What ‘The Monkees’ Leave Behind
The iconic, idiosyncratic pop-rock band, formed as an experimental TV sitcom, closed a major chapter of American pop culture this week.
“Here we come, walking down the street
We get the funniest looks from everyone we meet”
-(Theme from) The Monkees; Tommy Boyce, Bobby Hart
At the Greek Theater in Los Angeles this past Sunday, November 14th, America’s foremost music experiment came to an end.
Rock group The Monkees performed their final concert before disbanding after a curious and chaotic 56-year history. What began as a Television show about a fictitious group, inspired by the success of the 1964 Beatles’ hit film A Hard Day’s Night, grew into a sensation of young frustration, independence, and liberation.
It was Labor Day 1966 when the pilot for The Monkees aired on NBC.
Davy Jones, the British-born singer and child actor, was the dreamboat face of the group, singing and banging away at the tambourine. Hollywood-native fellow former child-star Micky Dolenz also sang and played the drums. You know, the typical lead-singer-drummer role. Catskills beatnik and folk singer Peter Tork played bass and keys, after Stephen Stills passed on the role. Finally, Texas singer-songwriter Michael Nesmith, who auditioned for the role on a whim while trekking to the laundromat, played guitar.
The premise of the sitcom, if any, was a starving ensemble begging for the success of their musical counterparts — and ultimately failing, episode by episode. The show was pioneering on many fronts. With new-wave creators Bob Rafelson and Bert Schneider producing the series, early improv-actors like Paul Mazursky and James Frawley writing and directing, the studio Screen Gems delivered a new kind of structure to TV sets each week, full of jump-cuts, cutaway gags, fourth-wall breaks, and the occasional social satire.
Then, of course, there was the music. Each episode consisted of two montages of Monkees songs, using a template that would later be known as the “music video” (more on that later). The first two Monkees LPs, the self-titled debut album and More of The Monkees, both skyrocketed to no. 1 with singles such as “Last Train to Clarksville”, “(I’m Not Your) Stepping Stone”, “Mary, Mary”, and “I’m a Believer”.
If you want to find the greatest example of an overnight hit, look no further. In an instant, Davy, Micky, Peter, & Mike were household names among young baby boomers developing in a new America: a post-Kennedy, hippie, Civil unrest America. The group was looked down upon by established artists as a manufactured concoction, but the younger siblings of those Beatles fanatics held onto their Monkees tightly.
Controversy arose during the show’s first season when rumors emerged that the band was not recording their own music, which turned out to be true. Songwriters like Carole King, Tommy Boyce & Bobby Hart, and Neil Diamond wrote most of the tunes on the first two albums, while studio musicians recorded them. The actual Monkees (usually Jones, Dolenz, and Nesmith) were relegated to vocals. Then comes the now-legendary story of the mutiny on the contemporary bounty. Led by Nesmith, the foursome fired their music director, Don Kirshner, and fought for permission to enter the recording studio.
“I’ve often said it’s like Leonard Nimoy actually becoming a Vulcan.”
-Mickey Dolenz, The Monkees
Thus, the fake band became a real band. The 3rd Monkees album, Headquarters, was released to widespread acclaim, with songs like the country-pop-fused “You Told Me” by Nesmith, the peace-and-love “For Pete’s Sake” by Tork (which would become the closing theme for the series) , and the grungy “Randy Scouse Git”, written by Dolenz after partying with The Beatles. The title of the latter would be changed in its UK release for its crude language (a “randy scouse git” basically translates to a horny incel from Liverpool), under the name “Alternate Title” — it went to #1 only to be replaced by, you guessed it, The Beatles.
The Monkees took creative control of their TV show as well, adding their own flair of deconstruction to the scripts and even directing. Everything changed. The clean-cut JCPenny wardrobe of the first season was replaced with turtlenecks, tablecloth ponchos, beads, and psychedelic fabrics in the second. Hairstyles became more shaggy, dialogue became more hip, and the music became more thoughtful and edgy. The Monkees’ fourth album, Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn, & Jones Ltd., featured “Pleasant Valley Sunday”, a bouncy elegy of dystopian California-suburbia, and the techno “Daily Nightly” and “Star Collector”, which were the first pop songs ever to feature an electric synthesizer.
The tone of the show changed drastically: the laugh-track was removed, episodes featured little plot and became very stream-of-conscious, sometimes even teetering on avante-garde. With a vastly different idea than conceived, the burned-out and unenthused Monkees ended their TV show in 1968. What followed was the fifth album, The Birds, The Bees, & The Monkees, which gave the group their last no. 1 hit, “Daydream Believer”.
Then, came Head.
The group agreed that if The Monkees were to make a movie, it would not be a continuation of the series. A month’s worth of blunt rotations, Jack Nicholson with a tape recorder, and Bob Rafelson’s vision gave them the material for Head, the R-rated experimental musical about…something, I’m sure. None of the members of the band was able to explain what Head was, other than a commercial disaster for them. None of the Monkees fans (teenagers) could even get in to the theater to see it due to its adult content. The film opens with the four guys committing suicide, for gods sake. After jumping off of a bridge, the guys are shown in various scenes; as soldiers in the Vietnam War, partying on LSD, as flakes of dandruff in Victor Mature’s hair, and using a tank to blow up a Coke machine in the desert. The film’s title was a joke, Rafelson wanted his next picture to be advertised as “From the guys who gave you Head…” The movie flopped both commercially and critically, leaving Rafelson, Burt Schneider, and the Monkees hopeless.
