A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs - Episode 144: “Last Train to Clarksville” by the Monkees

Episode Date: February 15, 2022

Episode 144 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Last Train to Clarksville” and the beginnings of the career of the Monkees, along with a short primer on the origins of the Vietnam War.  Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a seventeen-minute bonus episode available, on “These Boots Are Made For Walking” by Nancy Sinatra, which I mispronounce at the end of this episode as “These Boots Were Made For Walking”, so no need to correct me here. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ (more…)

A History of Rock Music in 500 songs by Andrew Hockey Episode 144, Last Train to Clarksville, by The Monkeys. We've obviously talked in this podcast about several of the biggest hits of 1966 already, but we haven't mentioned the biggest hit of the year, one of the strangest records ever to make number one in the US, The Ballad of the Green Berets, by Sergeant Barry's. Subla. Back at home, a young wife waits.

Her green beret has met his fate. He has died for those oppressed, leaving her just last request. But silver winds on my son's chest, make him one. Barry Sadler was an altogether odd man, and just as a brief warning, his story, which will last a minute or so, involves gun violence. At the time he wrote and recorded that song, he was on active duty in the military. He was a combat medic who'd been fighting in the Vietnam War when he'd got a wound that had meant he had to be shipped back to the USA. And while at Fort Bragg, he decided to write and record a song about his experiences, with the help of Robin Moore, a right-wing author of, of military books, both fiction and non-fiction, who wrote the books on which the films

the Green Berets and The French Connection were based. Sattler's record became one of those massive fluke hits, selling over 9 million copies and getting him appearances on the Ed Sullivan show. But other than one top 30 hit, he never had another hit single. Instead, he tried and failed to have a TV career, then became a writer of Pulp Fiction himself, writing a series of 21 novels about the centurion who thrust his spear into Jesus' side when Jesus was being crucified and is thus cursed to be a soldier until the second coming. He moved to Nashville, Tennessee, where he lived until he shot Lee Emerson, a country songwriter who had written songs for Marty Robbins, in the head, killing him, in an argument over a woman. He was sentenced to 30 days in jail for this

misdemeanor, of which he served 28. Later he moved to Guatemala City, where he was, was himself shot in the head. The nearest army based to Nashville, where Sadler lived after his discharge, is Fort Campbell in Clarksville. The Vietnam War was a long and complicated war, one which affected nearly everything we're going to see in the next year or so of this podcast, and we're going to talk about it quite a lot. So it's worth giving a little bit of background here. In doing so, I'm going to use quite a flippant tone, but I want to make it clear that I'm not mocking the very real horrors that people suffered in the wars I'm talking about. It's just that to somewhat multiple decades of unimaginable horrors in a few sentences

requires glossing over so much that you have to either laugh or cry. The origin of the Vietnam War, as in so many things in 20th century history, can be found in European colonialism. France had invaded much of Southeast Asia in the mid to late 19th century and created a territory known as French Indochina, which became part of the French colonial empire. But in 1940, France was taken over by Germany and Japan was at war with China.

Germany and Japan were allies, and the Japanese were worried that French Indochina would be used to import fuel and arms to China. Plus, they quite fancied the idea of having a Japanese empire, so Vichy France let Japan take control of French Indochina. But of course, the reason that France had been taken over by Germany was that pretty much the whole world was at war in 1940, and obviously the countries that were fighting Germany and Japan,

the bloc led by Britain, soon to be joined by America and Russia, weren't very keen on the idea of Japan getting more territory. But they were also busy with the whole fighting a world war thing. So they did what governments in this situation always do. They funded local guerrilla insurgent fighters on the basis that my enemy's enemy is my friend, something that has luckily never had any negative consequences whatsoever, except for occasionally.

Those local guerrilla fighters were an anti-imperialist popular front, the Viet Minh, led by Ho Chi Min, a revolutionary communist. They were dedicated to overthrowing foreign imperialist occupiers and gaining independence for Vietnam, and Ho Chi-min further wanted to establish a Soviet-style communist government in the newly independent country. The Allies funded the Viet Minh in their fight against the Japanese occupiers until the end of the Second World War,

at which point France was liberated from German occupation, Vietnam was liberated from Japanese occupation, and the French basically said, hooray, we get our empire back. To which Ho Chi Minh's response was, more or less, what part of anti-imperialist dedicated to overthrowing foreign occupation of Vietnam did you not understand exactly?

Obviously, the French weren't best pleased with this, and so began what was the first of a series of wars in the region. The first Indochina War, lasted for years and ended in a negotiated peace of a sort. Of course this led to the favoured tactic of the time, partition, splitting a formally occupied country into two at an arbitrary dividing line, a tactic which was notably successful in securing peace everywhere it was tried, apart from Ireland, India, Korea and a few other places.

But surely it wouldn't be a problem in Vietnam, right? North Vietnam was controlled by the communists, led by Ho Chi Minh, and recognised by China and the USSR but not by the Western states. South Vietnam was nominally independent, but led by the former puppet emperor who owed his position to France, soon replaced by a right-wing dictatorship. And both the right-wing dictatorship and a left-wing dictatorship were soon busily oppressing their own citizens

and funding military opposition groups in the other country. This soon escalated into full-blown war, with the north backed by China and Russia and the south backed by America. This was one of a whole series of wars in small countries, which were really proxy wars between the two major powers, the USA and the USSR, both of which were vying for control, but which couldn't confront each other directly,

because either country had enough nuclear weapons to destroy the whole world multiple times over. But the Vietnam War quickly became more than a small proxy war. The US started sending its own troops over, and more and more of them. The US had never ended the drafts, after World War II, and by the mid-60s, significant numbers of young men were being called up and sent over to fight in a war that had by that point lasted a decade, depending on exactly when you count the war they're starting from, between two countries they didn't care about,

over things few of them understood, and that an exorbitant cost in lives. As you might imagine, this started to become unpopular among those likely to be drafted, and as the people most affected, other of course than the Vietnamese people, whose opinions on being bombed and shot up by foreigners supporting one or other of the dictators vying to rule over them nobody else was much interested in, were also with the generation who were the main audience for popular music. Slowly this started to seep into the lyrics of songs, a seepage which had already been prompted by the appearance in the folk and soul worlds of many songs against other horrors like segregation. This started to hit the pop charts with songs like The Universal Soldier by

Buffy San Marie, which made the UK top five in a version by done of them. He's the one who gives his body as a weapon of the war. And without him, all this killing can't go on. He's the universal soldier, and he really is to blame. His orders come from far away no more. They come from here and there and you and me. And brothers, can't you see?

