The Last Of The Monkees

You’ve heard the story: The Monkees were a made-for-TV rock band that’s first two albums were engineered in a hit-making studio-lab featuring the talent of pop music’s most reliable songwriting and studio pros of the moment. The rock press maligned the foursome for not playing their own instruments on the recordings and for not writing their own songs (which, today, is normative). But the lads, to their great credit, ultimately became a real band, writing, playing, and producing the entirety of their third album, Headquarters. As noted by All Music Guide, the albums the band made after wrestling artistic control from Don Kirchner proved “…they were legitimate musicians with enough brains, heart, and soul as anyone else claiming to be a real band...” And Micky Dolenz famously likens The Monkees becoming a legitimate band to Leonard Nimoy becoming a real Vulcan. And yet it happened.

The television program ended after two short, successful seasons, after which the radio hits quickly dried up (no longer having a weekly vehicle to promote the songs), which is unfortunate for Top 40 radio in the late 1960’s, as their subsequent, self-directed albums proved no less engaging. I’ll be addressing them here, taken together – the final four original albums by The Monkees. I encountered Monkee-mania in its second (or maybe third?) iteration, through the MTV-fueled, twentieth Anniversary resurgence, and as a result, a new generation of fans and I were exposed, ad nauseam, to the band’s 12 top-40 hits, mostly coming from their first five million-selling albums, which mainly demonstrated the vision of the producers, music directors, and the television program, but gave little insight into the four individual members of the band. I’d argue that the final four original albums, while not only revealing so much more about Nesmith, Jones, Thorkelson, and Dolenz, also contain some of group’s best musical moments.

The downward sales spiral and the band’s ultimate demise started with their ill-fated film, Head. The idea behind the movie was to explode the whole mythology behind The Monkees: “a manufactured image with no philosophies.” It was a declaration of independence, of sorts, for the four actors/musicians, who were eager to shed the baggage of the kid-friendly television program. The film touched upon every movie genre imaginable as well as a few made-up ones as well, and it ended where it began, with the band running away from what it had become and featuring some of the best pop songs of the moment, from the psychedelic warmth of the movie’s theme song, the Goffin/King gem, “The Porpoise Song,” to Nesmith’s rocking barn-burner, “Circle Sky,” to the mellow gold, Carole King-penned, “As We Go Along.” Interspersed with snippets of dialogue from the film, the soundtrack is eclectic, eccentric, fun, and well-worth seeking out. Rhino recently released a 60-track collector’s edition of the soundtrack, featuring live versions and alternate vocal tracks as well as a few interviews from the era. 

After Head, Tork left, and then there were three. Instant Replay was the first album from the group that wasn’t connected to either a television program or to a film. Released just two months after the film soundtrack, the powers-that-be at Colgems apparently presumed the band still had sales potential. And while not boasting any true hit singles, the album did manage to eke its way up #32 on the album charts in the spring of 1969. The first single, the Boyce and Hart-penned, “Tear Drop City,” was an outtake from some of their earliest 1966 recording sessions and sounds suspiciously similar to their #1 debut single, “Last Train To Clarksville.” Truth was, it was reportedly an attempt by the band to reclaim territory on the pop charts by reaching into the hit-filled Kirchner vaults. Either way, it was a likable, sunny pop song that just missed the top 40 that summer, peaking at #56. Other gems on this forgotten album include the Goffin/King songs, “I Won’t Be The Same Without Her” and “A Man Without A Dream,” Jones’ acidic vocal on “You and I,” which boasted equally acidic guitar work by Neil Young, and the Neil Sadaka/Carole Bayer-Sager coulda-been-a-hit-in-1966, “The Girl I Left Behind Me.” The album’s closer, the McCartney-esque, bombastically schizophrenic cat biography, “Shorty Blackwell,” featured three separate, yet intertwining sonic movements and was written by Dolenz, foreshadowing the quirky art pop to come from the actor turned drummer turned songwriter (and my favorite Monkee: I love you, Micky Dolenz!).

