about a young girl ‘hanging out’ with an older crowd, but its lascivious attitude (“I know you taught your sister to boogaloo…well, she could teach you a thing or two”).
This had originally been released as a quickly-withdrawn B-side to A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You, in a version featuring only Jones and produced by Jeff Barry. This version, re-recorded with the Nesmith/Tork/Douglas/Hoh backing band, keeps the best bits of that arrangement (the answering vocals and ‘doo da ron day ron day’s) while expanding the organ part (which in Barry’s version had been very similar to those in I’m A Believer or his later hit Sugar Sugar), getting rid of the incongruous fuzz guitar and adding a horn section. The result is a great, and for the Monkees quite funky, dance record, with Jones’ sleazy, strained vocals working perfectly in this context.
The Door Into Summer
Writers: Chip Douglas and Bill Martin
Lead Vocalist: Michael Nesmith
Other Monkees present: Micky Dolenz (backing vocals, additional drums), Peter Tork (keyboards)
One of only two songs on this album to feature Dolenz on drums (he plays one of the two drum parts audible on the record, with Hoh playing the other), this song by the band’s friend Bill Martin seems musically to have been inspired by some of Love’s music at the time – the acoustic guitar intro sounding very like many of the acoustic parts on the Forever Changes and Da Capo albums.
Lyrically, the inspiration is more obvious – the title of the song comes from the Robert A. Heinlein novel of the same name. In the first half of the book, before it descends into the usual late-Heinlein sexual creepiness (though for a change it’s paedophilia, not incest, that Heinlein advocates in this one), the protagonist makes a lot of money from sales of stock in a company he founded, before going into cryogenic suspension and waking up in the future.
Douglas and Martin seem to have taken elements of this basic idea and used them as a metaphor for a businessman giving up most of his life and constantly postponing doing what he wants to advance his career for no real reason.
Easily one of the best tracks the band ever did, everything on this track works well, from Dolenz and Nesmith’s harmonies on the chorus, to the interplay between the banjo (played by Doug Dillard) and Tork’s keyboard, to the wonderful pseudo-Indian melismatic wailing on the end (by Dolenz, possibly with Harry Nilsson adding some extra vocals) in imitation of the Beatles’ Rain.
Love is Only Sleeping
Writers: Barry Mann and Cynthia Weill
Lead Vocalist: Michael Nesmith
Other Monkees present: Micky Dolenz (backing vocals), Davy Jones (percussion, backing vocals), Peter Tork (keyboards)
Another Nesmith-sung psych-pop track, this one seems to be modelled on some of John Lennon’s songs on Revolver, with their odd time signatures (the verse for this is in 7/4) and driving guitar riffs. One of the slighter actual songs here, this becomes a worthwhile track thanks to the production tricks, and to one of Nesmith’s very best vocal performances.
Nesmith here really shows off his versatility, from the low, speak-sung, “once I loved but love was dead” to the near-falsetto ‘sleeping’ at the end of the middle eight, he sings in a number of different voices, each one chosen perfectly for the section of the song in question. Dolenz – rightly – gets a lot of acclaim for his actorly phrasing, but Nesmith is at least as sensitive a vocalist here.
Cuddly Toy
Writer: Harry Nilsson
Lead Vocalist: Davy Jones
Other Monkees present: Micky Dolenz (drums and backing vocals), Peter Tork (piano), Michael Nesmith (guitar)
The last Monkees studio track to feature Dolenz on drums for nearly thirty years, this song was brought to them by their new ‘discovery’ Harry Nilsson.
Nilsson had been working as a bank clerk while submitting songs to various people for several years, writing songs like the Lovin’ Spoonful rip-off This Could Be The Night for Phil Spector. (That song was given to The Modern Folk Quartet , who had featured both Chip Douglas and sometime Monkees studio bass player Jerry Yester).
But at a time when the Monkees were drifting apart musically as a band, Nilsson’s astonishing talents were something they could all agree on, appealing as they did both to Nesmith’s desire to expand his musical palette (both Nesmith and Nilsson were equally influenced by both pre-rock popular music and by the Beatles’ contemporary work) and to Jones’ desire to make ‘Broadway rock’ his father’s generation could enjoy.
Not that Jones’ father’s generation would approve of the lyrics – or at least one would hope not. This song has been variously described as being about various sordid practices up to and including gang rape, but in fact seems pretty clearly to ‘only’ be someone callously dumping a girl after taking her virginity – “You’re not the only cherry delight that was left in the night and gave up without a fight”, “I never told you that I loved no other, you must have dreamed it in your sleep.”
Not quite as callous a performance as Nilsson’s own recording (which includes tossed-off ‘sob sob’ asides), this song still works because of the way the jaunty, upbeat, vaudeville style music, and Jones’ cheerful performance (doubled almost all the way through by Dolenz) contrast with the vicious psychopathy of the lyrics.
Very, very far from a pleasant song, but still a great one.
Words
Writers: Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart
Lead Vocalist: Micky Dolenz and Peter Tork
Other Monkees present: Michael Nesmith (guitar), Davy Jones (percussion)
One of the few occasions on which Tork actually plays bass on record, this track, which closes side one, was originally recorded during the More Of The Monkees sessions with Boyce and Hart producing and the Candy Store Prophets backing, before being remade during these sessions.
There are very few differences between the two performances – the original has some extra lead guitar, a small bit of backwards recording, and has a flute part rather than Tork’s hammond organ solo, but otherwise the two tracks are almost identical, even down to the chimes that can be heard faintly (going across the stereo spectrum in the stereo mix).