This is not the way we put the end to war. That charted in the lower regions of the US charts, and a cover version by Glenn Campbell did slightly better. That was even though Campbell himself was a supporter of the war in Vietnam, and rather pro-military. Meanwhile, as we've seen a couple of times, Jan Berry of Jan and Dean recorded a pro-war answer song to that, The Universal Coward. This, of course, was even though Barry was himself avoiding the draft. And I've not been able to find credits for that track, but Glenn Campbell regularly played guitar on Barry's sessions. so it's entirely possible that he played guitar on that record made by a coward, attacking his own record, which he disagreed with, for its cowardice.

This is, of course, what happens when popular culture tries to engage with social and political issues. Pop culture is motivated by money, not ideological consistency, and so if there's money to be made from anti-war songs or from pro-war songs, someone will take that money. And so on October 9, 1965, Billboard Magazine Manor Report, Colpix enters protest field Hollywood Colpix has secured its first protest lyric disc

The Willing Conscript As general manager Bud Katzl initiates relationships with independent producers The single features Lawrence St. Davis Katzl says the song was written during the Civil War Rewritten during World War I and most recently updated by Bob Krasnow and Sam Ash Screen Gems music

The Company's publishing wing is tracing the song's history, Katsl said. Katsl's second single is You Got the Gamaguchi by an artist with that unusual stage name. The record is a screen gem production and was in the house when Katsl arrived one month ago. The executive said he was expressly looking for material for two contract artists, David Jones and Hoyt Axton.

The company is also working on getting Axton a role in a television series, Camp Run Amok. To unpack this a little, Colpix was a record label owned by Columbia Pictures and we talked about that a little bit in the episode on the Locomotion the film and TV companies were getting into music

and Columbia had recently bought up Don Kirchner's Aldon Publishing and Dimension Records as part of their strategy of tying in music with their TV shows this is a company trying desperately to jump on a bandwagon Colpix at this time was not exactly having huge amounts of success with its records Hoytackston meanwhile was a successful country

singer and songwriter. We met his mother many episodes back. May Axton was the writer of Heartbreak Hotel. Axton himself is now best known as the dad in the 80s film Gremlins. David Jones will be coming up shortly. Bob Krasnow and Sam Ash were record executives then at Kama Sutra Records but soon to move on. We'll be hearing about Krasnow more in future episodes. Neither of them were songwriters, and while I have no real reason to disbelieve the claim that the willing conscript dates back to the Civil War, the earliest version I have been able to track down was its publication in issue 28 of Broadside magazine in June 1963, nearly 100 years after the American Civil War, with the credit by Tom Paxton. Paxton was a popular singer-songwriter

of the time, and it certainly sounds like his writing. The first recording of it I know of was by Pete Seeger. There are several lessons that I haven't mastered yet. I haven't got the hang of how to use the bayonet. If he doesn't die at once am I to stick him with it more. Oh, I hope you will be patient for I've never killed before. And the hand grenade is something that I just don't understand. You've got to throw it quickly or you're apt to lose your hand. Does it blow a man to pieces with its...

But the other thing is that by the time this was printed, the single had already been released the previous month, and it was not released under the name Lawrence and Davis, or under the title The Willing Conscript. There are precisely two differences between the song copyrighted as by Krasno and Ash, and the one copyrighted two years earlier as by Paxton. One is that verses three and four are swapped round, the other is that it's now titled The New Recruit, and presumably because they realized that the pseudonym Lawrence and Davis was trying just a bit too hard to sound cool in drug culture

they reverted to another stage name the performer had been using Michael Blessing Now there are several lessons that I haven't mastered yet I haven't got the hang of how to use the bayonet If he doesn't die at once should I stick him just once more Oh please be patient, Sergeant, for I've never killed before. It is something that I just don't understand. Blessing's name was actually Michael Nesmith. And before we go any further, yes his mother, Betty Nesmith Graham,

did invent the product that later became marketed in the US as liquid paper. At this time, though, that company wasn't anywhere near as successful as it later became, and was still a tiny company. I only mention it to forestall the 10,000 comments and tweets I would otherwise get, asking why I didn't mention it. In Nesbeth's autobiography, while he talks a lot about his mother, he barely mentions her business and says he was uninterested in it. He talks far more about the love of art she instilled in him,

as well as her interest in the deep questions of philosophy and religion, to which in her case and his they found answers in Christian science, but both were interested in conversations about ideas. in a way that few other people in Nesmith's early environment were. Nesmith's mother was also responsible for his music career. He had spent two years in the Air Force in his late teens, and the year he got out, his mother and stepfather brought him a guitar for Christmas,

after he was inspired by seeing Hoytackston performing live and thinking he could do that himself. As he put it in his autobiography, what did it matter that I couldn't play the guitar, couldn't sing very well, didn't know any folk songs. I would be going to college and hanging out at the student union with pretty girls and singing folk songs. They would like me. I might even figure out a way to get a cool car. This is, of course, the thought process that pretty much every young man to pick

up a guitar goes through, but Nesmith was more dedicated than most. He gave his first performance as a folk singer ten days after he first got a guitar, after practicing the few chords in most folk songs for twelve hours a day, every day in that time. He soon, he soon as a few songs. He soon, started performing as a folk singer, performing around Dallas both on his own and with his friend John London, performing the standard folk repertoire of Woody Guthrie and LeBellie Songs, things like Pick a Bail of Cotton. He also started writing his own songs and put out a vanity record of one of them in 1960s Wondering down that lonesome highway.

