by Bob Stanley
When Rafelson and Schneider successfully pitched their show to Screen Gems in 1966, they hadn’t thought too hard about the music for The Monkees. The storyline would usually involve Peter acting the dummy, Davy falling in love with a teenage cutie, Micky doing a James Cagney impression and Mike being the mature voice of reason. At some point there would be a couple of songs. It was colourful, it was done at breakneck speed and – thanks to Rafelson and Schneider’s subversive side – it had a dollop of Dada and it was very funny. The new Marx Brothers, said John Lennon.
The music, including the self-descriptive theme (‘We’re the young generation, and we’ve got something to say’), was initially written by jobbing writers Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart, but soon Brill Building overlord Don Kirshner was brought in, and he smelt big money in the project. The star names of the early sixties – Goffin and King, Mann and Weil, Carole Bayer, David Gates, Russ Titelman – got their first phone calls in months. ‘We’ll outsell the Beatles,’ said Kirshner, and everybody coughed and looked the other way. Session musicians were brought in – the cream of the crop: James Burton and Glen Campbell on guitar, Al Casey on bass, Larry Knechtel on piano, Hal Blaine on drums. It was the whole Spector ‘wrecking crew’, the ‘Da Doo Ron Ron’ ’63 team brought back together. Newsweek called them ‘direct videological descendants of the Beatles’, even though, from the session musicians’ perspective, it must have seemed like the Beatles had never happened. All the boys had to do was add vocals – Kirshner took care of the rest. Boyce and Hart’s plaintive folk jangler ‘Last Train to Clarksville’ was released as a single just before the series aired. By the time the eighth episode was broadcast, it had replaced? and the Mysterians’ ‘96 Tears’ as the number-one single in America.
The Monkees’ timing was perfect. They arrived just as it became clear that the Beatles were no longer cute moptops; in 1966 they had become ‘bigger than Jesus’ and sprouted facial hair.1 The Monkees plugged a gap, fulfilling a need the pop public had for a sweet-faced smiling beat group. As such, with Revolver released just prior to the Monkees’ breakthrough, most ’66 scenesters thought they were nothing but a put-on, a drag, phoney. The Beatles were kings of the art world; the Monkees were four Johnny Restivos. As a genuine pop phenomenon, the Monkees were put under incredible scrutiny. ‘I can only speak for myself,’ Davy told the NME in January ’67. ‘I am an actor and I have never pretended to be anything else … No one is trying to fool anyone! People have tried to put us down by saying we copy the Beatles. So, alright, maybe The Monkees is a half-hour Hard Day’s Night. But we read that the Who are working on a TV series. Now who’s copying who?’2
By February 1967 the Monkees were getting twelve million viewers on US TV, and were simultaneously number one in the British and American album and singles charts. No one had done this before. They had sold six million albums and five million singles in four months. Don Kirshner’s prediction had come true in double-quick time.
And at this point something quite unexpected happened. The Saturday Evening Post wanted to run an exposé on how the Monkees were manufactured, fake, duping the kids, and to their surprise Michael Nesmith was broadly in agreement: ‘The music happened in spite of the Monkees. It was what Kirshner wanted to do … Tell the world we don’t record our own music, but that’s us they see on television. The show is really a part of us. They’re not seeing something invalid.’
A few weeks later, Micky Dolenz was interviewed by a relative heavy-weight, Cliff Michelmore, on the BBC’s 24 Hours show. ‘Does it worry you that you are, in effect, a manufactured pop star?’ asked Michelmore. ‘No, not a bit,’ said Micky. ‘Because we weren’t. I was discovered going to school, LA Trade Tech. Mike was discovered in the Troubadour singing to fifteen people every night. Peter was discovered in Greenwich Village singing to two people every night. And Davy was trying to get a job singing to anybody in LA. No, we’re not a manufactured group. Where do you draw the line?’
Unsurprisingly, this all went down like a lead balloon with Don Kirshner. In January 1967 he had heard rumblings of discontent in the group and had flown west – something he only did under extreme duress – with a quarter-million-dollar cheque for each Monkee. That’ll placate the ingrates, he thought. Instead, they were belligerent, insisting on recording their own songs and playing on their own records. Kirshner’s lawyer drily reminded them that they were all committed to contract, to which Nesmith put his fist through a partition wall and said, in his best Clint Eastwood voice, ‘That could’ve been your face.’