Starting with a verse that stays on one minor chord for the whole verse, Dolenz and Tork overlap vocal lines (Tork’s only vocal leads on a Boyce and Hart song), in a moody downbeat manner, before Dolenz becomes sole lead vocalist for the bridge (which by the time this came out would have sounded like it was based on Heroes & Villains by the Beach Boys, having the same bass riff as that song, but which was probably, like the Beach Boys’ track, inspired by the version of Save The Last Dance For Me that Phil Spector had recently produced for Tina Turner).
The chorus is one of Boyce & Hart’s garage-psych classics – a two-chord riff played for four bars, then repeated a tone up, with a bassline that’s playing a variation on a boogie line (going constantly up instead of up then down), and is just ridiculously exciting.
This became the B-side to Pleasant Valley Sunday and charted in its own right at number 11.
Hard to Believe
Writers: David Jones, Kim Capli, Eddie Brick and Charlie Rockett
Lead Vocalist: Davy Jones
Other Monkees present: none
Side two of the album opens with the song that marks the end of the Monkees as a recording group. The first song Jones ever co-wrote with anyone outside the band, this was written with two members of the band’s tour support band The Sundowners, plus Rockett, their roadie, while on tour.
A bossa nova-lite track that fits in with the ‘Broadway rock’ idea Jones had been discussing in interviews for a while, this is the only proper song on the album to feature no Monkee involvement other than the lead vocalist. Instead Kim Capli plays the whole rhythm track, building up from the (excellent) drum and percussion parts.
Actually quite a catchy song (and the heavy breathing in the tag sounds like it may have inspired the similar effect in Time Of The Season by The Zombies), this could easily have been a hit for Tom Jones or Dusty Springfield at the time. But a faultline was appearing in popular music by this point, with Vegas-style singers like those on one side, and rock music on the other, and Jones was trying firmly to ensconce himself on one side of that line, while his bandmates were all on the other.
Possibly because it was the only song to feature none of the rest of the band, this is the only song from the album never to be featured in the TV show. But it points the way to the future of the band – by their next album they would be working independently of each other more often than not, and solo tracks like this would become the norm.
What Am I Doing Hangin’ ‘Round?
Writers: “Travis Lewis and Boomer Clark” (Michael Martin Murphey and Owens Castleman)
Lead Vocalist: Michael Nesmith
Other Monkees present: Micky Dolenz and Davy Jones (backing vocals)
In its own way, this track also shows the way the band were falling apart as a recording unit. While the track features Nesmith on guitar, Douglas on bass and Hoh on drums, the standard rhythm section for this album, the banjo is supplied not by Tork (who had played the banjo on Headquarters) but by bluegrass legend Doug Dillard.
While it sounds like a fairly standard country song, this is far more harmonically sophisticated than was normal in country music at that time. Nesmith points out (in an interview quoted in Andrew Sandoval’s liner notes to the deluxe edition of this album) the I7-vi7 change in the bridge as a particularly ‘uncountry’ element, but the song plays with key ambiguity quite a bit, not being able to decide whether it’s in C or F (in a mirror of its protagonist’s own self-questioning), and going to a Db in the chorus (at the start of the line “I should be ridin’ on that train to San Anton’”) which belongs to neither key.
Nesmith provides one of his very best vocals here, going from the resigned “boy I sure missed mine” to the almost howled last chorus.
While this has precursors in some of Nesmith’s own earlier work, and on some tracks on the Beatles albums Beatles For Sale and Help!, this song was, at the time, probably the most successful ever example of country-rock, managing to combine the emotional sophistication and musicianship of the former genre with the energy of the latter without sacrificing either.
This song has become a recent highlight of the Monkees’ (Nesmith-less) reunion tours, where Tork takes the lead vocal. As has the next track…
Peter Percival Patterson’s Pet Pig Porky
Writer: Peter Tork
Lead Vocalist: Peter Tork
Other Monkees present: None
A tongue-twister credited to Tork as arranger, this twenty-seven second spoken word track is just a bit of fun, with Tork showing how much fun plosives can be when you don’t use a pop-shield.
Pleasant Valley Sunday
Writers: Gerry Goffin and Carole King
Lead Vocalist: Micky Dolenz
Other Monkees present: Peter Tork (piano), Michael Nesmith (guitar and backing vocals), Davy Jones (backing vocals and percussion)
If ever proof were needed that the Monkees were capable of producing great pop records without the involvement of Don Kirshner, this is it. With an instrumental track by Tork, Nesmith, Douglas and Hoh (with additional acoustic guitar by Bill Chadwick and possibly Dolenz), this shows that the band could, when left to their own devices, create spectacular pop singles.
Every band member gets to shine here – Dolenz of course takes the lead vocal, and does his usual superb job, Nesmith plays the Day Tripper-esque guitar riff (composed by Chip Douglas) and adds harmonies (and the Dolenz/Nesmith harmony blend, while underutilised, is one of the band’s most thrilling elements), Tork adds the piano part under the middle eight (which otherwise would have seemed woefully poor, having as it does only a single chord), and Jones gives the vocal performance of his life, on the nasal, sarcastic ‘ta ta ta ta’ section.
Given that the song itself is relatively weak, being just an example of the mid-60s tendency to cruelly mock people for daring to want a comfortable life (see for example every song George Harrison ever wrote), the power of the track must be attributed entirely to the performance, production and arrangement. And every element here is spot-on (as can be heard on the ‘karaoke’ version made available on a Japanese best-of CD, where every detail of the backing track can be heard).
It’s not the song itself that made this a hit, but Douglas’ riff and the understanding of dynamics. This track builds from a relatively sedate beginning towards an almost orgasmic peak, with the riff and Nesmith and Dolenz’s wailing being lost in a wall of reverb that it turn gets fed back on itself. The ending wouldn’t be out of place on a Led Zeppelin record, but because it’s been contextualised as part of a piece of simple pop music, no-one blinked an eye.
