A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs - Episode 162: “Daydream Believer” by the Monkees

Episode Date: January 31, 2023

Episode 162 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Daydream Believer”, and the later career of the Monkees, and how four Pinocchios became real boys. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a twenty-minute bonus episode available, on “Born to be Wild” by Steppenwolf. 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 Andreake. Episode 162 Daydream Believer By the Monkeys When we left the Monkeys, they were in a state of flux. To recap what we covered in that episode, the monkeys were originally cast as actors in a TV show and consisted of two actors with some singing ability.

former child stars Davy Jones and Mickey Dolans, and two musicians who were also competent comic actors, Michael Nesmith and Peter Talk. The show was about a fictional band whose characters shared names with their actors, and there had quickly been two big hit singles and two hit albums taken from the music recorded for the TV show's soundtrack. But this had caused problems for the actors. The records were being promoted as being by the fictional group in the TV series. blurring the line between the TV show and reality, though in fact for the most part they were being made by session musicians, with only Dolans or Jones adding lead vocals to pre-recorded backing tracks.

Dolans and Jones were fine with this, but Nesmith, who had been allowed to write and produce a few album tracks himself, wanted more creative input, and more importantly felt that he was being asked to be complicit in fraud, because the records credited the four monkeys as the musicians when, other than a tiny bit of inaudible rhythm guitar by talk, on a couple of Nesmith's tracks, none of them played on them.

Talk, meanwhile, believed he had been promised that the group would be an actual group, that they would all be playing on the records together, and felt hurt and annoyed that this wasn't the case. They were by now playing live together to promote the series and the records, with Dolans turning out to be a perfectly competent drummer, so surely they could do the same in the studio. So in January 1967, things came to a head.

It's actually quite difficult to sort out exactly what happened, because of conflicting recollections and opinions. What follows is my best attempt to harmonise the different versions of the story into one coherent narrative, but be aware that I could be wrong in some of the details. Nezreth and Talk, who disliked each other in most respect, were both agreed that this couldn't continue and that if there were going to be Monkeys' records released at all,

they were going to have the monkeys playing on them. Dolans, who seems to have been the one member of the group that everyone could get along with, didn't really care, but went along with them for the sake of group harmony. And Bob Raifelson and Birch Schneider, the production team behind the series, also took Nesbeth and Talk's side

through a general love of mischief. But on the other side was Don Kirshner, the music publisher who was in charge of supervising the music for the TV show. Kirchner was adamantly, angrily, opposed to the very idea of the group members having any input at all into how the records were made. He considered that they should be grateful for the huge paychecks they were getting from records his staff writers and producers were making for them, and stopped whinging. And Davy Jones was somewhere in the middle.

He wanted to support his co-stars, who he genuinely liked, but also he was a working actor. He'd had other roles before, he'd have other roles afterwards, and as a working actor you'd do what you're told if you don't want to lose the job you've got. Jones had grown up in very severe poverty, and had been his family's breadwinner from his early teens, and artistic integrity is all very nice, but not as nice as a check for a quarter of a million dollars,

although that might be slightly unfair. It might be fairer to say that artistic integrity has a different meaning to someone like Jones, coming from musical theatre and the tradition of the show must go on, than it does to people like Nesmith and Talk, who had come up through the folk clubs. Jones's attitude may also have been affected by the fact that his character in the TV show didn't play an instrument

other than the occasional tambourine or moraccas. The other three were having to mime instrumental parts they hadn't played and to reproduce them on stage, but Jones didn't have that particular disadvantage. Birch Schneider, one of the TV, shows producers, encouraged the group to go into the recording studio themselves, with a producer of their choice, and cut a couple of tracks to prove what they could do. Michael Nesmith, who at this point was the one who was most adamant about taking control of the music, chose Chip Douglas

to produce. Douglas was someone that Nesmith had known a little while, as they'd both played the folk circuit, in Douglas's case as a member of the modern folk quartet, but Douglas had recently joined the Turtles as their new bass player. At this point, Douglas had never officially produced a record, but he was a gifted arranger and had just arranged the Turtle's latest single, which had just been released and was starting to climb the charts. Douglas quit the Turtles to win. Douglas quit the Turtles to work with the monkeys, and took the group into the studio to cut two demo backing tracks for a potential single as a proof of concept. These initial sessions didn't have any vocals,