Kirshner relented, a little, and Nesmith hired Chip Douglas, fresh from arranging the Turtles’ ‘Happy Together’, to produce a session on which the Monkees would finally get to play. Chip would become their musical director. Don Kirshner, though, had no intention of releasing these sessions. Why should he listen to these failed musicians and child actors? Hadn’t everything he had planned for them been a number-one hit? Sod them, he thought, and sneaked out the next single in Canada hoping no one would notice: ‘A Little Bit Me, a Little Bit You’, backed with ‘She Hangs Out’, featured just loyal Davy and a bunch of session musicians. It was a bad miscalculation. When Screen Gems discovered what he had done, they decided the four actors were of greater worth to them than Kirshner and he was duly sacked.
Davy, Peter, Micky and Mike were now no longer four kids playing a part; just three months after the first episode of The Monkees aired, they were a fully functioning pop group. Micky quickly learnt to play the drums – ‘It’s not exactly brain surgery,’ he reasoned – and in spring ’67 they shut themselves away in RCA Studios on Sunset Boulevard for three weeks to record their third album. The results should have been a disaster, DIY at best; instead, they produced Headquarters, quite the most morning-fresh album of the era, with tinges of country and folk rock and a tangible sense of gleeful freedom. Dolenz’s ‘Randy Scouse Git’,3 renamed ‘Alternate Title’ to become a number-two UK hit in the summer of ’67, was a wigged-out vaudevillian précis of their time in England, where Dolenz had just met his future wife; ‘You Just May Be the One’, ‘Sunny Girlfriend’ and ‘You Told Me’, Nesmith originals, are distilled California sunshine with hints of Texas that effectively pre-date the biggest-selling American records of the seventies; Tork’s ‘For Pete’s Sake’ was a love-generation song strong enough to become the end titles music for their second season. The greatest compliment you can pay Headquarters is that almost nobody would have guessed the circumstances in which it was made without being told. It’s a miracle of a record.
Their fourth album in just over a year, Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones Ltd, saw the four bringing in outside musicians and, briefly, considering doing a whole album of Harry Nilsson songs – he was the only contemporary songwriter the thrown-together-fast friends could agree on. It produced another massive single, Goffin and King’s paean to suburbia ‘Pleasant Valley Sunday’ (US no. 3, UK no. 11), with its sly opening line, ‘The local rock group down the street is trying hard to learn their songs’. But by the start of ’68 the show was losing viewers and it was cancelled, with the last episode going out in the States in March (directed by Micky and called ‘The Frodis Caper’, the last three minutes of it were taken up by Tim Buckley’s debut performance of his magical ‘Song to the Siren’). By this point, the Monkees’ feature film Head (originally titled Untitled) was well into production.
Head was a suicide note. Rafelson and Schneider wanted to kill their creation in a cinematic car crash. The TV commercial for the movie featured a close-up shot of an unsmiling, balding, sleazy and anonymous man – after thirty seconds he smiled, and the word ‘HEAD’ appeared on screen. It was a parody of Andy Warhol’s 1963 film Blow Job, which most Monkees fans, it was safe to say, hadn’t seen. The film itself opened with Micky Dolenz committing suicide, jumping from a suspension bridge before being bathed in psychedelic solarisation and carried away by mermaids. This scene was played out to the tune of Goffin and King’s elegiac ‘Porpoise Song’, a heavy, baroque
creation orchestrated by Spector sidekick Jack Nitzsche which was a final, fond farewell to not just the Monkees but the sixties.
Did anyone care? Of course not. Rafelson and Schneider acted as if the whole movie was sarcastic (it wasn’t), the fans didn’t want to see their heroes die, literally, amid shots of Viet Cong assassinations and exploding Coke machines, and the Monterey scenesters weren’t about to suddenly tune in. A cover of the Byrds’ ‘Wasn’t Born to Follow’ was recorded for the soundtrack; Rafelson and Schneider saved it instead for their next movie, Easy Rider, which they didn’t have to pretend was all a bit of a put-on. Bob Rafelson’s official line after Head premiered was: ‘I grooved on those four in very special ways while at the same time thinking they had absolutely no talent.’
The Monkees had no map, no rules – they had to forge their own path. They had shown with Headquarters that they understood pop better than Screen Gems. But by the end of 1968 this was not enough. When the first Monkees show had aired in September ’66, there had been no separation between the ‘pop’ audience and the ‘rock’ audience; by the time Head premiered in November ’68, they were two different worlds. The Monkees were seen as lowest-common-denominator money makers, harbingers of bubblegum.