Quite rightly, this is a favourite of the band members – Peter Tork recorded a truly odd remake of it with his band The New Monks in 1980, for example – because of all their classic singles, it’s the only one which allowed them all to shine as a group.
Daily Nightly
Writer: Michael Nesmith
Lead Vocalist: Micky Dolenz
Other Monkees present: Peter Tork (keyboards), Michael Nesmith (guitar)
Oddly, for an album so dominated vocally by Nesmith, his first songwriting contribution to the album is one of the handful of Dolenz lead vocals.
This song, in fact, shows the new songwriting style Nesmith would be trying out for the next few albums. While it’s harmonically simple (only three chords), the lyrics, which began life as an impressionistic poem about the Sunset Strip riots, give up on standard ideas of sense in order to play with language:
Startled eyes that sometimes see phantasmagoric splendour
Pirouette down palsied paths with pennies for the vendor
Salvation’s yours for just the time it takes to pay the dancer.
Meanwhile Dolenz turns in the performance of his life, not just on vocal, but on Moog. Dolenz had only bought the Moog (one of a handful in existence at the time) the previous weekend, and this was its first use on a pop record. Dolenz here just twiddles knobs and makes interesting sounds, but in so doing he manages to do pretty much everything worthwhile that there is to do with a Moog.
The whole thing has a dense, brooding feel, and is in a sonic world completely different from anything else on the album. Tork’s Hammond organ and Douglas’ bass are very much of their time – the basic backing track could be by Julie Driscoll, Brian Auger And The Trinity or Jefferson Airplane – but adding Dolenz’s vocals and the Moog’s siren-like wails makes this something very special.
Don’t Call On Me
Writers: Michael Nesmith and John London
Lead Vocalist: Michael Nesmith
Other Monkees present: Peter Tork (keyboards), Micky Dolenz and Davy Jones (intro chatter)
And from a pointer to Nesmith’s songwriting future, we look to his past, with this song he’d written four years earlier.
This lounge-flavoured song was originally written as an exercise in learning how to use major 7ths (which are what give it its lush feeling), and an acoustic demo exists of it from the early 60s in an almost McCartney-esque style, but it probably came back to its composer’s mind after hearing America Drinks And Goes Home by the Mothers Of Invention.
Frank Zappa, the Mothers’ leader, had become a big influence on the Monkees, especially Nesmith, and would appear in the second series of the TV show and make a cameo appearance in the band’s film Head, and America Drinks And Goes Home is both harmonically and lyrically similar to this song, though Zappa plays it entirely for laughs, while Nesmith takes the song perfectly straight (though like the Mothers’ record, the track opens and ends with fake-drunk audience chatter and lounge piano).
This is actually a lovely ballad, with Nesmith singing right at the top of his range, sounding utterly unlike his normal baritone, and would be a stand-out track were it not for the fact that nearly every track on this album is a stand-out track.
Star Collector
Writer: Gerry Goffin and Carole King
Lead Vocalist: Davy Jones
Other Monkees present: Micky Dolenz (backing vocals), Peter Tork (keyboards), Michael Nesmith (guitar)
Well, we’ve not had any Jones misogyny for a little while, so why not close the album with it? This rather nasty Goffin/King song about groupies (last line of the chorus “how can I love her when I just don’t respect her?”) is catchy, but after some of the wonderful music we’ve had it’s a shallow, heartless song to end on, although it’s easy to see why it was chosen as the closer, having as it does an extended Moog jam to fade on which would be difficult to follow. (The Moog here is played by session player Paul Beaver, far less inventively than Dolenz’s performance on Daily Nightly).
On any other Monkees album this would be a decent slightly-below-average track with an interesting ending. Here it’s easily the least interesting track.
Bonus Tracks
Special Announcement
Writer: unknown
Lead Vocalist: Peter Tork
Other Monkees present: None
This is a little spoken-word joke, with Tork imitating the voice of Robert Keith Morrison, who introduced the reference tones for Ampex alignment tapes (used by sound engineers to calibrate equipment), introducing tones at various levels, the last of which is inaudible – but we hear a dog barking instead. This was originally intended as the opening track of the album.
It’s been suggested that this was a joke about the ‘silent’ track at the end of Sgt Pepper, which could only be heard by dogs, but a few weeks prior to this recording, the album Safe As Milk by Captain Beefheart And His Magic Band had been released. That album, which had been recorded in the same RCA studio as this album, and with Hank Cicalo (the Monkees’ regular engineer at this time) engineering, opened on side two with the track Kandy Korn, which starts with producer Richard Perry doing a near-identical Morrison imitation. For that reason, The Captain Beefheart Radar Station [FOOTNOTE http://www.beefheart.com/zigzag/books/barnescompanswers2.htm ] (from which I got some of the details here) calls this track ‘the first ever Beefheart cover version’.
Goin’ Down
Writers: Diane Hildebrand, Peter Tork, Michael Nesmith, Micky Dolenz and David Jones
Lead Vocalist: Micky Dolenz
Other Monkees present: Davy Jones (percussion), Peter Tork and Michael Nesmith (guitar)
This track developed from a jam on the Mose Allison classic Parchman Farm (which it resembles closely enough that it’s amazing Allison didn’t sue – it still has almost an identical melody). Nesmith liked the results, but didn’t see why the band should pay Allison royalties when they could just put a new vocal line on top, and so Diane Hildebrand (co-writer of Early Morning Blues And Greens and Your Auntie Grizelda) was asked to write a new lyric.