London moved to California, and Nesmith soon followed, with his first wife Phyllis and their son Christian. There, Nesmith and London had the good fortune to be neighbours with someone who was a business associate to Frankie Lane, and they were signed to Lane's management company as a folk duo. However, Nesmith's real love was rock and roll, especially the heavier R&B end of the genre. He was particularly inspired by Bo Didley, and would always credit seeing Diddley live as a teenager

as being his biggest musical influence. Soon, Nesmith and London had formed a folk rock trio with their friend Bill Sleeper, as Mike and John and Bill, they put out a single, How Can You Kiss Me, written by Nesmith. They also recorded more of Nesmith's songs, like All the King's Horses. But that was left unresolved

They couldn't put my broken heart back together again But that was left unreleased as Bill was drafted And Nesmith in The Survivors One of several big folk groups run by Randy Sparks The founder of the new Christie Minstrels Nesmith was also writing songs throughout 1964 and 1965 And a few of those songs would be recorded by other people in 1966 like Different Drum, which was recorded by the Bluegrass Band, The Greenbrier Boys.

That would more successfully be recorded by the Stone Ponyes later, of course. And Nesmith's Mary Mary was also picked up by the Paul Butterfield Blues band. But while Nesmith had written these songs by late 1965, he wasn't able to record them himself. He was signed by Bob Krasno, who insisted he changed his name to Michael Blessing, and recorded two singles for Culpix the new recruit which we heard earlier and a version of Buffy Sammarie's until it's time for you to go sung in a high tenor range very far from Nesmith's normal singing voice but to my mind by far the best thing Nesmith recorded in this period is the unissued third Michael Blessing single

where Nesmith seems to have been given a chance to make the record he really wanted to make. The B side, a version of Alan two-scent, swamp rocker, Get Out of My Life Woman, is merely a quite good version of the song, but the A side, a version of his idle Bo Didley's classic, Who Do You Love, is utterly extraordinary, and it's astonishing that it was never released at the time. But the Michael Blessing Records did no better than anything else Culpix were putting out. Indeed, the only record they got onto the Hot 100 at all in a three-and-a-half-year period

was a single by one David Jones, which reached the heavy height of number 98. What are we going to do if the word gets out? What are we going to do if it gets about? What are we going to do if your dad finds out we're in love? Well, what did your sister say when she saw us kiss? What have I got to pay so she won't talk about this? Jones had been brought up in extreme poverty in open shore in Manchester, but had been encouraged by his mother, who died when he was 14, to go into acting.

He'd had a few parts on local radio, and had appeared as a child actor on TV shows made in Manchester, like appearing in the long-running soap opera Coronation Street, still on today, as Ian Arsharpals' grandson, Colin. Just tell me again what your auntie madge said about my last bank holiday. The auntie made you give me a shilling last week. Did she? Yeah. More than she's ever given me.

It's nice to have a bit of money in your pocket, isn't it, Grandma? Yes. What does she say? She said she didn't know where you managed to put it. She said you must have all her legs. Hmm. Now let's hear what she had to say about me face again. She said you look like a budgie that had turned into a pick of ease.

Right. That's done it. That's seen how madge off. He also had small roles in Zed cars and Bill Norton's TV play June evening, and a larger role in Keith Waterhouse's radio play, there is a happy land. But when he left school, he decided he was going to become a jockey rather than an actor. He was always athletic, he loved horses, and he was short. I've seen his height variously cited as 5'3 and 5 foot 4.

But it turned out that the owner of the stables in which he was training had show business connections and got him the audition that changed his life for the part of the artful Dodger in Lionel Bart's West End musical Oliver. We've encountered Lionel Bart before a couple of times, but if you don't remember him, he was the songwriter who co-wrote Tommy Steele's hits and who wrote Living Doll for Cliff Richard.

He also discovered both Steele and Marty Wilde and was one of the major figures in early British rock and roll. But after the Tommy Steele records, he turned his attention to stage musicals, writing book, music and lyrics for a string of hits, and more or less single-handedly inventing the modern British stage musical form, something Andrew Lloyd Webber, for example, always credits him with. Oliver, based on Oliver Twist, was his biggest success,

and they were looking for a new artful dodger. This was the best role for teenage boy in the UK at the time. Later performers to take the role on the London stage include Steve Marriott and Phil Collins, both of whom will no doubt encounter in future episodes. And Jones got the job, although they were a bit worried at first about his Manchester vowels. He assured them, though, that he could learn to do a cockney accent, and they took him on. Jones not having a natural cockney accent ended up doing him the biggest favour of his career.

While he could put on a relatively convincing one, he articulated quite carefully because it wasn't his natural accent. And so when the North American version found him previews that their real cockney, Dodger wasn't being understood perfectly, the fake Cockney Jones was brought over to join the show on Broadway and was there from opening night on. On February 9th, 1964, Jones found himself as part of the Broadway cast of Oliver on the Ed Sullivan show. That same night, there were some other British people who got a little bit more attention than Jones did. Davy Jones wasn't a particular fan of pop music at that point, but he knew he liked what he saw,

and he wanted some of the same reaction. Shortly after this, Jones was picked up for management by Ward Sylvester, of Columbia Pictures, who was going to groom Jones for stardom. Jones continued in Oliver for a while, and also had a brief run in a touring version of Pickwick, another musical based on a Dickens novel,

this time starring Harry Seekam, the British comedian and singer, who had made his name with the Goonshow. Jones' first single, Dream Girl, came out in early 1965. It was unsuccessful, as was his one album, David Jones, which seemed to be aiming at the teen idol market but failing miserably. The second single, What Are We Going to Do, did make the very lowest regions of the Hot 100,

but the rest of the album was mostly attempts to sound a bit like Herman's Hermit, a band whose lead singer, coincidentally, also came from Manchester, had appeared in Coronation Street, and was performing with a fake Cockney accent. Herman's Hermits had had a massive US hit with the old musical song, I am Henry the 8th I am. So of course Davy had his own old musical song,

Any Old Iron. Also, the Turtles had recently had a hit with a folk rock version of Dullens' It's Ain't Me Babe, and Davy cut his own version of their arrangement in the one concession to rock music on the album. The album was, unsurprisingly, completely unsuccessful, but Ward Sylvester was not disheartened. He had the perfect job for a young British teen idol who could sing and act.