The Monkees’ immediate influence was felt in a bunch of songs written by a fabulously cynical New York pair called Jerry Kasenetz and Jeff Katz.4 They teamed up with Neil Bogart, late of Cameo Parkway, who had started a new label called Buddah and created a run of super-commercial hits in 1968 and ’69, most of which used the Monkees’ ‘Stepping Stone’ as a musical base, then added lyrics that would easily reverberate around the playground: ‘Yummy Yummy Yummy’, ‘Simon Says’, ‘123 Red Light’, ‘Gimme Gimme Good Lovin’’.5 This was a return to pre-psych basics – garage-band simplicity, riffs and hooks, and in Britain the Equals (‘Baby Come Back’) and Tommy James and the Shondells (‘Mony Mony’, surprisingly their only UK Top 30 hit) both benefited from this with 1968 number ones. Kasenetz–Katz’s Super K productions were intentionally basic; their lyrics messed with food and love – hence, it was tagged bubblegum – but it took an old hand to make the ultimate hit in this short-lived shock-tactic genre. As the Brill Building cubicles emptied and Ellie Greenwich licked her wounds in her New York apartment, ex-husband Jeff Barry packed his cowboy hat and headed for California. Old Golden Ears Don Kirshner welcomed him back into the fold, and together they concocted a song, which it was only too easy to imagine Davy Jones singing, called ‘Sugar, Sugar’. It was given to the Archies, a cartoon group that couldn’t answer back or punch holes in walls.
‘Sugar, Sugar’ is one of pop’s most beautifully constructed singles. It’s sweet, of course, and takes a while to stretch beyond the rather obvious sugar, honey and candy-girl references, but when it does it catches fire and it then becomes clear that the song is all a prelude to sex: ‘I’m gonna make your life so sweet,’ coos Betty Archie, so deeply and huskily it’s barely audible, then the line is repeated by excitable Veronica Archie in a precocious squeak, before singer Ron Dante, lead Archie, brings it all back home with real, human desire (‘Aaaaaaaah, SUGAR!’); the record fades just as it introduces a final hook to snare you, with joyous ba-ba-bas straight out of the Mamas and Papas’ locker. It’s so good you want to hear it all over again the moment it finishes. It’s the kind of single the auto-repeat function on a Dansette was made for.
Christmas 1969 saw teenagers getting their own stereo hi-firecord players, built for long-playing albums; their Dansettes were discarded, handed down to their younger brothers and sisters. In Britain, eight weeks of ‘Sugar, Sugar’ at no. 1 was followed by six weeks of Rolf Harris’s ‘Two Little Boys’6 as 1969 bled into 1970; the severance between album-based rock and 45-led pop was complete, and the Monkees were held responsible for the inanity at the heart of our singles chart.7
Even now, though ‘I’m a Believer’ is regarded as a classic, and Dolenz’s vocal one of the best blue-eyed soul performances ever, they are tarred as the first boy band, precursors of the Bay City Rollers, New Kids on the Block, Westlife.8 If only other boy bands were as good, or at least as self-aware. After Head, the Monkees hobbled on, shedding members (Tork in ’68, Nesmith in ’69) until 1970, by which time the shows were already being rerun, keeping them in the minds of pre-teens for more than a decade to come. Their later albums were patchy, a little sad. But against the odds Davy Jones came up with his best-ever effort for their 1969 album Instant Replay: the autobiographical ‘You and I’ has a lyric and a production made all the richer and more bittersweet by the guitar-playing of Neil Young, a pop star whose stature would only grow with the passing years: ‘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.’
1 Facial hair was no laughing matter. When the Monkees’ Headquarters album appeared in 1967, it featured a picture of the band sporting three weeks’ growth. Colgems hurriedly withdrew the album and replaced the photo, lest it scare pre-pubescent fans.
2 This was true – Brian Epstein’s Subafilms was in discussions with the Who about a Monkees-style series, according to the January 28th 1967 edition of the NME. It never got off the ground. Nor did pencilled-in copies starring Haircut 100 or Supergrass. Time and cost aside, any other TV series starring a group would end up being compared to The Monkees, and would almost certainly pale. When it did eventually happen – with S Club 7 in Britain in the late nineties – the results were so anodyne and forgettable that most people listening to their singles were unaware there even was a TV show.
