The Monkees, Head, and the 60s

Peter Mills

Description

How have a group conceived as a shortlived commodity outlived so many of their contemporaries? Why are The Monkees still important, and what does this tell us about their music, their TV show, and our understanding of popular culture today?

Despite being built in Hollywood, and not necessarily to last, The Monkees and their music, TV, and cinematic output have proved enduring. They are in many ways unique: as the first ‘made for TV’ band their success introduced methods of marketing pop that have since become standard industry practice, and their big-screen use of film and images in live performance is now a firmly established principle of concert staging. What’s more, they changed the rules of the pop game, taking control of their own affairs at the height of their success, risking magnificent failure by doing so.

The Monkees invented a new kind of TV, gave a new model to the music industry, and left behind one of the most enigmatic movies of the modern era, Head. This book is about all that and more. Drawing on years of original research and brand new interviews with key figures including songwriter Bobby Hart and producer Chip Douglas, it includes an extensive scene-by-scene analysis of the film and an exclusive essay on the impact of The Monkees and Head by KLF founder Bill Drummond.

Beginning by exploring the origins and personalities of the four Monkees before looking in depth at their work together on screen, on stage, and on record, The Monkees, Head, and the 60s is the first serious study of the band and the first to fully acknowledge their importance to the development of pop as we now know it.

Sujets

• Musique
• Histoire de la musique
• Music
• Musician
• Multiple signal classification
• Pop Vocal
• Individual Composer

Informations

• Publié par: Jawbone Press
• Date de parution: 01 septembre 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781908279989
• Langue: English

Extrait

The Monkees, Head , and the 60s
Peter Mills

A Jawbone book
First edition 2016
Published in the UK and the USA by Jawbone Press
3.1D Union Court
20–22 Union Road
London SW4 6JP
England
www.jawbonepress.com

Volume copyright © 2016 Outline Press Ltd. Text copyright © Peter Mills. All rights reserved. No part of this book covered by the copyrights hereon may be reproduced or copied in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in articles or reviews where the source should be made clear. For more information contact the publishers.

Edited by Tom Seabrook and John Morrish
Jacket design by Mark Case
Contents

Introduction
Chapter One: Pre-History: The Road To 1334 North Beechwood Drive
Chapter Two: Made For Television? The Monkees And The Art Of TV
Chapter Three: Monkees On Tour: The Liveness Of The Monkees
Chapter Four: Listen To The Band: The Music Of The Monkees
Chapter Five: What Is Head ? The Roots Of The Pop Film
Chapter Six: Production 8888: Head , Script To Screen
Chapter Seven: Can You Dig It? The Head Soundtrack
Chapter Eight: Aftermath
Conclusion: There’s A Good Time Comin’ On
Appendix One: Here We Come by Bill Drummond
Appendix Two: Archival Adventurer: Bill Inglot
Selected Discography
Selected Filmography
Bibliography
Endnotes
Acknowledgements
About The Author
This book is for those who look for meaning in form as they do fact.
INTRODUCTION