The Monkeys was the brainchild of two young TV producers, Bob Raifelson and Birch Snyder, who had come up with the idea of doing a TV show very loosely based on the Beatles film A Hard Day's Night, though Rayfelson would later claim that he'd had the idea many years before the Hard Day's Night, and was inspired by his youth touring with folk bands. Schneider always admitted the true inspiration, though.

This was not a particularly original idea. There were a whole bunch of people trying to make TV shows based in some way around bands. Jan and Dean were working on a possible TV series. There was talk of a TV series starring The Who. There was a Beatles cartoon series. Hannah Barbera were working on a cartoon series about a band called The Bat, and there was even another show proposed to Screen Gems, Columbia's TV department, titled Liverpool USA,

which was meant to star Davy Jones, another British performer, and two American musicians, and to have songs provided by Don Kirchner's songwriters. That The Monkeys, rather than these other series, was the one that made it to the TV, though obviously the Beatles cartoon series did too, is largely because Raifleston and Schneider's independent production company, Ray Burt, which they had started after leaving Screen Gems, was given $225,000 to develop the series by their former colleague,

Screen Gems as Vice President in Charge of Programme Development, the former child star Jackie Cooper. Of course, as well as being their former colleague, Cooper may have had some more incentive to give Bob Ravelson and Bert Schneider that money, in that the head of Columbia Pictures, and thus Cooper's boss's boss, was one, Abe Schneider. The original idea for the show,

was to use the loving spoonful, but as we heard last week, they weren't too keen, and it was quickly decided instead that the production team would put together a group of performers. David Jones was immediately attached to the project, although Rayfelson was uncomfortable with Jones, thinking he wasn't as rock and roll as Rayfelson was hoping for. He later conceded, though, that Jones was absolutely right for the group.

As for everyone else, to start with, Raifleson and Schneider placed an ad in a couple of the trade papers, which read, auditions folk and roll musicians singers for acting roles in new TV series, running parts for four insane boys ages 17 to 21, once spirited Ben Frank's types, Have courage to work, must come down for interview. There were a couple of dog whistles in there to appeal to the hip crowd.

Ben Franks was a 24-hour restaurant on the sunset strip, where people including Frank Zapper and Jim Morrison used to hang out, and which was very much associated with the freak scene we've looked at in episodes on Zappa and the Birds. Meanwhile, must come down for interview, was meant to emphasise that you couldn't actually be high when you turned up, but you were expected to be the kind of person who would at least at some points have been high.

A lot of people answered that ad, including Paul Williams, Harry Nelson, Vandai Parks, and many more we'll be seeing along the way. But oddly, the only person actually signed up for the show because of that ad was Michael Nesmith, who was already signed up to Colpix Records anyway. According to Davy Jones, who was sitting in at the auditions, Schneider and Raffleson were deliberately trying to disorient the auditioners

with provocative behaviour like just ignoring them to see how they'd react. Nesmith was completely unfazed by this, and apparently walked in wearing a green wool hat and carrying a bag of laundry, saying that he needed to get this over with quickly so he could go and do his washing. John London, who came along to the audition as well, talked later about seeing Nesmith fill in a questionnaire that everyone had to fill in, In a space asking about previous experience, Nesmith just wrote Life and drew a big diagonal line across the rest of the page.

That attitude certainly comes across in Nesmith's screen test. You just came to it two years ago? What before then? I was a failure. Yeah, but did you work at that? Yeah. I mean, I just didn't do anything. I was a failure.

Do you think you're a goof? Do you? No. Well, see, it depends on what you're a goof? Yeah. No. Well, okay, see, then that's where I said. If you think I'm a goof man, I'm a goof.

What I think is what I am. I don't think I'm a goof. I don't think you're a goof. Right, okay. I think I'm out of work. I hope I get this serious. But a goof, no, I'm like... Let me ask you, do you.

Do you want to ego hangups? Yeah. A lot of ego hangouts. Meanwhile, Ravelson and Schneider were also scouring the clubs for performers who might be useful and put together a short list of people, including Jerry Yester and Chip Douglas of the Modern Folk Quartet, Bill Chadwick, who was in the Survivors with Ned Smith in London, and one Mickey Braddock,

whose agent they got in touch with, and who was soon signed up. Braddock was the stage name of Mickey Dolans, who soon reverted to his birth surname, and it's the name by which he went in his first bout of fame. Dolans was the son of two moderately successful Hollywood actors, George Dolans and Janelle Johnson, and their connections had led to Dolans, as Braddock, getting the lead role in the 1958 TV series Circus Boy,

about a child named Corky who worked in a circus looking after an elephant, after his parents, the flying falcons, were killed in a trapeze accident. We ran every outlaw and bad man out of the territory. Was there much shooting? Huh. Outlaws and wresters bit the dust every time we tangled with them. How many did you get? Six.

Gee. Maybe even eight. Do you suppose I could join the Rough Riders with you? You're a little young, don't you think? Well, you and Teddy are such a good friend. Maybe if you asked him. Well, they do have drummer boys in the army. Well, I can't play a drum.

I can teach you. Let's get back. Oddly, one of the other people who had been considered for that role was Paul Williams, who was also considered for the Monkeys, but ultimately turned down, and would later write one of the Monkees' last singles. Dolans had had a few minor TV appearances after that series had ended, including a recurring role on Peyton Place, but he had also started to get interested in music.