but featured Nesmith on guitar, talk on piano, Dolan's on drums, Jones on tambourine, and an unknown bass player, possibly Douglas himself, possibly Nesmith's friend John London, who he'd played within Mike and John and Bill. They cut rough tracks of two songs, All of your toys by another friend of Nesmith's, Bill Martin, and Nesmith's, the girl I knew somewhere. Those tracks were very rough and ready. They were garage band tracks rather than the professional studio recordings at the Candy Store Profits,

or Jeff Barry's New York session players, had provided for the previous singles, but they were competent in the studio thanks largely to Chip Douglas's steadying influence. As Douglas later said, they could hardly play. Mike could play adequate. rhythm guitar. Pete could play piano but he'd make mistakes, and Mickey's time on drums was

erratic. He'd speed up or slow down. But the takes they managed to get down showed that they could do it. Ravelson and Schneider agreed with them that the monkeys could make a single together and start recording at least some of their own tracks. So the group went back into the studio with Douglas producing and with Lester Sil from the music publishers there to supervise, and cut finished versions of the two songs. This time the line-up was Nesmith on guitar, talk on electric harpsichord, talk had always been a fan of bark,

and would in later years perform bark pieces as his solo spot in Monkees shows, Dolan's on drums, London on bass, and Jones on tambourine. But while this was happening, Kirchner had been trying to get new Monkeys material recorded without them. He'd not yet agreed to having the group play on their own record.

Three days after the sessions for all of your toys and The Girl I Knew Somewhere, sessions started in New York for an entire album's worth of new material, produced by Jeff Barry and Denny Randell, and largely made by the same Red Bird Records team, who had made I'm a believer. The same musicians who in various combinations had played on everything from Sherry by the Four Seasons to Like a Rolling Stone by Dylan,

to leader of the pack, and with songs by Neil Diamond, Jeff Barry and Ali Greenwich, Libre and Stoller, and the rest of the team of songwriters around Redbird. But at this point, came the meeting we talked about towards the end of the last train to Clarksville episode,

in which Nesmith punched a hole in a hotel wall, in frustration as what he saw as Kirchner's obstinacy. Kirshner didn't want to listen to the recordings the group had made. He'd promised Jeff Barry and Neil Diamond that if I'm a believer went to number one, Barry would get to produce, and Diamond Wright, the group's next single.

Chip Douglas wasn't a recognised producer, and he'd made this commitment, but the group needed a new single out. A compromise was offered of sorts by Kirchner. How about if Barry flew over from New York to L. 8 to produce the group, they'd scrap the tracks both the group and Barry had recorded, and Barry would produce new tracks for the songs he'd recorded with the group playing on them.

But that wouldn't work either. The group members were all due to go on holiday, three of them were going to make staggered trips to the UK, partly to promote the TV series, which was just starting over here, and partly just to have a break. They'd been working 60-plus hour weeks for months between the TV series, live performances, and the recording studio, and they were basically falling down tired,

which was one of the reasons for Nesmith's outburst in the meeting. They weren't accomplished enough musicians to cut tracks quickly, and they needed the break. On top of that, Nesmith and Barry had had a major falling out at the I'm a Believer session, and Nesmith considered it a matter of personal integrity that he couldn't work with a man who in his eyes had insulted his professionalism. So that was out, but there was also no way Kershner was going to let the group release a single, consisting of two songs he hadn't heard, produced by a producer with no track record.

At first, the group were insistent that all of your toys should be the A-side for their next single. But there was an actual problem with that, which they hadn't foreseen. Bill Martin, who wrote the song, was under contract to another music publisher, and the Monkees contract said they needed to only record songs published by Screen Gems. Eventually, it was Mickey Dolans who managed to cut the Gordian knot, or so everyone thought. Dolans was the one who had the least at stake of any of them. He was already secure as the voice of the hits. He had no particular desire to be an instrumentalist, but he wanted to support.

his colleagues. Dolan suggested that it would be a reasonable compromise to put out a single with one of the pre-recorded backing tracks on one side, with him or Joan singing, and with the version of The Girl I New Somewhere that the band had recorded together on the other. That way, Kirshner and the record label would get their new single without too much delay. The group would still be able to say they'd started recording their own tracks. Everyone would get some of what they wanted, so it was agreed, though there was a further stipulation. The girl I knew somewhere had Nesmith singing lead vocals, and up to that point, every monkey single had featured Dolan's on lead on both sides. As far as Kershner and the other people involved in making the release decisions were concerned, that was the way things were going to continue.