The Monkees Present: Micky, David, Michael was originally conceived back when Peter Tork was still with the group and had been planned as a double album, devoting one side to each Monkee. With Tork absent and sales dwindling, the main concept was retained, but the project abbreviated to two sides, with songs contributed separately by the remaining three. Standout tracks include Nesmith’s country-rock, “Good Clean Fun,” (#82) one of the albums failed singles, and the Nesmith’s fan-favorite and leadoff single, “Listen To The Band” (#63). Davy submitted some of his best recorded efforts ever in tried-and-true starry-eyed mode for which he had become most known, the self-penned, “If I Knew” and the eerie, lounge-act number, “French Song,” as well as a surprising rocker written by the reliable tunesmiths, Boyce and Hart, “Looking For The Good Times.” As with the last LP, Micky Dolenz turned-in the most experimental tracks, with the terse album opener, “Little Girl,” and the similarly claustrophobic and excellent, “Bye-Bye, Baby, Bye-Bye.” Dolenz also contributed the album’s third failed single, the overtly political and tightly coiled, “Mommy and Daddy,” (#109). More musically gifted than many might have presumed, I’ve often wondered what might have happened had Dolenz chosen to devote himself to a musical, post-Monkees career (sigh...).

After Present, Nesmith left, and then there were two. Changes was the final “original” Monkees album, which featured the two actors in the band, Dolenz and Jones, with industry insiders joking that the final remaining band member would eventually release an album as “The Monkee.” **Good one, industry insiders** This contractual obligation of an album was produced and largely written by Jeff Barry and Andy Kim (“Rock Me Gently,” #1, 1974) and is surprisingly strong. By my ear, Changes is a perfect representation of the type of preteen-oriented bubblegum music being released around that time (e.g., “A-B-C,” The Jackson 5, “Sugar, Sugar,” The Archies – which was another Andy Kim song, by the way, “Dizzy,” Tommy Roe, “Simon Says,” 1910 Fruitgum, “I Think I Love You,” Partridge Family…). Standouts include the album opener and sole single, “Oh, My My” (#98), the mournful, meandering melody of “Ticket On A Ferry Ride,” and “You’re So Good To Me,” which rounds out the album’s first three tunes. “Acapulco Sun” and the Dolenz-penned, playful, country-R&B tune, “Midnight Train,” which was recorded during the sessions for the previous album, also hold their own on this universally ignored, final Monkees release. While neither Jones nor Dolenz reported having fond memories of the recording sessions or of the album, it’s a surprisingly enjoyable and playful Polaroid of that era in pop music.

After The Monkees, Tork wandered aimlessly through the next two decades doing a stint in prison for marijuana possession and meandering in and out of various rock bands. Nesmith enjoyed modest success as a country-rock pioneer and early adopter of music videos, and the final two Monkees quietly made their ways into the tumultuous new decade, with Jones releasing a failed solo album in 1971 and making ends meet with guest appearances on The Brady Bunch, etc., and Dolenz, financially solvent from the success of The Monkees, eventually carving out a career for himself as a television director in the UK. Twenty years later came the MTV-fueled reunion extravaganza, which gave the group an unexpected (and unnecessary?) half-life, providing opportunity for the group to release new recordings in the late 1980’s and into the 1990’s in various incarnations. None of the new material comes close to the quality of their 1960’s recordings, and The Monkees story came to a sad end with Jones’ untimely death in 2012. “Goodnight, goodnight everybody; everybody everywhere, goodnight.”

"Pieces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones Ltd.," by The Monkees

Everybody knows The Monkees story: the Hollywood trade newspaper, “Variety,” listed an ad titled, “Madness!” enlisting actors and musicians to play a Beatles-like, “Help”-inspired television program, and Micky Dolenz, Davy Jones, Peter Tork, and Michael Nesmith were selected out of hundreds of hopeful applicants, including (as legend has it) rock legend, Stephen Stills, and the murderous Charles Manson. After one season of the wildly successful “Monkees” television program and two number one albums, pressure from the rock press (who understandably questioned their rock cred - after all, they weren't actually a rock band, they just played one on T.V.) pushed the four actors/musicians to demand artistic control of their recorded albums, resulting in the firing of the golden-eared musical Svengali, Don Kirshner (who would soldier on to continued success in the 1970’s with “The Archies,” another studio invention spawning a number one hit in 1969 with “Sugar Sugar,” and the syndicated TV rock show, “Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert”).