He performed a bit as a folk duo with his sister Coco, and had also been the lead singer of a band called Mickey and the One Nighters, who later changed their name to the missing links, who played mostly covers of Little Richard and Chuck Berry songs, and later British Invasion hits. He'd also recorded two tracks with wrecking crew backing, although neither track got released until after his later fame. Don't Doe Doleyn's had a great singing voice, an irrepressible personality and plenty of TV experience. He was obviously in. Ravelson and Schneider took quite a while whittling down the shortlist of the final four, and they were still considering people who'd applied through the ads. One they actually offered the role to was Stephen Stills, but he decided not to take the role. When he turned the roll down, they asked if he knew anyone else who had a similar appearance to him, and as it happened, he did. Steve Stills and Peter talk had known of each other before they actually met on the streets of Greenwich Village.

The way they both told the story on their first meeting that each approached the other and said, you must be the guy everyone says looks like me. The two had become fast friends and had played around the Greenwich Village folk seen together for a while before going their separate ways. Still's moving to California while Talk joined another of those big folk ensembles of the new Christie Minstrels type, this one called the Phoenix Singers. Talk had later moved to California himself and reconnected with his old friend, and they had performed together for a while in a trio called The Buffalo Fish, with Tork playing various instruments, singing and doing comedy bits. Oddly, while Tork was the member of the Monkeys with the most experience as a musician,

he was the only one who hadn't made a record when the TV show was put together. But he was by far the most skilled instrumentalist of the group, as distinct from best musician. A distinction talk was always scrupulous about making, and could play guitar. bass and keyboards all to a high standard, and I've also seen him in more recent years play French horn live. His great love, though, was the banjo, and you can hear how he must have sounded on the Greenwich Village folk scene in his solo spots on monkey shows,

where he would show off his banjo skills. Talk wouldn't get to use his instrumental skills much at first, though, as most of the backing tracks for the group's records were going to be performed by other people. More impressive for the TV series producers was his gift for comedy, especially physical comedy. Having seen Talk perform live a few times,

the only comparison I can make to his physical presence is to Harpo Marx, which is about as higher compliment as one can give. Indeed, Mickey Dolans has often pointed out that while there were intentional parallels to the Beatles in the casting of the group, the Marks brothers are a far better parallel, and it's certainly easy to see Talk as Harpo,

Dolans as Chico, Nesmith as Groucho, and Jones as Zepo. This sounds like an insult to Joe, Jones, unless you're aware of how much the Marks Brothers films actually depended on Zepo as the connective tissue between the more outrageous brothers and the more normal environment they were operating in, and how much the later films suffered for the lack of Zepo. The new cast worked well together, even though there were obvious disagreements between them right from the start. Dolan's, at least at this point, seems to have been the gel that held

the four together. He had the experience of being a child star in common with Jones. He was a habitual way of the sunset strip clubs when Nesmith and Talk had been hanging out, and he had personality traits in common with all of them. Notably, in later years, Dolans would do duo tours with each of his three bandmates without the participation of the others. The others, though, didn't get on so well with each other. Jones and Talk seemed to have got on okay, but there were very different people. Jones was a showbiz entertainer, whose primary concern was that none of the other stars of the show be better looking than him, while Talk was later self-diagnosed as neurodivergent, a fokey proto-hippie who wanted to drift from town to town playing his banjo.

Talk and Nesmith had similar backgrounds and attitudes in some respects, and were united in their desire to have more musical input into the show than was originally intended. But there were such different personalities in every aspect of their lives, from their religious views to their politics, to their tasting music. They came into conflict. Nesmith would later say of talk, I never liked Peter, he never liked me. So he had an uneasy truce between the,

the two of us. As clear as I could tell, among his peers he was very well liked, but we rarely had a civil word to say to each other. Nesmith also didn't get on well with Jones, both of them seeming to view themselves as the natural leader of the group, with all the clashes that entails. The four monkeys were assigned instruments for their characters, based not on instrumental skill, but on what suited their roles better. Jones was the teen idol character, so he was made the Maraca playing frontman who could dance without having to play an instrument. though Dolans took far more of the lead vocals. Nesmith was made the guitarist,

while Torque was put on bass, though Torque was by far the better guitarist of the two, and Dolan's was put on drums, even though he didn't play the drums. Talk would always say later that if the roles had been allocated by actual playing ability, Jones would have been the drummer. Dolans did, though, become a good drummer,

if a rather idiosyncratic one. Talk would later say, Mickey played the drums but Mike kept time that one record we all made, headquarters. Mike was the timekeeper. I don't know that Mickey relied on him, but Mike has a much stronger sense of time, and Davy too. Davy has a much stronger sense of time. Mickey played the drums like there were a musical instrument, as a colour. He played the drum colour. As a band, there was a drummer and there was a timekeeper, and there were different people. But at first, while a group were practising their instruments so they could mind convincingly on the TV

and make personal appearances, they didn't need to play on their records. Indeed, on the initial pilot, they didn't even sing. The recordings have been made before the cast had been finalized. The music was instead performed by two. The music was instead performed by two songwriters, Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart, who had become hugely important in the Monkees project. Boyce and Hart were not the first choice for the project. Don Kirshner, the head of Screen Gems music,

had initially suggested Roger Atkins, a brill-building songwriter working for his company, as the main songwriter for the monkeys. Atkins is best known for writing It's My Life, a hit for the animals. But Atkins didn't work out, though he would collide. later on one song with Nesmith, and reading between the lines, it seems there was some corporate infighting going on, though I've not seen it stated in so many words. There seems to have been a turf war between Don Kirshner, the head of Screen Gems Music

publishing, who was based in the Brill building, and Lester Sill, the West Coast executive who we've seen so many times before, the mentor to Lieber and Stoller, Dwayne Eddy, and Phil Specter, who was now the head of Screen Gems music on the West Coast. It also seems to be the case that none of the top thrill-building songwriters were all that keen on being involved at this point. Writing songs for an unsold TV pilot wasn't exactly a plum gig. Sill ended up working closely with the TV people

and it seems to have been him who put forward Boyce and Hart, a songwriting team he was mentoring. Boyce and Heart had been working in the music industry for years, both together and separately, and had had some success, though they weren't one of the top-tier songwriting teams like Guffin and King. They both started as performers. Boyce's first single, Betty Jean, had come out in 1958.