Everyone was fine with this. Nesmith, the one who was most likely to object in principle, in practice realized that having Dolan sing his song would make it more likely to be played on the radio and used in the TV show. show, and so increases royalties. A vocal session was arranged in New York for Dolans and Jones to come and cut some vocal tracks right before Dolans and Nesmith flew over to the UK, but in the meantime it had become even more urgent for the group to be seen to be doing their own recording. An in-depth article on the group in the Saturday evening post had come out, quoting Nesmith as saying, it was what Kirshner wanted to do.

Our records are not our forte. I don't care if we never sell another record. Maybe we were manufactured and put on the air strictly with a lot of hoopla. Tell the world we're synthetic because damn it we are. Tell them the monkeys a holy man-made overnight. That millions of dollars have been poured into this thing.

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. The press immediately jumped on the band and started trying to portray them as con artists exploiting their teenage friends, though as Nesmith later said, the press decided they were going to unload on us as being somehow illegitimate,

somehow false, that we were making an attempt to dupe the public, when in fact it was me that was making the attempt to maintain the integrity, so the press went into a full-scale war against us. Talk, on the other hand, while he and Nesmith were on the same side about the band making their own records, blamed Nesmith for much of the press reaction, later saying Michael blew the whistle on us.

If he had gone in there with pride and said, we are what we are and we have no reason to hang our heads in shame, it never would have happened. So as far as the group were concerned, they needed to at least go with Dolan's suggested compromise. Their personal reputations were on the line. When Dolans arrived at the session in New York, he was expecting to be asked to cut one vocal track

for the ace side of the next single, and presumably a new lead vocal throval. for the girl I knew somewhere. When he got there, though, he found that Kirchner expected him to record several vocals so that Kirshner could choose the best. That wasn't what had been agreed, and so Dolan's flat out refused to record anything at all.

Luckily for Kirshner, Jones, who was the most cooperative member of the band, was willing to sing a handful of songs intended for Dolans, as well as the ones he was meant to sing. So the tape of A Little Bit Me, a Little Bit You, the song intended for the next single, was slowed down so it would be in a suitable key for Jones instead, and he recorded the vocal for that.

Incidentally, while Jones recorded vocals for several more tracks at the session, and some would later be reused as album tracks a few years down the line, not all of the recorded tracks were used for vocals, and this later gave rise to a rumor that has been repeated as fact by almost everyone involved, though it was a misunderstanding. Kershner's next major success after the Monkeys was another made-for-TV fictional band, the Archies,

and their biggest hit was Sugar Sugar, co-written and produced by Jeff Barry. Both Kirshner and the Monkeys have always claimed that the monkeys were offered sugar-sugar and turned it down. To Kershner, the moral of the story was that since Sugar-Sugar was a massive hit, it proved his instincts right

and proved that the monkeys didn't know what would make a hit. To the monkeys, on the other hand, it showed that Kirchner wanted them to do bubblegum music that they considered ridiculous. This became such an established factoid that Dolan regularly tells a story in his live performances and includes a version of Sugar Sugar in them, rearranged as almost a torch song.

But in fact, Sugar Sugar wasn't written until long after Kirchner and the monkeys had parted ways. But one of the songs for which a backing track was recorded, but no vocals were ever completed, was Sugar Man, a song by Denny Randell and Sandy Linsa, which they would later release themselves as an unsuccessful single. Over the years, the Monkey is Not Recording Sugar Man became the Monkeys Not Recording Sugar Sugar. Meanwhile, Dolans and Nesmith had flown over to the UK to do some promotional work and relax, and Jones soon also flew over, though didn't hang out with his bandmates, preferring

to spend more time with his family. Both Dolan's and Nesmith spent a lot of time hanging out with British pop stars and were pleased to find that despite the manufactured controversy about them being a manufactured group, none of the British musicians they admired seem to care. Eric Burden, for example, was quoted in the melody maker as saying,

They make very good records, I can't understand how people get upset about them. You've got to make up your minds whether a group is a record production group or one that makes live appearances. For example, I like to hear a Phil Spector record, and I don't worry if it's the Ronnettes or I can Tina Turner. I like the Monkees' record as a grand record, no matter how people scream. So somebody made a record and they don't play. So what? Just enjoy the record.

Similarly, the Beatles were admirers of the monkeys, especially the TV show, despite being expected to have a negative opinion of them, as you can hear in this contemporary recording of Paul McCartney answering a fan's questions. The thing is that if the monkeys weren't around, there'd be no one to watch on TV. And I want to watch TV. And I want to see a nice program, and their program is better than most things on TV, you know. It's like watching you, isn't it? Well, yeah.

Well, that's nice. That's okay. I like them, you know. I really do. They're nice. But they've got so worried now because everyone says to them, you know, well, you like the Beatles. But so what? You know, that doesn't matter.