Peter Tork stated in a 1997 interview,
“if they wanted to kill The Monkees [with the film]…boy, they really did it”.
Tork left the band following the film’s release. Michael Nesmith followed in 1970, leaving just Davy Jones and Micky Dolenz. The two remaining members released one more unsuccessful album together before immediately disbanding.
The four guys saw personal tragedies and successes over the following two decades, with Jones releasing music solo and making several TV appearances. Dolenz started a family and didn’t work for several years, taking to raucous partying, which damaged his marriage. He later cleaned himself up and became a children’s TV director in Britain. Tork had the hardest struggle. In the 1970’s he was near bankruptcy, and was arrested for marijuana possession by customs while crossing the US-Mexico border, which lead to a three-month-long stay in an Oklahoma penitentiary. Upon release, he got a job as an Elementary teacher and, too, cleaned himself up. While Tork had the lowest sink, Nesmith had the greatest high of all. Upon inheriting his mother’s fortune from inventing Liquid Paper (White-Out), he formed the Southern-rock “First National Band”, and scored hits with his songs “Joanne”, “Nine Times Blue” and “Rio”. In 1981, he capitalized on what he learned from The Monkees to create an early VHS Tape called Elephant Parts — a sort of visual album featuring narrative scenes and images backed by his songs. This became known as the first official “Music Video”. Nesmith won the first ever Grammy Award for his innovation.
That innovation, though, led to even more success. He created the short-lived variety series Television Parts, which featured music and comedy. The show gave exposure to young comics like Jerry Seinfeld, Garry Shandling, and Whoopi Goldberg. But perhaps Nesmith’s greatest success was using the concept of Elephant Parts to help form Music Television (MTV), the world’s first TV Channel to feature all-things-music.
As fate would have it, Nesmith’s creation inadvertently helped re-launch The Monkees. In the era of post-punk, early hip-hop, and hard rock, the Monkees seemed like they couldn’t be any less relevant. That is until one night when a 22-hour Monkees marathon aired on the network to high ratings. This prompted a resurgence in Monkees sales and inspired the group’s 1986 20th anniversary tour, where they played to sold-out arenas. The vibe was electric and the energy between the group and their fans was unexpected, as if it had been held contained without them even knowing. What seemed like a failed experiment turned out to be a culture-defining phenomena. The Monkees not only brought rebellion to the small-screen, musical-fusion to records, and a new form of artistic medium to the country, but as they discovered they’d also built a colossal family who drew inspiration and comfort from their work. The revived band continued to release music and tour off and on for the next thirty years.
Now it is 2021.
Davy Jones died suddenly of a heart attack in 2012, and Peter Tork died after a private cancer battle in 2019. In September, after a year-long delay because of COVID-19, the surviving members, Micky Dolenz and Mike Nesmith teamed up for one final tour before leaving the story of The Monkees to the history books.
I was fortunate enough to witness one of the duo’s final shows at Atlanta’s Symphony Theater in October. With a few musicians backing up the two stars, now in their late 70’s, the tone was more subtle. Nesmith frightened me at first. He appeared quite gaunt and frail, choosing not play his iconic 12-string birchwood Gretsch (which he played for 50+ years), instead confined to a stool from which he would occasionally rise to sing. His voice had the same power, though somewhat antiquated by time. I would argue it elevated his songs to a new level of poignancy. Dolenz, on the other hand, seemed to retain the same energy he had as a performer 50 years ago. I found myself shocked at multiple moments, such as his spot-on rendition of his Jazz-inspired “Goin’ Down”, which runs at an intense pace. Dolenz managed to hit every word and every note with soul and clarity. Genuinely amazing.
Another thing that left me stunned was that this was not a concert, it was a show. Each song had some bit of dialogue, be it a story or a comedy routine, between Dolenz and Nesmith. Of course! They were sitcom stars, after all. The old-time Monkees chemistry was alive and well. This made for lots of laughs, but even some tears. Nesmith gave a 7-minute long speech (I timed it) about the power music has to lift people from times of deep sadness, before singing “While I Cry”. On the final note, he fell into weeping.
What this show proved was that this moment is not only emotional for the millions of people across generations who grew up with this new sound; a smorgasbord of musical genres melded into one entity, but this particular moment was crushing for these two guys. The Monkees were about celebrating the fun and sorrow, the carelessness and sensitivities, the love and hate of youth, and now they are old. Is it perverse that they continued to play on those themes into their 8th decade of life? I don’t think so. If anything, I feel this has kept them alive.
They wouldn't allow this manufactured phenomenon to rest until they physically had to. 56 years and the deaths of two of their Monkee-brothers later, Micky Dolenz and Michael Nesmith must face that reality.
The spirit of The Monkees’ TV show and music is now in the hands of the fans as of the end of this week. They will soon leave this earth to join Davy Jones and Peter Tork in whatever location they will meet next. While they are feasting on their well-earned celebration, let’s hang on to what they leave behind — groundbreaking entertainment that continues to both resonate and captivate. As someone who grew up obsessing over these four weirdos, I can assure you, their work just makes living a little more tolerable.
“For all you Monkees fans who watched this thing come to life, this is for you. Here we are. I love you all, I love you dearly.”
— Michael Nesmith, at the conclusion of “While I Cry” at the final concert of The Monkees, November 14, 2021.