And Hart, love what you're doing to me, under his birth name Robert Harshman, a year later. Boyce had been the first one to have real songwriting success, writing Fat Stomino's Top Ten Hit Be My Guest in 1959, and co-writing two songs with singer Curtis Lee, both of which became singles produced by Full Specter, Under the Moon of Love, and the top ten hit, Fitty Little Angel Eyes. Boyce and Hart together,

along with Wes Farrell, who had co-written Twist and Shout with Bert Burns, wrote Lazy Elsie Molly for Chubby Chekker, and the number three hit come a little bit closer for Jay and the Americans. At this point they were both working in the Brill building, but then Boyce moved to the West Coast, where he was paired with Steve Venet,

the brother of Nick Venet, and they co-wrote and produced Peaches and Cream for the Iquettes. Hart, meanwhile, was playing in the band of Teddy Randarzo, the accordion playing singer who had appeared in The Girl Can't Help It, and with Randarzo and Bobby Weinstein, he wrote, Hurt So Bad, which became a big hit

for Little Anthony and the Imperials. But Hart soon moved over to the West Coast, where he joined his old partner Boyce, who had been busy writing TV themes with Venet for shows like where the action is.

Hart soon replaced Venet in the team, and the two soon wrote what would become undoubtedly their most famous piece of music ever, a theme tune that generations of TV viewers would grow to remember. Like sands through the hourglass, so are the days of our lives.

Well, what did you think I meant? Yes, just as Davy Jones had starred in an early episode of Britain's longest-running soap opera, one that's still running today. So Boyce and Hart wrote the theme music for America's longest-running soap opera, which has been running every weekday since 1965, and as so far aired well in excess of 14,000 episodes. Meanwhile, Hart had started performing in a band called the Candy Store Profit, with Larry Taylor, who we last saw with the Gamblers playing on LSD 25 and Moondog, on bass,

Jerry McGee on guitar and Billy Lewis on drums. It was this band that Boyce and Hart used, augmented by session guitarists Wayne Irwin and Louis Shelton, and wrecking crew percussionist Gene Estes on tambourine, plus Boyce and session singer Ron Hicklin on backing vocals, to record first the demos and then the actual tracks that would become the Monkey's hits. They had a couple of songs already that would be suitable for the pilot episode, but they needed something that would be usable as a theme song for the TV show.

Voice and Hart's usual working method was to write off another hit. They'd try to replicate the hook or the feel or the basic sound of something that was already popular. In this case, they took inspiration from the song Catch as If You Can, the theme from the film that was the Dave Clark Five's attempt, at their own A Hard Day's Night. Catch us if you can Um Time to get a move on We will yell with all of our might

Catch us if you can It's if you can Catch us if you can Catch us if you can Voice and Hart turned that idea Into what would become the Monkees theme We heard their performance of it earlier Of course

But when the TV show finally came out It was re-recorded with Dolan singing For a while. For a while, voice and heart hoped that they would get to perform all the music for the TV show. And there was even apparently some vague talk of them being cast in it, but it was quickly decided that there would just be songwriters. Originally, the intent was that they wouldn't even produce the records, that instead the production would be done by a name producer.

Mickey Most, the Animals producer, was sounded out for the role but wasn't interested. Snuff Garrett was brought in, but quickly discovered he didn't get on with the group at all. In particular, they were all annoyed at the idea that Davy would be the sole lead vocalist, and the tracks Garrett Cup with Davy on lead and the wrecking crew backing were scrapped. Instead, it was decided that Boyce and Hart would produce most of the tracks, initially with the help of the more experienced Jack Keller, and that they would only work with one monkey at the time to minimum. disruption, usually Mickey and sometimes Davy. These records would be made the same way as the

demos had been, by the same set of musicians, just with one of the monkeys taking the lead. Meanwhile, as Nesmith was seriously interested in writing and production, and Raffelson and Schneider wanted to encourage the cast members, he was also assigned to write and produce songs for the show. Unlike Boyce and Hart, Nesmith wanted to use his bandmate's talents, partly as a way of winning them over, as it was already becoming clear that the show would involve several competing factions. Nesmith's songs were mostly country rock tracks that weren't considered suitable as singles, but they would be used on the TV show and as album tracks. And on Nesmith's songs, Dolans and Tork would sing backing vocals, and Tork would join the Wrecking crew as an extra guitarist,

though he was well aware that his part on records like Sweet Young Thing wasn't strictly necessary when Glenn Campbell, James Burton, Al Casey and Mike Deasy were also playing guitar. That track was written by Nesmith with Goffin and King, and there seems to have been some effort to pair Nesmith early on with more commercial songwriters, though this soon fell by the wayside, and Nesmith was allowed to keep making his own idiosyncratic records off to the side, while Boyce and Hart got on with making the more commercial records. This was not incidentally something that most of the stars of the show objected to, or even thought was a problem at the time.

Talk was rather upset that he wasn't getting to have much involvement with the direction of the music, as he'd thought he was being employed as a musician. But Dolan's and Jones were actors first and foremost, while Nesmith was happily making his own tracks. They'd all known going in that most of the music for the show would be created by other people. There were going to be two songs every episode,

and there was no way that four people could write and record that much material themselves. while also performing in a half-hour comedy show every week, assuming, of course, that the show even aired. Initial audience response to the pilot was tepid at best, and it looked for a while like the show wasn't going to be green-lit. But Ravelson and Schneider, and director James Fawley, who played a crucial role in developing the show,

recut the pilot, cutting out one character altogether, a manager who acted as an adult supervisor, and adding in excerpts of the audition tapes, showing the real characters of some of the actors. As three of the four were playing characters loosely based on themselves, Peter's dummy character wasn't anything like he was in real life, but was like the comedy character he'd developed in his folk club performances. This helped draw the audience in.