They do, you know. Yeah, they're great. They're great, you know, they're compliment. Flatsry being that, what is it? Yeah. But, you know, that's what you're doing. Both Dolans and Nesmith hung out with the Beatles quite a bit. They both visited Sergeant Pepper recording sessions,

and if you watch the film footage of the orchestral overdubs for a day in the life, Nesmith is there with all the other stars of the period. Nesmith and his wife, Phyllis, even stayed with the Lennon's for a couple of days, though Cynthia Lennon seems to have thought of the Nesmith's as annoying intruders who had been invited out of politeness and not realised they weren't wanted. That seems plausible, but at the same time,

John Lennon doesn't seem the kind of person to not make his feelings known, and Michael Nesmith's reports of the few days they stayed there seemed to describe a very memorable experience, where after some initial awkwardness he developed a bond with Lennon, particularly once he saw that Lennon was a fan of Captain Beefheart, who was a friend of Nesmith, and whose Safer's Milk album, Lennon was examining when Nesmith turned up, and his music at this point bore a lot of resemblance to the kind of thing Nesmith was doing.

Or at least, that's how Nesmith always told the story later, though Safe as Milk didn't come out until nearly six months. later. It's possible he's conflating memories from a later trip to the UK in June that year, where he also talked about how Lennon was the only person he'd really got on with on the previous trip, because he's a

compassionate person. I know he has a reputation for being caustic, but it is only a cover for the depth of his feeling. Nesmith and Lennon apparently made some experimental music together during the brief stay, with Nesmith being impressed by Lennon's Malletron, and later getting one

himself. Dolan Meanwhile, was spending more time with Paul McCartney, and with Spencer Davis of his current favourite band, the Spencer Davis Group. But even more than that, he was spending a lot of time with Samantha Just, a model and TV presenter whose job it was to play the records on top of the Popes, the most important British TV pop show, and who had released a record herself a couple of months earlier, though it hadn't been a success. The two quickly fell deeply in love, and just would become Dolans' first wife the next year. When Nesmith and Dolans arrived back in the US after their time off,

they thought the plan was still to release A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You, with The Girl I Knew Somewhere on the B-side. So Nesbeth was horrified to hear on the radio, what the announcer said were the two sides of the new Monkeys single. A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You, and She H hangs out. Another song from the Jeff Barry sessions with a Davy vocal. John Kirchner had gone ahead and picked two songs from the Jeff Barry Sessions and delivered them to RCA Records, who had put a single out in Canada.

The single was very, very quickly withdrawn, once the Monkeys and the TV producers found out, and only promo copies seem to circulate, rather than being credited to The Monkeys, both sides are credited to My Favorite Monkey Davy Jones Sings. The record had been withdrawn, but a little bit me, a little bit you, was clearly going to have to be the single. Three days after the record was released and pulled, Nesmith, Dolans and Talk were back in the studio with Chip Douglas, recording a new B-side, a new version of The Girl I New Somewhere, this time with Dolans on vocals. As Jones was still in the UK, John London added the tambourine part, as well as the bass. As Nesmith told the story

a couple of months later, Bert said, you've got to get this thing in Mickey's key for Mickey to sing it. I said, has Donny made a commitment? I don't want to go there and break my neck in order to get this thing if Donny hasn't made a commitment, and Bert refused to say anything. He said, I can't tell you anything except just go and record. What had happened was that the people at Columbia had had enough of Kirchner. As far as Ravelson and Schneider were concerned, the real problem in all this was that Kirshner had been making public statements,

taking all the credit for the monkey's success, and casting himself as the puppet master. They thought this was disrespectful to the performers, and, unstated but probably part of it, that it was disrespectful to Rayfelson and Schneider for their work putting the TV show together, and that Kirchner had allowed his eagle to take over. Things like the liner notes for more of the monkeys, which made Kirchner and his stable of writers more important than the performers, had, in the view of the people at Raybert Productions,

put the monkeys in an impossible position and forced them to push back. Schneider later said Kershner had an ego that transcended everything else. As a matter of fact the press issue was probably magnified a hundred times over because of Kershna. He wanted everybody thinking hey he's doing all this, not them.