3 The title was a reference to British comedy series Till Death Us Do Part. Dolenz had caught it while he was over and been amused and confused when Warren Mitchell referred to his TV son-in-law Tony Booth as a ‘randy Scouse git’. The subject of Mitchell’s ire grew up to be Tony Blair’s real-life father-in-law.
4 Their Super K production outfit scored their first hit with the Music Explosion’s ‘Little Bit of Soul’ (US no. 4 ’67): Billboard reported that for Eric Burdon and the Animals’ album Winds of Change, ‘producer Tom Wilson spent long hours in April through July in three different cities around the world to come up with the finished product. Little Bit of Soul by the Music Explosion [was recorded] in about an hour.’ Kasenetz and Katz’s last hurrah was a spiky attempt at Led Zep bubblegum, Ram Jam’s ‘Black Betty’ (UK no. 7 ’77).
5 Though it’s presumed Kasenetz and Katz put together most of their bands, the Ohio Express (‘Yummy Yummy Yummy’, ‘Chewy Chewy’) were very real, a garage band who seemed quite happy to munch on the nasal, repetitive fare Buddah fed them. At the far end of the Super K empire, future 10cc star Graham Gouldman had a short stay writing for Kasenetz and Katz. His only success was ‘Susan’s Tuba’ (‘ooby dooby dooba, Susan’s got a tuba’) for Freddie and the Dreamers, a sizeable European hit, though none of the group appears on it, not even Freddie – Gouldman sang lead.
6 Though it was a regular on the BBC’s Junior Choice, ‘Two Little Boys’ was a World War One song about the death of a childhood friend in battle. John Lennon sent a telegram to Rolf Harris congratulating him on having a Christmas number one with an anti-war song in the year of My Lai. Harris later said, ‘Lennon got it,’ but the point seemed lost on everyone else.
7 One of Jonathan King’s better musical gags was to try and bridge this real or imagined divide by recording a heavy-rock version of ‘Sugar, Sugar’ under the name Sakkarin – it was convincing and danceable enough to reach number twelve in 1971.
8 Hugely successful Irish balladeers the Bachelors – with eighteen UK Top 40 hits in the sixties – were the true forefathers of Westlife, and their catalogue is just as devoid of interest.
PART THREE
26
1970: EVERYTHING’S GONE GREY
I still get the same old yearning tearing my heart inside out
And now there can’t be any doubt
I’m still not over you.
Pickettywitch, ‘
That Same Old Feeling’
There’s a school of thought that sees a modern pop revolution occurring every ten years: rock ’n’ roll taking over in ’57, psychedelia in ’67, punk in ’77, house in ’87. The flip side to that is the ten-year lull. 1960 had seen the brave new beat at bay, rock ’n’ roll on its knees. Ten years on, things were worse still. By 1970 pop had become a country of melancholic introspection, underachievement and lost idealism.
Pop was in denial that the sixties were over. The Beatles’ split, made official by Paul McCartney on April 10th 1970, caused widespread mourning; without the group who had focused pop for seven years internationally, it now suffered a total loss of direction. In need of spiritual renewal, record buyers initially turned to the quasi-hymnal: there was ‘Let It Be’, the Beatles’ swansong, and Simon and Garfunkel’s ‘Bridge over Troubled Water’, then came the musicals Godspell and Jesus Christ Superstar. Norman Greenbaum’s Christian bubblegum rocker ‘Spirit in the Sky’ was a transatlantic number one. Church aside, the only other places to look were over your shoulder or down at your feet. For those inclined to the latter there was heads-down, no-frills hard rock, which had begun as an extension of the blues revival but was taken in heavier directions by Led Zeppelin, Birmingham’s Black Sabbath, teenagers Free, and Deep Purple, a group put together by the Searchers’ Chris Curtis before he was kicked out by the other members for his unreliability.1 Student unions in Britain saw cross-legged audiences listening to heavy bands in tight tie-dyed shirts with names like Jody Grind, Levee Camp Moan and Titus Groan.2 Where to go next? The old dependables didn’t have the answer. Think of any of the major names of 1968 – Lennon, McCartney, Byrds, Airplane, Stones, Who, Kinks – and consider the quality drop in their output between then and 1971, when Don McLean wrote ‘American Pie’, his broadside about the end of a golden era. As for the new names, much of their music sounded bored and boring: Pink Floyd scored a UK number-one album with Atom Heart Mother, which Roger Waters quickly condemned as ‘horrible’; Neil Young’s ‘Out on the Weekend’ (‘think I’ll pack it in and buy a pick-up’) suggested modern pop was flatlining.