The result is stunning – Hildebrand’s lyrics turns this into a patter song or talking blues, with lyrics and internal rhymes tumbling out of Dolenz’s mouth in a flow that would shame most modern rappers. The lyrics themselves are hilarious – the thoughts of someone drunkenly attempting suicide by drowning in the Mississippi, regretting it, and eventually deciding to go with the flow, quite literally. Between Dolenz’s frenetic performance and the squealing saxophone, this is as exciting a record as it gets, and was released as the B-side of Daydream Believer.
Riu Chiu
Writer: traditional
Lead Vocalist: all four Monkees
And we finish with a stunning piece of vocal harmony, with the four Monkees singing a traditional Spanish Christmas carol.
I’ve got friends who believe that because Boyce and Hart provided the backing vocals on many of the early hits, that the Monkees themselves couldn’t sing in harmony. This track should prove them wrong – an a capella performance of a complicated arrangement that’s every bit as good as any of the harmony work pulled off by the Beach Boys, the Zombies or the Beatles.
In fact, there’s an even better version of this song on the Missing Links vol 2 CD – the version on here is taken from a TV performance, while the Missing Links vol 2 version is a full studio recording, properly EQd with reverb added. That version also features Chip Douglas, rather than Jones, taking the fourth harmony part. Both versions are absolutely lovely, though.
Monkee Music 1: The Monkees
A revised and improved version of this essay appears in my book Monkee Music, available as paperback, hardback, PDF, Kindle (US), Kindle (UK) and ePub (all DRM-free).
The Monkees’ first album was put together very quickly, in anticipation of the band’s TV debut. For the pilot of the TV show, several songs by Screen Gems writers Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart had been recorded by Boyce & Hart’s band The Candy Store Prophets, as the four band members hadn’t yet been cast. As a reward, after sessions with legendary producer Snuff Garret (who wanted Davy Jones to be sole lead vocalist) had broken down, Boyce and Hart were allowed to supervise the initial batch of sessions for the show and the first album (albeit with assistance from the more experienced Jack Keller on early sessions).
In fact, so much material was needed for the show that songs originally recorded during these sessions, but put aside or only used on the TV, would turn up (sometimes in rerecorded form) for the rest of the band’s career. Sometimes two sessions would be going on at once, with Michael Nesmith (who was allowed to write and produce two tracks on the album) running one session in one part of town while Boyce and Hart were running another elsewhere.
Surprisingly enough, the finished product is a rather good album of its type. While nowhere near as musically interesting as the results once the band took control of their own career, there’s still some great pop music mixed in with the filler.
Theme From The Monkees
Writers: Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart
Lead Vocalist: Micky Dolenz
Other Monkees present: None
Producers: Tommy Boyce, Bobby Hart and Jack Keller
Or “Hey hey, we’re the Candy Store Prophets”, as with the exception of Dolenz’s vocals this track, like much of The Monkees, was performed by Boyce and Hart’s band (Gerry McGee on guitar, Larry Taylor on bass and Billy Lewis on drums), with augmentation from a couple of session musicians – percussionist Gene Estes (a talented jazz vibraphone player, here reduced to hitting a tambourine on the off-beat, though he may also provide the finger-snaps) and guitarists Wayne Erwin and Louie Shelton. This group of musicians (with Hart on occasional keyboards and Boyce on backing vocals) would provide almost all the backing for the album.
While harmonically simple (staying for the most part in the key of Am in the verses apart from one V-of-V chord, and staying entirely in C for the choruses, and not using any chord more complex than a 7th), like most Boyce and Hart songs, the track is full of musical ideas. Starting with the famous ‘falling’ drum sound, the verse then combines Larry Taylor’s strutting bassline with fingersnapping and hi-hat to create an impressive air of swaggering cool, before going into the famous chorus.
The track is very blatantly “inspired” by the Dave Clark Five’s Catch Us If You Can, down to starting with a single throbbing bass note and “Here [we/they] come…” but is far more meticulously constructed, and a much more memorable record.
The one weak spot of the track is the way it shifts gears out of the chorus into the second verse, which doesn’t quite come off, but then the track really kicks off in the second chorus, with the key change up a tone for “We’re just trying to be friendly…”
The guitar solo – surprisingly late in the track, after the third chorus – is a pastiche of George Harrison’s Chet Atkins imitations, and the whole thing then builds to a powerful climax with a repeat of the second chorus with its key change.
Lyrically, the song is a perfect introduction to TV show for which it was the theme, though I’m not too keen on the line “we’re the young generation and we’ve got something to say”, which seems slightly patronising – especially since at the time the band members were prevented from saying anything even slightly controversial.
Saturday’s Child
Writer: David Gates
Lead Vocalist: Micky Dolenz
Other Monkees present: None
Producers: Tommy Boyce, Bobby Hart and Jack Keller
Astonishingly for something written by the man who would go on to form Bread, one of the softest of all AOR bands, Saturday’s Child is close to heavy metal, especially in the mono mix (which is a much more powerful track than the comparatively weak stereo version). The lumbering bottom-string guitar riff and throbbing bass part could almost be Deep Purple or early Black Sabbath, though Dolenz’s soft, faintly sinister vocal is as far from that style as you can get – Dolenz at his best being one of the most controlled vocalists in the business, and heavy metal vocals being all about (perceived) loss of control.
Interestingly, this track was originally recorded with Peter Tork on lead vocals, and while he’s officially not on the finished track, one of the double-tracked backing vocal parts singing the chorus countermelody does sound an awful lot like him.
I Wanna Be Free
Writers: Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart
Lead Vocalist: Davy Jones
Other Monkees present: None
Producers: Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart
And from Saturday’s Child we go to Sunday Morning… this track in its finished version bears quite an astonishing resemblance to the later Velvet Underground song, both harmonically and in the general shape of its melody and its feel.