In the end it was very self-destructive because it heightened the whole press issue and it made them feel lousy. Kershner was out of a job, first as the supervisor for the monkeys and then as the head of Columbia Screen Gems music. In his place came Lestager the Sill, the man who had got Leibbren Storer together as songwriters,

who had been Lee Hazelwood's production partner on his early records with Dwayne Eddy, and who had been the Les in Phyllez Records until Phil Specter pushed him out. Sil, unlike Kirchner, was someone who was willing to take a back seat and just be a steadying hand where needed. The reissued version of A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You, went to number two on the charts, behind something stupid by Frank and Nancy Sinatra, produced by Sil, old colleague Hazelwood. And the B-side, the girl I knew somewhere,

were also charted separately, making number 39 on the charts. The Monkeys finally had a hit that they'd written and recorded by themselves. Pinocchio had become a real boy. At the same session at which they'd recorded that track, the Monkeys had recorded another Nesmith song, Sonny Girlfriend, and that became the first song to be included on a new album, which would eventually be named Headquarters,

and on which all the guitar, keyboard, drums, percussion, banjo, pedal, steel and backing vocal parts would for the first time be performed by the monkeys themselves. They brought in horn and string players on a couple of tracks, and the bass was variously played by John London, Chip Douglas and Jerry Esther, as talk was more comfortable on keyboards and guitar than bass, but it was, in essence, a full band album. Jones got back the next day and sessions began in earnest. The first song they recorded after his return was Mr. Webster,

a Boyson Hart song that had been recorded with the Candy Store profits in 1966, but hadn't been released. This was one of three tracks on the album that were re-recordings of earlier outtakes, and it's fascinating to compare them, to see the strengths and weaknesses of both approaches. In the case of Mr. Webster, the instrumental backing on the earlier version is definitely slicker. said sorry stop

cannot attend I've flown away and taken wish you were here to help me spend But at the same time There's a sense of dynamics in the group recording That's lacking from the original Like the backing dropping out totally on the word stop

A nice touch that isn't in the original I'm only speculating But this may have been inspired by the similar emphasis on the word stop in For What It's Worth, by Talk's old friend Stephen Stills. Then came a telegram for Mr. Webster Said sorry, stop

cannot attend Is she... Headquarters was a group album in another way, though. For the first time, Talk and Dolans were bringing in songs they'd written. Nesmit, of course, had supplied songs already for the two previous albums. Jones didn't write any songs himself,

yet, though he'd start on the next album, but he was credited with the rest of the group on two joke tracks, band six, a jam on the Merry Melodies theme, Merylily We Roll Along, and Zilch, a track made up of the four band members repeating nonsense phrases. Zilch, Mr. Davalina, Mr. Bob Davalina, Mr. Davila, Mr. Davila, Mr. Bob Davila. Zilch, China Kippa calling Alameda. Zilch, never meant a furthermore, the place of defense. It is of my opinion that the people are intending. It is my opinion that the people are intending.

It is of my opinion that the piece are intended. Oddly, that track had a rather wider cultural resonance than a piece of novelty joke album, Phil, and Ormally would. It's sometimes covered live by there might be giants. Sher insists O'Ne Nashville. Mr. D'Avelina. Mr. Dabalina, Mr. Dajalena, Mr. Bob Dave Lave Ler, Zilk.

Mr. Dahlina, Mr. Dabalina, Mr. Bob Nahlina, Mr. Bob Davina, Mr. Davlina, Mr. Davallino, Mr. Bob Vita, Mr. Dabilina, Mr. Davillian, Mr. Stavolnie, Mr. Moseph dispon, Mr. Dauvillan, Mr. D posing, Mr. Dahlina, Mr. Duralina, Mr. While the rapper Del the Funky Homo Sapien had a worldwide hit in 1991 with Mr. Mr. Dobelina built around a sample of Peter Talk from the track. Nesmit contributed three songs, all of them combining Beatles-style pop music and country influences,

none more blatantly than the opening track, You Told Me, which starts off parodying the opening of Taxman before going into some furious banjo picking from Talk. Talk, meanwhile, wrote for Pete's sake with his flatmate of the time, and that became the end credits music for season two of the TV series. But while the other band members made important contributions, the track on the album that became most popular was the first song of Dolenz's to be recorded by the group. The lyrics recounted in a semi-psychedelic manner, Dolans' time in the UK, including meeting with the Beatles, who the song refers to as the Four Kings of EMI. But the first verse is all about his new girlfriend, Samantha Just.

The song was released as a single in the UK, but there was a snag. Dolans had given the song a title he'd heard on an episode of the BBC sitcom Till Death Us Due Part, which he'd found an amusing bit of British slang. Till Death was due part was written by Johnny Spate, a writer with associated London script, and was a family sitcom based around the character of Alf Garnett, an ignorant, foul-mouthed reactionary bigot who hated young people, socialists and every form of minority,

especially black people, who he would address by various slurs, I'm definitely not going to repeat here, and was permanently angry at the world and abusive to his wife. As with another great sitcom from ALS, Stepto and Sun, which normally have adapted for the US as Sanford and Sun, till Death was due part was also adapted by Lear, and became All in the Family.