It also, though, contributed to some line blurring that became a problem. The re-edited pilot was a success, and the series sold. Indeed, the new format for the series was a unique one that had never been done on TV before. It was a sitcom about four young men living, together without any older adult supervision, getting into improbable adventures, and with one or two semi-inforvised rumps, inspired by silent slapstick, over which played original songs. This became strangely influential in British sitcom when the series came out over here.

Two of the most important sitcoms of the next couple of decades, the goodies and the young ones, are very clearly influenced by the monkeys. And before the broadcast of the first episode, they were going to release a single to promote it. The song chosen as the first single was one Boyce and Hart had written inspired by the Beatles, specifically inspired by this. Hart heard that tag on the radio and thought that the Beatles were singing, Take the Last Train. When he heard the song again the next day and realised that the song had nothing to do with trains, he and Boyce sat down and wrote their own song inspired by his mishearing. Last Train to Clarksville is structured very, very similarly to

paperback writer. Both of them stay on one chord, a G7, for an 8-bar verse, before changing to C-7 for a chorus line, the word writer for the Beatles, the no, no, inspired by the Beatles, yeah, yeah, yeah, for the monkeys. To show how close the parallels are, I've sped up the vocals from the Beatles track slightly, to match the tempo with a karaoke backing track version of last train to Clarksville I found, and put the two together. my book it took me here's to write will you take a look it's based on a novel by a man named near and i need a job so i want to be a paperbackwriter lyrically there was one inspiration i will talk about in a minute but i think i've identified another inspiration that nobody has ever mentioned the classic country song night train to memphis co-written by owen bradley and made famous by roy aikoff has some slight melodic similarity to last train to clark's will and

parallels the lyrics fairly closely. Take the night train to Memphis, against take the last train to Clarksville, both towns in Tennessee. And when you arrive at the station, I'll be right there to meet you, I'll be right there to greet you, so don't turn down my invitation. It's clearly close to, and I'll meet you at the station, you can be here by 4.30 because I've made your reservation. Interestingly, in May 1966,

the same month that paperback writer was released, and so presumably the time that Hart heard the song on the radio for the first time, Rick Nelson, the teen idol formerly known as Ricky Nelson, who had started his own career as a performer in a sitcom, had released an album called Bright Lights and Country Music. He had had a bit of a career downslump and was changing musical direction and recording country songs. The last track on that album was a version of Night Train to Memphis.

And when you arrive at the station, I'll be right there to meet you, I'll be right there to greet you, so don't turn down my invitation. Hallelujah, hallelujah, I'll be shouting hallelujah all the day. Or we'll have a jubilee down in Memphis, Tennessee, and we'll shout hallelujah all the day. Now I've never seen either voice or heart ever mentioned even hearing that song. It's pure speculation on my part that there's any connection there at all, but I thought the similarity worth mentioning. The idea of the lyric, though, was to make a very mild statement about the Vietnam War.

Clark's rule was, as mentioned earlier, the site of Fort Campbell, a military training base, and they crafted a story about a young soldier being shipped off to war, calling his girlfriend to come and see him for one last night. This has left more or less ambiguous. This was a song being written for TV show intended for children after all, but it's still very clear on the line, and I don't know if I'm ever coming home.

Now, Boyce and Hart were songwriters first and foremost, and as producers, they were quite hands-off and would let the musicians shape the arrangements. They knew they wanted a guitar riff in the style of the Beatles' recent singles, and Louis Shelton came up with one based around the G7 chord that forms the basis of the song, starting with an octave leap. Shelton's riff became the hook that drove the record, and engineer Dave Hassinger added the final touch,

manually raising the volume on the hi-hat mic for a fraction of a second every bar, creating a drum sound like a hissing steam break. Now all that was needed was to get the lead vocals down, but Mickey Dolans was tired and hungry and overworked. Both Dolans and Jones in their separate autobiographies talk about how it was normal for them to only get three hours' sleep in night, between working 12-hour days filming the series, three-hour recording sessions and publicity commitments. He got the verses down fine,

but he just couldn't sing the middle eight. Boyce and Hart had written a complicated, multisyllabic patter-bridge, and he just couldn't get his tongue around that many syllables when he was that tired. He eventually asked if he could just sing do-d-do-do instead of the words, and the producers agreed. Surprisingly, it worked.

Last Train to Clarksville was released in advance of the TV series on a new label, Coal Gems, set up especially for the Monkeys to replace Coal Picks, with a better distribution deal, and it went to number one. The TV show started out with mediocre ratings, but soon that too became a hit, and so did the first album released from the TV series, and that album was where some of the problems really started. The album itself was fine, 10 tracks produced by a song, Boyce and Heart with the Candy Store Poffets playing and either

Michio or Davy singing. Most of these songs Boyce and Heart wrote, with a couple of numbers by Goffin and King and other Kirshner staff songwriters, plus two songs produced by Nesmith with the wrecking crew and with token participation from Talk in Dolans. The problem was the back cover, which gave little potted descriptions of each of them with their height, eye colour and so on. And under three of them it said, plays guitar and sings. While under Dolans it said, plays drums and sings. Now this was technically accurate. They all did play those instruments.

They just didn't play them on the record, which was clearly the impression the cover was intended to give. Nesmith in particular was incandescent. He believed that people watching the TV show understood that the group weren't really performing that music any more than Adam West was really fighting crime, or William Shatner travelling through space. But crediting them on the record was, he felt, crossing a line into something close to con artistry. To make matters worse, success was bringing more people trying to have a say. Where before, the monkeys had been an irrelevance, left to a couple of B-list producers, songwriters on the West Coast, now they were a guaranteed hit factory, and every songwriter working for Kirchner wanted to write and produce for them, which made sense because of the sheer quantity

of material they needed for the TV show, but it made for a bigger, less democratic organisation, one in which Kirshner was suddenly in far more control. Suddenly, as well as Boyce and Hart with the Candy Store Profits, and Nesmith with the wrecking crew, both of whom had been operating without much oversight from Kershner, there were a bunch of tracks being cut on the East Coast by songwriting and production teams like Goughlin and King, and Neil Siddarker and Carol Baia.