Which makes it all the more surprising that while the finished version is a gentle ballad based around some lovely, sparse acoustic guitars, harpsichord and a string quartet, earlier that day the same song had been recorded in a totally different arrangement owing far more to Dylan’s Like A Rolling Stone, with Dolenz and Jones singing the verses in unison and Dolenz, rather than Jones, taking the middle eight. (This faster version is available on various compilations and as a bonus track on the Deluxe Edition of The Monkees, as well as being featured in the TV show).
Truth be told, the fast, Hammond-led version that was originally attempted suited the lyrics far better than the version finally released on the album, because the lyrics are anything but romantic. The protagonist of the song is quite possibly one of the most unpleasant in any song, insisting on utter devotion from his girlfriend (“say you’ll always be my friend, babe/We can make it to the end, babe”), but on utter freedom from all commitments himself (“doing all those things without any strings to tie me down”). His girlfriend is not even allowed to say that she loves him – just that she likes him – but is to give him total freedom.
That said, this unpleasant – frankly almost psychopathic – lyric is backed by one of the most beautiful arrangements on any Monkees record, nicely understated rather than over-lush, and Jones’ wistful vocal almost sells the song.
Tomorrow’s Gonna Be Another Day
Writers: Tommy Boyce and Steve Venet
Lead Vocalist: Micky Dolenz
Other Monkees present: None
Producers: Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart
A quick knock-off track that probably took about as long to write as it does to listen to, this seems to have been written with the rough aim of trying to write something that sounded like the Beatles’ more country-flavoured songs like Another Girl, though the harmonica part and “hey hey hey hey” vocal line sound more reminiscent of the Rolling Stones.
The vaguely train-like rhythm (and “I’m gonna catch me the fastest train” lyric) suggest that this was essentially a failed attempt at writing Last Train To Clarksville, which would be recorded two days later. However, on its own merits this is a perfectly pleasant country-blues number.
Papa Gene’s Blues
Writer: Michael Nesmith
Lead Vocalist: Michael Nesmith
Other Monkees present: Micky Dolenz (backing vocals), Peter Tork (guitar)
Producer: Michael Nesmith
If this sounds very different from the rest of the album up to this point, it’s because rather than being a Boyce/Hart production with an augmented Candy Store Prophets, this is a Nesmith production with members of the Wrecking Crew [FOOTNOTE: A term for the group of session musicians who played on most LA-based hit records in the 1960s, including drummers Hal Blaine and Jim Gordon, guitarist Glen Campbell and others. Note that Carol Kaye, a bass player who was often part of the Wrecking Crew, has claimed to have played on many Monkees hits. However, Ms Kaye's claims are, at best, unreliable, and she is only known to have played on two songs, both album tracks on More Of The Monkees.], who would play on most of Nesmith’s productions from this time. It’s also the closest thing to a group performance on the album, with Tork one of the several acoustic guitar players (as well as possibly providing some backing vocals on a rejected mix) and Dolenz harmonising with Nesmith throughout.
From this early, Nesmith was pushing for the band to have creative involvement in their own records, and so this track more than any others on this album points the way forward to the music the band would be making from their third album onwards.
A Latin-infused country song, with tons of percussion, this is musically not much more sophisticated than Boyce and Hart’s tracks, though much fuller sounding (and with some wonderful guitar work, presumably by James Burton). But lyrically, while still being a basic love song, there’s an awareness of language that is mostly absent from the Boyce/Hart material.
Nesmith’s lyrics are often slightly archaic in their word choices, and the tumbling Dylanesque phrases here (“So take my hand, I’ll start my journey, free from all the helpless worry, that besets a man when he’s alone”) are a joy. And the combination of Nesmith and Dolenz’s vocals, while all too rare, is by far the best vocal blend the band had.
Easily the highlight of the album.
Take A Giant Step
Writers: Gerry Goffin and Carole King
Lead Vocalist: Micky Dolenz
Other Monkees present: None
Producers: Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart
The first of Goffin and King’s several attempts at cod-psychedelia for the Monkees, this works about as well as you’d expect two Brill Building songwriters attempting to be down with the kids by inviting you to “take a giant step outside your mind” to work.
That said, there are points of interest – there’s some nice pseudo-Indian oboe playing (by Bob Cooper), and the melody is as strong as all King’s work, especially the “It’s time you learned to live again at last” over descending chords, which is reminiscent of much of her best work.
But the whole thing sounds like it was written and recorded by people who’d heard about psychedelia and not understood it, but thought “well, if this is what the kids are listening to…”
Last Train To Clarksville
Writers: Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart
Lead Vocalist: Micky Dolenz
Other Monkees present: None
Producers: Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart
Recorded toward the end of the sessions for this album, this became the Monkees’ first single and first number one. Based roughly around the structure of the Beatles’ Paperback Writer, which like this stays on G7 for the whole verse before switching briefly to C7 in the chorus, this was inspired by hearing only the tag of that song and thinking that McCartney was singing “take the last train”.
The almost-moronic guitar riff (based around an open G chord) was inspired by Day Tripper, but when combined with the train rhythm and the obsession on a single chord sounds almost like Smokestack Lightning, if Smokestack Lightning had been recorded by LA pop musicians rather than Chicago blues ones.
Of all the Boyce/Hart tracks on this album, this one is far and away the best-thought-out, both lyrically (actually having a story to it, with a very mildly anti-war sentiment) and musically – it’s simplistic, but in all the right ways, the product of people who’ve been listening to every record on the radio and stripped all of them down to their most basic essentials, then rebuilt them into a pop masterpiece.
I may occasionally seem a little harsh on Boyce and Hart in this book, and it’s true that some of their work was sub-par, but that’s because they were producing such a lot of music in such a small amount of time. When they were on form, as they were here, they were as good as anyone.