But while Archie Bunker, the character based on Garnett in the US version, has some redeeming qualities because of the nature of US Network sitcom, Alf Garnett has absolutely none, and is as purely unpleasant and unsympathetic a character as has ever been created, which sadly didn't stop a section of the audience from taking him as a character to be emulated. A big part of the show's dynamic was the relationship between Garnet and his socialist son-in-law from Liverpool, played by Anthony Booth, himself a Liverpoolian socialist, who would later have a similarly contentious relationship with his own decidedly non-socialist son-in-law, the future Prime Minister Tony Blair.

Garnet was as close to foul-mow as was possible on Vintage TV at the time, with Spate regularly negotiating with the BBC bosses to be allowed to use terms that were not otherwise heard on TV and used various offensive terms about his family including referring to his son-in-law as a Randy Scouse git. Dolans had heard the phrase on TV,

had no idea what it meant but loved the sound of it and gave the song that title. But when the record came out in the UK he was baffled to be told that the phrase which he picked up from a BBC TV show after all couldn't be said normally on BBC broadcasts, so they would need to retitle the track. The translation into American English that Dolan's uses in his live shows to explain this to Americans is to say that Randy Scouse Git means horny Liverpooly and puts, and that's more or less right.

Dolans took the need for an alternative title literally, and so the track that went to number two in the UK charts was titled Alternate Title. The album itself went to number one in both the US and the UK. though it was pushed off the top spot almost straight away by the release of Sergeant Pepper. As sessions for headquarters were finishing up, the group were already starting to think about their next album. Season 2 of the TV show was now in production, and they'd need to keep generating yet more musical material for it. One person they turned to was a friend of Chip Douglas.

Before the Turtles, Douglas had been in the modern folk quartet, and they'd recorded This Could Be the Night, which had been written for them by Harry Nelson. Nilsson had just started recording his first solo album, Fopper, at RCA Studios, the same studios that the Monkeys were using. At this point, Nelson still had a full-time job in a bank, working a night shift there while working on his album during the day. But Douglas knew that Nelson was a major talent,

and that assessment was soon shared by the group when Nelson came into demo nine of his songs for them. According to 44, the father walked right out the door, and in 45 the mom and son were still alive. But who could tell in 46 if the two were to survive? Well, the years were passing quickly, but not fast enough for him. So he closed his eyes till 55, then he opened them up again. And when he looked around, he saw a clown.

According to Nilsson, Nesmith said after that demo session, You just sat down there and blew our minds. We've been looking for songs and you just sat down and played an album for us. While the monkeys would attempt a few of Nilsson's songs over the next year or so, the first one they chose to complete was the first track recorded for their next album. Pice's Aquarius, Capricorn and Jones Limited, a song which, from the talk back at the beginning of the demo, was always intended for Davy Jones to sing.

La La La La You're not the only cuddly toy That was ever enjoyed By any boy You're not the only Choo-Choo-Train That was left out in the ring The day after Santa King

Oddly, given his romantic idol persona A lot of the songs given to Jones to sing were anti-romantic And often had a cynical and misogynistic edge. This had started with the first albums I Want to Be Free but by Pisces it had gone to ridiculous extremes. Of the four songs Jones sings on the album,

Hard to believe, the first song proper that he ever co-wrote, is a straightforward love song, but the other three have a nasty edge to them. A remade version of Jeff Barry's She Hangs Out is about an underage girl, starts with the lines, How old you say your sister was, you know you'd better keep an eye on her,

and contains lines like, she could teach you a thing or two, and you'd better get down here on the double before she gets her pretty little self in trouble. She's so fine. Goffin and King's star collector is worse, a song about a groupie with lines like, How can I love her if I just don't respect her,

and it won't take much time before I get her off my mind. But, as is so often the way, these rather nasty messages were wrapped up in some incredibly catchy music, and that was even more the case with cuddly toy. a song which at least is more overtly unpleasant. It's very obvious that Nelson doesn't intend the protagonist of the song to be at all sympathetic, which is possibly not the case in She Hanks Out or Star Collector. But the character Jones is singing is viciously cruel here,

mocking and taunting a girl who is coaxed to have sex with him, only to scorn her as soon as he's got what he wanted. It's a great song if you like the cruelest of humour combined with the cheeriest of music, and the royalties from the song allowed Nelson to quenchon to quit. quit the job at the bank. Cuddly Toy and Chip Douglas and Bill Martin's song The Door Into Summer were recorded the same way as

headquarters, with the group playing as a group. But as recordings for the album progressed, the group fell into a new way of working, which Peter Talk later dubbed Mixed Mood. They didn't go back to having tracks cut for them by session musicians, apart from