Why write about The Monkees? That’s a question I’ve been asked a few times since embarking on this study. My answer, at least in part, is this book, but the shorter version I’ve come to use is that whichever way you look at it The Monkees and their story provide a direct route into the centre of the popular culture of the last 50 years, be that music, film, television, live performance, marketing, and advertising … you name it. In heated moments I have even been known to claim, to the amusement of my friends, that popular culture as we recognise it would not exist if it weren’t for The Monkees. So, I’m partial.
Like everyone else of my age group, I first heard the records and saw the TV show as a child, and although I’m primarily an advocate of the music and the movie, it is undoubtedly the TV show that has kept their name alive to new generations of fans. For me and my school friends, it was the 1974 repeats on the BBC – an episode a day during the long summer holidays – that got us into the series and sent us all out to spend our pocket money on the only Monkees album available in the UK at that time, an 11-track compilation simply called The Best Of The Monkees on an offshoot of EMI’s budget ‘Music For Pleasure’ label, Sounds Superb. It cost £1.25 at a time when, say, Band On The Run or Dark Side Of The Moon would have cost you £2.99. It offered all the best-known hits and also introduced its young listeners to ‘Listen To The Band’, which at that time was a virtually unknown song in Britain. Watching and listening to the show, it was clear there was a lot more music to be had – in the days before Google searches, heritage reissues, and online discographies, it was almost impossible to find out what a defunct band’s output had been, once those records were deleted. So began my habit of browsing second-hand record shops.
At first I had to make do with the ones closest to me, but they delivered – notably Project Records on Roundhay Road in Leeds, walking distance on a Saturday morning from our house and directly opposite the legendary and near-notorious Fforde Grene pub-cum-music venue-cum-roughhouse. Project was where I found most of my Monkee albums, usually mono copies, sleeves a bit battered but the discs fine to play, and usually located in the cheapest section of the shop at the back, where albums sold for 30 pence. It’s important to understand that at this time in the mid 70s, with a few obvious exceptions, the music of the 60s and even the late 50s was not fashionable and sometimes even considered an embarrassment in a world where prog rock ruled and Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd were too cool to release singles because the pop charts were, like, nowhere . So my Monkee albums were in those bargain bins alongside titles by other acts who seemed to have been left behind by progress: The Young Rascals, The Lovin’ Spoonful, Every Mother’s Son, Eddie Cochran, Wayne Fontana, Cliff Richard & The Shadows, The Association, The Spencer Davis Group, The Troggs. At 30p a time, even paper-round money stretched to letting me try out the unknown on the strength of a half-recognised name or an interesting sleeve. I’ve still got them all.
The shop also sold used singles (5p to 30p, depending on title and condition) and I found most of my Monkee 45s there too. My original black-label RCA of ‘Alternate Title’ was from the sleeveless 5p bin and in such bad condition that I was shocked the first time I heard a ‘clean copy’ – where was all that noise? This was how second-hand record collections were assembled by kids in the mid 70s. It was a couple of years later that I found out about Head , while looking for a copy of Headquarters , which – probably because it’s the best Monkees album – fewer people had dumped after their fall from favour and was therefore harder to pick up at the kind of prices I could pay. I found my mono copy of the Head soundtrack in the punk summer of 1977, while Micky and Davy were starring in Harry Nilsson’s The Point in London and around the time that Head got its UK debut at the Electric Cinema Club in Notting Hill in August. I picked it up at Gerol’s, a little second-hand stall in the covered market hall in the Merrion Centre in Leeds at the relatively lofty price of £1.50.
So I’ve been listening and looking a long time. To return to our opening question, why write about them? Compared to The Beatles, Bob Dylan, or The Beach Boys, there are remarkably few books about The Monkees; there were scores of quickie fan books and annuals in the 60s, but if we look at ‘real’ books about them, even including the memoirs of Jones and Dolenz, I count no more than seventeen. This is and remains a great mystery to me, as once you begin to dig into the story you see how their tale connects up quickly and closely with the much wider spread of popular culture since the mid 60s. Thus they pop up not only in heavy-duty cineaste tomes like Peter Biskind’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls and musical memoirs like Neil Young’s Waging Heavy Peace but also in works on the history of television, marketing, and bubblegum pop music.
The books we do have seem to fall into four distinct categories, which we might call ‘archival’, ‘analytical’, ‘biography’, and ‘fan memoir’. In the first group we find the mother of all Monkee reference works, Andrew Sandoval’s The Monkees: The Day-By-Day Story Of The 60s TV Pop Sensation (2005). This work is and will most likely remain the definitive text on the archival side of The Monkees story, primarily because it had the great advantage of access to both all the main players in the tale and the tape archive itself. Indeed, it grew out of the deep mining into that archive by the staff of Rhino Records. Rhino began as an enthusiast’s dream as much as a record company; their role in The Monkees’ story over the past 30 years can hardly be overstated, and we look in detail at their contribution in this book. Clearly taking its cue from Mark Lewisohn’s similarly structured The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions (1988), Sandoval’s book is a meticulously constructed diarising of The Monkees’ career and has proved very useful in the composition of this book both in the trustworthiness of its information (taken direct from source) and the forensic clarity of its presentation. All the session information cited herein, unless clearly specified as being found elsewhere, is drawn from this impeccable source. With so much ground to cover in a single book, the detail by necessity squeezes out sustained analysis of the music and its wider contexts, but it is an invaluable work and a must-read for anyone interested in the group.
The other book to draw on an archival element is older, being the Chadwick, McManus, Reilly, and Schultheiss volume The Monkees: A Manufactured Image: The Ultimate Reference Guide To Monkee Memories And Memorabilia , published in 1993. The book’s introduction notes that it grew out of a frustration with the lack of books acknowledging the group’s success and as a response to their enduring ‘underground’ popularity and benefits from the contributions of Bill Chadwick, who worked with Michael Nesmith in the folk clubs of LA pre-Monkees and was a stalwart of the organisation until the end, even writing a number of tunes for latter day Monkee albums, such as ‘Zor And Zam’, and the original, scorchingly acerbic ‘You And I’ with Davy Jones. Where Sandoval focuses on the hidden world of Monkee studio recordings, this book sweeps across the world of fan memorabilia, discographies, variant record releases, and precious ephemera. Bill Chadwick also writes a short but fascinating memoir of his experiences in and understanding of the Monkee phenomenon. It’s the perfect companion volume to the Sandoval, and together they cover the ‘archival’ approach to the group in a way it is hard to imagine being bettered.
Poised between archival analysis and memoir are two invaluable works by Rhino Records co-founder Harold Bronson: Hey Hey We’re The Monkees (1996), a lavishly illustrated oral history of the band in which we hear from all the key players, and The Rhino Records Story (2013), a fascinating slice of pop-cultural history delivered directly from experience and which, amongst much else, contextualises the relationship between group and label brilliantly well.
In the ‘analytical’ bag we have two excellent volumes, both pioneering and coming well ahead of the game: Eric Lefcowitz’s Monkee Business made it into print in 1985, just ahead of Au