This Just Doesn’t Seem To Be My Day
Writers: Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart
Lead Vocalist: Davy Jones
Other Monkees present: None
Producers: Tommy Boyce, Bobby Hart and Jack Keller
Three decent musical ideas (a rewrite of I’ve Just Seen A Face, a pesudo-Indian instrumental break, and a ‘cello-led baroque middle eight) jammed together with no real thought as to how they’d work together. Combined with a poor, sloppily double-tracked vocal from Jones, the end result is less than the sum of its parts.
Let’s Dance On
Writers: Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart
Lead Vocalist: Micky Dolenz
Other Monkees present: None
Producers: Tommy Boyce, Bobby Hart and Jack Keller
A simple dance track based on the Twist and Shout riff, but also taking elements from two other songs that used the same chord sequence, Hang On Sloopy and Little Latin Lupe Lou, this is generic garage band filler of the sort that was being churned out by the ton in 1965 and 66.
I’ll Be True To You
Writers: Gerry Goffin and Russ Titelman
Lead Vocalist: Davy Jones
Other Monkees present: None
Producers: Tommy Boyce, Bobby Hart and Jack Keller
A cover of a vapid ballad that had been a British hit for the Hollies the year earlier under the name Yes I Will, presumably chosen because Jones, like the Hollies, was from Manchester, this is a terrible song performed terribly. Jones sings the song consistently flat, and in a weird stage-school accent with strangely mangled vowels.
The lowest point is when Jones recites the lyrics of one verse, rather than singing them, letting you – yes you, teenage American girl in your bedroom – know that he will be true to you and only you.
Horrible.
Sweet Young Thing
Writers: Michael Nesmith, Gerry Goffin and Carole King
Lead Vocalist: Michael Nesmith
Other Monkees present: Micky Dolenz (backing vocals), Peter Tork (guitar and backing vocals)
Producer: Michael Nesmith
A bizarre and rather brilliantly eccentric production, the distorted-guitar-and-country-fiddle combination here is eerily premonitory of the similar sound the Velvet Underground would get with John Cale’s viola a few years later. Almost exhausting to listen to, with the bass and drums pummeling the listener into submission, and Nesmith sounding audibly out of breath by the end of the track, this is another highlight from Nesmith.
This was apparently written at Don Kirshner’s insistence, Kirshner arguing that if Nesmith was going to insist on writing he should try to collaborate with more commercial songwriters. Nesmith apparently disliked the experience of collaborating with Goffin and King intensely, and the result is almost wilfully uncommercial.
Gonna Buy Me A Dog
Writers: Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart
Lead Vocalist: Davy Jones and Micky Dolenz
Other Monkees present: None
Producers: Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart
A terrible song made into a terrible “comedy” track, as an attempt to create a Ringo-style song for the album. Absolutely no redeeming features at all.
Strangely, Nesmith also produced a backing track for this song with his normal Wrecking Crew musicians (available as a bonus track on The Monkees) which has a slightly more bluesy feel.It still wouldn’t set the musical world alight, though.
Bonus Tracks
I Don’t Think You Know Me
Writers: Gerry Goffin and Carole King
Lead Vocalist: Michael Nesmith/Micky Dolenz
Other Monkees present: none
Producer: Michael Nesmith
A song that the band tried recording on several occasions, this rather preachy Goffin/King song (“If you think my goals could be so trivial and small/I don’t think you know me at all”) has been released in three versions. The deluxe edition of The Monkees contains versions with Nesmith and Dolenz taking lead, singing over the same backing track, while More Of The Monkees has a version with Tork on lead as a bonus.
While it was never released at the time, this has become a staple of Monkees reunion tours, with Tork singing lead. It has some nice moments (the Nowhere Man-esque ‘la la la’ break) but has neither the power of Nesmith’s songs nor the catchiness of the better Boyce/Hart tracks.
So Goes Love
Writers: Gerry Goffin and Carole King
Lead Vocalist: Davy Jones
Other Monkees present: Peter Tork (guitar)
Producer: Michael Nesmith
A vaguely Latin-infused track with a lovely, jazzy arrangement, this has been released in two versions (on Missing Links and on The Monkees deluxe edition) which sound like the same performance but run at different speeds/keys. The faster version (on Missing Links) is definitely preferable.
Jones does a very creditable job on the verses, where he’s comfortably within his range, but on the middle eight he’s audibly straining at points.
(I Prithee) Do Not Ask For Love
Writer: Michael Murphey
Lead Vocalist: Davy Jones
Other Monkees present: Peter Tork (guitar)
Producer: Michael Nesmith
Another song that was attempted by the band multiple times, this was recorded with Davy on lead over a harpsichord-based backing track (the version on The Monkees Deluxe edition), with Micky on lead over the same backing track (available as a bonus track on More Of The Monkees), with Peter over slow, heavily-reverbed electric guitar (on The Birds, The Bees And The Monkees deluxe edition) and finally with Peter over a sitar-based track (on the 33 1/3 Revolutions Per Monkee TV special).
My own favourite version is the reverbed version with Tork on vocals, but every version of this pseudo-Elizabethean ballad by Nesmith’s friend Michael Martin Murphy is simply stunning.
Kellogg’s Jingle
Writers: Unknown (Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart ?)
Lead Vocalist: Micky Dolenz
Other Monkees present: None
Producers: Unknown (Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart ?)
A tiny snippet, presumably a Boyce and Hart production, used to introduce the TV show. Apparently Kellogg’s cereals are “K-E-double-L-O-double-good Kellogg’s best for you!”
So now you know.