Jones's song, hard to believe, for which the entire backing track was created by one of his co-writers overdubbing himself, but Dolans, who Torque always said was incapable of repeating a triumph, was not interested in continuing to play drums in the studio. Instead, a new hybrid monkeys would perform most of the album. Nesmith would still play the league guitar, Torque would provide the keyboards, Chip Douglas would play all the bass and add some additional guitar, and Fast Eddie Ho, the session drummer who had been a touring drummer with the modern folk quartet and the

Mama's in the Poppers, among others, were play drums on the records, with Dolans occasionally adding a bit of acoustic guitar, and this was the line-up that would perform on the hit single from Pisces. Pleasant Valley Sunday was written by Jerry Goffin and Carol King, who had written several songs for the group's first two albums,

and who had continued to provide them with more songs. As with their earlier songs for the group, King had recorded a demo. Furiously and subsequently, when presented with a Carol King demo, the group and their producers would just try to duplicate it as closely as possible, right down to King's phrasing. Bob Rayfelson has said that he would sometimes hear those demos

and wonder why King didn't just make records herself, and, without wanting to be too much of a spoiler for a few years' time, he wasn't the only one wondering that. But this time the group had other plans. In particular, they wanted to make a record with a strong guitar riff to it, Nesmith has later referenced their own last train to Clarksville and the Beatles Day Tripper has two obvious reference points for the track.

Douglas came up with a riff and taught it to Nesmith who played it on the track. The track also ended with the strongest psychedelic, or Psychogello as the group would refer to it, freak out that they'd done to this point, a wash of saturated noise. King was unhappy with the results and apparently glared at Douglas the next time they met.

This may be because of the rearrangement from her intentions but it may also be for a reason that Douglas later suspected When recording the track he hadn't been able to remember all the details of her demo and in particular he couldn't remember exactly how the middle eight went This is the version on King's demo While here's how the monkeys rendered it with slightly different lyrics I also think there's a couple of chord changes in the second verse that differ between King and the Monkeys

but I can't be sure that's not my ears deceiving me. Either way though, the track was a huge success and became one of the group's most well-known and well-loved tracks, making number three on the charts behind All You Need is Love and Like My Fair. And while it isn't Dolan's drumming on the track, the fact that it's Nesmith playing guitar and talk on the piano, and the piano part is one of the catchiest things on the record, meant that they finally had a proper major hit on which they played,

and it seems likely that Dolan's contributed some of the acoustic rhythm guitar on the track, along with Bill Chadwick, and if that's true, all three monkey instrumentalists did play on the track. Pisces is by far and away the best album the group ever made, and stands up well against anything else that came out around that time, but cracks were beginning to show in the group. In particular, the constant battle takes. get some sort of creative input, had soured Nesmith on the whole project.

Chip Douglas later said, When we were doing Pisces, Michael would come in with three songs. He knew he had three songs coming on the album. He knew that he was making a lot of money if he got his original songs on there. So he'd be real enthusiastic and cooperative and real friendly and get his three songs done. Then I'd say, Mike, can you come in and help on this one we're going to do with Mickey here? He said, no, Chip, I can't, I'm busy.

I'd say, Mike, you go. got to come in the studio. He'd say, No, Chip, I'm afraid I'm just going to have to be ornery about it, I'm not coming in. That's when I started not liking Mike so much anymore. Now, as is so often the case with the stories from this period, this appears to be inaccurate in the

details. Nesbeth is present on every track on the album, except Jones's solo, Hard to Believe, and Talk's spoken word track, Peter Percival Patterson's pet pig Porky, and indeed this is by far the album with the most Nesmith input, as he takes five lead vocals, most of them on songs he didn't write. But Douglas may well

be summing up Nesmith's attitude to the band at this point, listening to Nesmith's commentaries on episodes of the TV show. By this point he felt disengaged from everything that was going on, like his opinions weren't welcome. That said, Nesmith did still contribute what is possibly the single most innovative song the group ever did, though the innovations weren't primarily down to Nesmith. Nesmith always described the lyrics to Daily Nightly as being about the riots on sunset strip, but while they're oblique, they seem rather to be about streetwalking sex workers, though it's perhaps understandable that Nesmith would never admit as much. What made the track innovative was the use of the Moog synthesizer. We talked about Robert Mogue in the episode on