Their first album after Kirshner was the wonderful, Headquarters, one of the band’s very best albums (a significant accomplishment, considering it boasts no major radio hits and still rose to the pole position on Billboard’s album charts earlier in 1967), demonstrating that two actors and two musicians thrown together for a television show could hold their own, musically. “Headquarters doesn't show the band to be musical geniuses, but it did prove they were legitimate musicians with enough brains, heart, and soul as anyone else claiming to be a real band in 1967” (All Music Guide). And later that same year, the band submitted the sublime Pieces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones Ltd., which stands as their very best.

Pieces is a psychedelic pop gem, which featured some of the earliest use of the Moog synthesizer ever recorded as well as the songs of some of pop music’s greatest songwriters, including: Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil (“Love Is Only Sleeping”), Harry Nilsson (“Cuddly Toy,” with the royalties of this song allowing Nilsson to quit his then “day job” managing a bank), and Carole King and Jerry Goffin (“Pleasant Valley Sunday” and “Star Collector”). The album also featured some outstanding compositions by Mike Nesmith (“Don’t Call On Me” and the stunning, psychedelic, “Daily Nightly”). Monkees go-to songwriters, Tommy James and Bobby Hart, contributed one of my favorite songs on the album, as well, the haunting, “Words,” featuring Micky on lead vocals and Peter providing the memorable echo in the verse. Great stuff.

Home to two of their most memorable hits (the aforementioned “Pleasant Valley Sunday,” #3, and “Words,” #11), Pieces was the band’s final #1 album. To be sure, hits would follow after Pieces (the delightful and durable “Daydream Believer,” which became a #3 US Country hit for Anne Murray over a decade later, and “Valleri,” the Monkees’ ode to a female name which has received more than it’s fair share of pop homage – from Steve Winwood and Amy Winehouse to name a few), and some of the band’s best songs were yet to be heard (“The Porpoise Song,” "Daddy's Song," and “As We Go Along,” from their 1968 cult film, "Head," and “Listen To The Band,” “I Won’t Be The Same Without Her,” and “Someday Man, - go Roger Nichols and Paul Williams!)” from later albums as a trio, minus Tork, and finally, songs like “Oh My, My,” from the final “original Monkees” LP, the surprisingly strong bubblegum album, Changes), but Pieces was, by all accounts, the Monkees’ last hurrah.

A cartoon band? A manufactured image? A flash-in-the-pan? Criticisms and accusations followed the beleaguered band during their 60’s heyday, but what naysayers couldn’t know in 1967 was that the Monkees would endure: through a decade of 1970’s after-school syndication, through a late-1980’s, MTV-driven resurgence 20 years later, and still drawing sold-out crowds 45 years later for a world-wide summer tour. Maybe the lads (as Ringo calls them) will never be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, but I’d argue that they should be, because regardless of how they came to be, The Monkees, Inc., made an indelible mark on the pop music business landscape: The Monkees are arguably the first “boy band” (okay, so maybe that’s not a check in the “plus” column, but it was influential, nonetheless), they are certainly the first rock group to leverage the power of music videos to successfully market their music (pre-dating MTV by 15 years and the "Glee" phenomenon by 43 years!), and they showcased some of the best pop writing of the era, establishing songwriters who were, in fact, later inducted into the same Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, largely due to the Monkees recordings of their songs. But whatever ones’ stance on the Hall of Fame question, Pieces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones Ltd., stands as a classic post script from the “Summer of Love” and one of the very best examples of pop psychedelia of the 1960’s. So turn down the lights, turn on the lava lamp, put the needle on the record (or click your iPod), and listen to this groovy album.