On the second Monke's album, released only a few months after the first, there were nine producers credited, as well as Boyce, Hart, Jack Keller and Nesmith, there were now also Goffin, King, Sidarka, Bayer, and Jeff Barry, who, as well as cutting tracks on the East Coast, was also flying over to the West Coast, cutting more tracks with the wrecking crew, and producing vocal sessions while there.

As well as producing songs he'd written himself, Barry was also supervising songs written by other people. One of those was a new songwriter he'd recently discovered and been co-producing for Bang Records, Neil Diamond, who had just had a big hit of his own with Cherry Cherry. Diamond was signed with screen gems and had written a song which Barry thought would be perfect for the monkeys, an up-tempo song called I'm a Believer, which he demoed with the regular bang musicians, top East Coast session players like Al Gore Goni, the guitarist who played on the Sound of Silence.

Barry had caught a backing track for the monkeys using those same musicians, including Diamond on acoustic guitar, and brought it over to LA. And that track would indirectly lead to the first big crisis for the group. Barry, unlike Boyce & Hart, was interested in working with the whole group and played all of them the backing track. Nesmith's reaction was a blunt, I'm a producer too, and that ain't no hit. He liked the song.

He wanted to have a go at producing a track on it himself as it happened, but he didn't think the backing track worked. Barry, trying to lighten the mood, joked that it wasn't finished and he needed to imagine it with strings and horns. Unfortunately, Nesmith didn't get that he was joking and started talking about how that might indeed make a difference, at which point everyone laughed and Nesmith took it badly.

His relationship with Barry quickly soured. Nesmith was getting increasingly dissatisfied with the way his songs and his productions were being sidelined and was generally getting unhappy, and talk was wanting more musical input too. They'd been talking with Raffleson and Schneider, who'd agreed that the group were now good enough on their instruments so that they could start recording some tracks by themselves, an idea which Kirshner loathed. But for now they were recording Neil Diamond's song to Geoff Barry's backing track.

Given that Nesmith liked the song, and given that he had some slight vocal resemblance to Diamond, the group suggested that Nesmith be given the lead vocal, and Kershner and Barry agreed, although Kershner at least apparently always intended for Dolans to sing a lead, and was just trying to pacify Nesmith. In the studio, Kershner kept criticising Nesmith's vocal and telling him he was doing it wrong until eventually he stormed out and Kershner got what he wanted,

another monkey's hit with Mickey Dolan's on lead, though this time it did at least have Jones and Talk on backing vocals. That was released on November the 23rd, 1966, as their second single, and became their second number one. and in January 1967, the group's second album, More of the Monkeys, was released. That too went to number one. There was only one problem.

The group weren't even told about the album coming out beforehand. They had to buy their own copies from a record shop to even see what tracks were on it. Nesmith had his two tracks, but even Boyce and Hart were only given to, with the rest of the album being made up of tracks from the Brill-building songwriters Kirchner preferred. Lots of great Nesmith and Boyce and Heart tracks were left off the album in favour of some astonishingly weak material, including the two worst tracks the group ever recorded, the day we fall in love and laugh,

and a novelty song they found embarrassing, Your Auntie Griselda, included to give talk a vocal spot. Nesmith called it probably the worst album in the history of the world, though in truth seven of the 12 tracks are really very strong, though some of the other material is pretty poor. The group were also annoyed by the packaging. The liner notes were by Don Kirchner, and read to the group at least,

like a celebration of Kirchner himself as the one person responsible for everything on the record. Even the photo was an embarrassment. The group had taken a series of photos in clothes from the department store J.C. Penny as part of an advertising campaign, and the group thought the clothes were ridiculous, but one of those photos was the one chosen for the cover.

Nesmith and Talk made the decision, which the other two agreed to with various. degrees of willingness. They'd been fine mimming to other people's records when it was clearly just for a TV show, but if they were being promoted as a real band and having to go on tour promoting albums credited to them, they were going to be a real band and take some responsibility for the music that was being put out in their name. With the support of Ravelson and Schneider, they started making preparations to do just that. But Don Kirshner had other ideas, and told them so in no uncertain terms. As far as he was concerned, he was concerned, he was,

earned, there were a bunch of ungrateful, spoiled kids who were very happy cashing the ridiculously large cheques they were getting, but now wanted to kill the goose that laid the golden egg. They were going to keep doing what they were told. Things came to a head in a business meeting in January 1967, when Nesmith gave an ultimatum. Either the group got to start playing on their own records, or he was quitting. Herb Merliss, Kerseners, lawyer, told Nesmith that he should read his contract more carefully, At which point Nesmith got up, punched a hole in the wall of the hotel suite they were in, and told Merliss that could have been your face.

So as 1967 began, the group were at a turning point. Would they be able to cut the puppet strings, or would they have to keep living a lie? We'll find out in a few weeks' time. A history of rock music and 500 songs is brought to you by The Generosity, of my backers on Patreon. Each week, Patreon backers will get a 10-minute bonus podcast. This week's is on.

These boots were made for walking by Nancy Sinatra. Visit patreon.com slash Andrew Hickey to sign up for as little as a dollar a month. A book based on the first 50 episodes of the podcast, from Savoy Swingers to Clock Rockers, is now a visual.

available. Search Andrew Hickey 500 Songs on your favourite online bookstore or visit the links in the show notes. This podcast is written and narrated by me, Andrew Hickey, and produced by me and Tilt Ariser. Visit 500Songs.com. That's 5000-the-numbersongs.com. To read 300-0-thenumbers.com. To read transcripts and liner notes, and get links to hear the full versions of songs excerpted here. If you've enjoyed the show and feel it's worth reviewing, please do leave a review wherever you get your podcasts. But more importantly, tell just one person that you liked this podcast. Word of mouth, more than any other form of promotion, is how creative works get noticed and

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