All The King’s Horses
Writer: Michael Nesmith
Lead Vocalist: Michael Nesmith
Other Monkees present: Micky Dolenz, Peter Tork and Davy Jones (backing vocals)
Producer: Michael Nesmith
An early Nesmith song, originally recorded with his imaginatively-named trio Mike, John & Bill, this shows little sign of his later songwriting talent, but is still catchy enough that it’s surprising it was not placed on the album, especially since it’s apparently the only track on the entire CD to feature all four Monkees (though Jones is inaudible).
Propinquity (I’ve Just Begun To Care)
Writer: Michael Nesmith
Lead Vocalist: Michael Nesmith
Other Monkees present: None
Producer: Michael Nesmith
And here we have Nesmith’s first ever songwriting masterpiece. A gentle, beautiful country song, with the chorus line “I’ve known you for a long time but I’ve just begun to care”, Nesmith would record this three times. The version here is a demo, with John London (Nesmith’s former bandmate in Mike, John & Bill and his stand-in for the TV show) on bass and Nesmith on guitar.
Nesmith would re-record this with a full band in 1969 (that version is on Missing Links vol 3) and then again with the First National Band on his third solo album, Nevada Fighter. All these versions are wonderful, but this early version is possibly the best. The line “I’ve seen you make a look of love from just an icy stare” is still possibly the best line in any Monkees song.
The Monkees, Manchester Apollo May 14 2011
The Monkees (and my elbow)
I bought tickets to this show a couple of months back, knowing I’d either want to celebrate winning the AV referendum, or need cheering up after losing the AV referendum. As turns out, it’s done a good enough job of cheering me up I think I’m ready to get back to blogging.
I was sat in Row E, which I didn’t realise until I got in was actually the second row, next to possibly the most enthusiastic people in the world – two women in their twenties who looked like stereotypical Goths but spent the pre-show talking to each other about which of the two reunion albums – Pool It! or Justus – was better, and who squealed every time Peter Tork did anything, and their enthusiasm was catching. (When they saw where they were sitting, one of them said “YES! We’re going to get extreme Tork!”)
For those of you wanting to listen along at home, by the way, I’ve created a playlist of all the songs they played.
The show was a strange mix of two completely different styles. On the one hand, the setlist itself was of a type familiar to me from shows by Brian Wilson, Arthur Lee and so on – you do twenty or so obscure album tracks to please the die-hard fans, then you have an interval, after which you perform your most famous ‘classic album’ in full, and then finish with a ton of hits. This is usually the kind of thing that is done by Serious Musos and involves much stroking of beards and furrowing of brows at the Importance of the Serious Artist on stage.
But everything else about the show was showbiz razzle-dazzle, of a kind I very rarely go and see but can certainly appreciate – costume changes, physical comedy, giant video screens, dance routines – the sort of attention to putting on a show and actually entertaining the audience who’ve paid fifty quid to see you that very, very few people bother with. The end result was something that came out equal parts The Goodies and Brian Wilson’s Pet Sounds tours, and will I think have pleased both the MOJO-reading crowd and the grannies wanting to relive their teenage crushes.
They also seemed to be desperate to prove themselves as multi-instrumentalists – possibly still hurt by the jibes at them for not playing on their first two albums (a criticism that can be raised for *every* American band of the 60s to a greater or lesser extent, from the Byrds to the Mothers Of Invention). Micky spent pretty much every song where he wasn’t the lead singer behind one of the two drum kits (one with the Monkees logo, the other with ‘DRUM’ written on it a la Head) and strummed an acoustic guitar on a few other songs, Davy played acoustic on a few songs, and Peter played keyboard, guitar, banjo and French horn.
In fact Peter Tork was the revelation of the show. He was a little rusty still on some of his instrumental parts (some slightly stiff banjo picking on What Am I Doing Hanging Round and a single very slightly flatted note on his French horn solo on Shades Of Gray), which can presumably be explained by the fact that he’s spent ten years ostentatiously *NOT* being a Monkee, and the band apparently only had three days’ rehearsal before the tour started – I’m sure those problems will be completely ironed out by the middle of next week – but his dancing and over-emoting facial expressions reminded me of nothing so much as Harpo Marx ( I know of no higher praise). And the absence of Mike Nesmith meant that Tork got to sing Nesmith’s lead vocals, meaning he had a decent share of the spotlight (Tork rarely sang leads on the records).
Davy was about as you’d expect – the showbiz song and dance man with a joke for every occasion, an all-round entertainer of a type they don’t really make any more. You could easily imagine Davy in another life as Ernie Wise or someone (again a compliment). As I get older I have more and more time for this kind of old-school entertainer, as I have less time for ‘authentic’ rock posing, though Davy’s still never going to be my favourite Monkee (a view shared by the women next to me, who before the show were discussing the dilemmas faced when you come to songs like Star Collector – “but it’s great… but it’s Davy! But it’s great… but it’s Davy!”)
And Micky is one of the great rock vocalists of all time – seriously. The only performer I’ve seen live who was as strong a singer was Arthur Lee, who is of course sadly no longer with us. I’ve seen some extraordinarily good singers in my time (Jeff Buckley, Al Green, Robert Plant) but Micky is at least the equal of all of those, as well as being a great performer. To an extent he was saving his voice for his lead parts – on songs where he wasn’t singing lead, his parts were doubled (and sometimes covered) by a keyboard player who sounded scarily like him – but when he did sing lead (on sixteen songs, so we’re not talking about him being lazy) he was astounding.
Before the show, the PA played cover versions of Monkees songs, ranging from the obvious (the Association doing Come On In, Nilsson’s Daddy’s Song) to the obscure (what sounded like a Japanese indie band) to the plain odd (a slow string arrangement of Your Auntie Grizelda which I can only presume was incidental music for the Monkees TV show or something) – along with, for some reason, Davy Jones’ cover version of McCartney’s Man We Was Lonely.
Then the backing band came on, and over a five minute montage of clips from the band’s career, played a medley of bits from maybe a dozen songs, before Davy, Micky and Peter came on. The backing band (guitar, bass, drums, two keyboardists (one of whom doubled on sax and flute) and three horn players (one of whom doubled on percussion)) were all extremely good, and thankfully mostly free of the 80s slickness audible in some of the recordings of earlier reunion tours.
I’ll reproduce the setlist below, along with relevant comments:
I’m A Believer Micky ended this with “thank you Liverpool!” – I’m still not sure if this was a joke or not.
Mary Mary introduced as ‘a Mike Nesmith tune’, the only time Nesmith got mentioned during the show
The Girl I Knew Somewhere
She Hangs Out
Randy Scouse Git/Alternate Title Micky’s scat singing here was great, sounding like Louis Jordan.
Your Auntie Grizelda the girls next to me screamed at this. I never in my life thought I’d hear two goths in their twenties screaming with lust because a nearly-70-year-old man who looks like Catweazle was doing a silly dance and singing a comedy song. Peter stuck in the line from Head “I’d like a glass of cold gravy with a hair in it” into the scat section.
It’s Nice To Be With You Sung in front of a backdrop of Davy from the 60s. Davy – “I used to be a heartthrob, now I’m a coronary”.
I Don’t Think You Know Me Sung by Peter, whose facial expressions on this were priceless.
Look Out Here Comes Tomorrow At the end, where Davy says “Mary, I love you, Sandra, I love you too”, instead he said “Mary, I love you, Sandra, you love Mary… it’s a new world”
Words
Cuddly Toy
Papa Gene’s Blues Sung by Peter.
Listen To The Band Sung by all three in unison, all strumming acoustic guitars, with an extended instrumental break to introduce the backing band members. Davy had to keep looking at his fingers.
That Was Then, This Is Now Performed with photos of the band as children projected behind them. Micky and Davy were joking to each other about these off-mic, and Davy said something that made Micky laugh so much he was still laughing half-way through the next song.
All Of Your Toys
Hard To Believe
What Am I Doin’ Hangin’ Round Peter sang and played banjo
Sometime In The Morning
Valleri – this was *much* better live than on the record.
No Time – all three took a verse each on this.
We’ll Be Back In A Minute – the music that they used to end the first half of each TV episode led into the interval, during which we saw various 60s vintage commercials by the band, for Kellogg’s cereals, Yardley aftershave and Kool-Aid.
The second half started with the full, long trailer for Head, including the full Ditty Diego War Chant (which I was *very* surprised they kept in) before the band came out and played every song on the Head album while the relevant sections of the film played behind them.
Circle Sky Sung by all three in unison. This was the only song whose video footage was edited, to cut out the shots of Nesmith singing lead.
Can You Dig It When it was announced before the start of the tour that Davy Jones’ wife (who’s a dancer half his age) would be taking part in the show, a massive uproar rose up on the various Monkees fan fora, saying that she’d wreck it. This turns out to have been pure Yoko Ono Syndrome (the unfounded belief among fans of a male musician that that musician’s wife must in all cases be evil and talentless. QV Linda McCartney, Gail Zappa, Melinda Wilson, Courtney Love). In this case she performed a belly-dance to match the ones being projected behind the band from the film, and in so far as I’m any judge, she did so perfectly well. She certainly added to, rather than detracted from, the show.
As We Go Along
Long Title: Do I Have To Do This All Over Again? Peter sang lead.
Porpoise Song The long version with the extended outro. Micky sang Davy’s part as well as his own, as Davy was offstage getting changed.
Daddy’s Song Davy and his wife, in black and white outfits, recreated the dance routine from the film. Davy looked *absolutely exhausted* at the end of this, and out of breath, but managed to keep a smile on.
For Pete’s Sake Sung by Peter rather than Micky.
When Love Comes Knocking At Your Door
She
A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You
Shades of Gray Peter played the French horn. He also ruffled Davy’s hair on the last ‘only shades of gray’.
Last Train To Clarksville
Goin’ Down Micky made this *slightly* easier on himself by changing some of the phrasing to allow more room to breathe, but it’s still an astonishingly difficult song to sing and he pulled it off tremendously. This was the song everyone talked about as they were leaving.
I Wanna Be Free Davy missed the first line of this.
Saturday’s Child
Someday Man Wonderful to hear these two.
I’m Not Your Steppin’ Stone
Daydream Believer Peter told the security guards off for not singing along with the rest of us, after which one of them did some half-hearted arm-waving.
ENCORE:
Peter Percival Patterson’s Pet Pig Porky – Peter had to shut Micky up so he could do this.
Pleasant Valley Sunday Micky sounded *astonishing* on this.
I’m A Believer a shortened version with no second verse.
Given the band’s fractious history – roughly speaking they have a reunion tour once every decade, at the start of which they’re best friends, but by the end they hate each other’s guts and won’t speak to each other for ten years – and their age (they’re all in their mid-late 60s now) this is almost certainly the last chance you’ll get to see them live, and you should take it. For all the jokes about ‘the prefab four’ and so on, they are simultaneously the last of the old-style variety performers *and* a band with a catalogue of great songs any three other bands would kill for.
For those of you who can view Flash, here’s two Youtube videos of last night’s show:
I’m off tomorrow to see Van Dyke Parks in London, which will be equally great but in a very different way. I’ll post a review of that on my return, and then get back to my much-postponed Seven Soldiers posts, now I’m physically and mentally well enough to handle them. Thanks for your patience.
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