Good Vibrations. He had started out as a Theramine manufacturer, and had built the ribbon synthesizer that Mike Love played live on good vibrations, and now he was building the first commercially available, easily usable synthesizers. Previously, electronic instruments had either been things like the clavoline, a simple monophonic keyboard instrument that didn't have much tonal variation, or the RCA Mark 2, a programmable synth that could make a wide variety of sounds, but took up an entire room and was programmed with punch cards. Mogue's machines were bulky but still transportable, and they could be played in real time with the keyboard, but were still able to be modified to make a wide variety of different sounds.

While, as we've seen, there had been electronic keyboard instruments as far back as the 1930s, Moog's instruments were, for all intents and purposes, the first synthesizers as we now understand the term. The Moog was introduced in late spring, 1967, and immediately started to be used for making experimental and novelty records, like Hal Blaine's track, Lovein, which came out at the beginning of June. And the Electric Flag soundtrack album for The Trip, the drug exploitation film starring Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper, and written by Jack Nicholson we talked about last time, when Arthur Lee moved into a house used in the film. In 1967, there were a total of six albums released with a Moog on them, as well as one non-album experimental single. Four of the

albums were experimental or novelty instrumental albums of this type. Only two of them were rock albums, Strange Days by the Doors, and Pisces Aquarius Capricorn and Jones Limited by the Monkeys. The Doors album was released first, but I believe the Monke's tracks were recorded before the Doors overdupped the Moog on the tracks on their album, though some session dates are hard to pin down exactly. If that's the case, it would make the monkeys the very first band to use the Moog on an actual rock record, depending on exactly how you count the trip soundtrack. This gets back again to my old claim that there's no first anything. But that's not the only way in which Daily Nightly was innovative. All the first seven albums to feature the Moog featured one man playing the instrument.

Paul Beaver, the company's West Coast representative, who played on all the novelty records by members of the wrecking crew, and on the albums by the electric flag and the doors, and on the notorious Bird Brothers by the Birds, which came out in early 1968, and Beaver did play the Moog on one track on Pisces, Star Collector. But on daily nightly, it's Mickey Dolan's playing the Moog, making him definitely the second person ever to play a Moog on a record of any kind. Dolans indeed had bought his own Moog, widely cited as being the second one ever in private ownership. At fact I can't check, but which sounds plausible given that by 1970 less than 30 musicians own one, after seeing Beaver demonstrate the instrument at the Monterey Pop Festival.

The Monkees hadn't played Monterey, but both Dolans and Talk had attended the festival. If you watch the famous film of it, you see Dolan's and his girlfriend Samantha in the crowd a lot, while Torque introduced his friends in the Buffalo Springfield. As well as discovering the Moog there, Dolans had been astonished by something else. As Peter Talk later put it, I didn't get it. At Monterey, Jimmy followed the Who, and the Who busted up their things, and Jimmy bashed up his guitar. I said, I just saw explosions of destruction, who needs it? But Mickey got it.

He saw the genius and went for it. Dolans was astonished by Hendricks and insisted that he should be the support act on the group's summer tour. The pairing might sound odd on paper, but it made more sense at the time than it might sound. The monkeys were, by all accounts, a truly astonishing live act at this point. Frank Zapper gave them a back-handed compliment by saying they were the best-sounding band in LA before pointing out that this was because they could afford the best equipment. That was true, but it was also the case

that their TV experience gave them a different attitude to live performance than anyone else performing at the time. A handful of groups had started playing stadiums, most notably of course the Beatles, but all of these acts had come up through playing clubs and theatres and essentially just kept doing their old act with no thought as to how the larger space worked, except to put their amps through a louder PA. The monkeys, though, had started in stadiums, and had started out as mass entertainers,

and so their live show was designed from the ground up to play to those larger spaces. They had costume changes, elaborate stage sets, like oversized fake box amps that they burst out of at the start of the show, a light show and a screen on which film footage was projected. In effect, they invented stadium performances as we now know them. Nesmith later said, In terms of putting on a show, there was never any question in my mind, as far as the rock and roll era is concerned,

that we put on probably the finest rock and roll stage show ever. It was beautifully lit, beautifully costumed, beautifully produced. I mean, for Christ's sakes, it was practically a review. The monkeys were confident enough in their stage performance that at a recent show at the Hollywood Bowl that had Eich and Tina Turner as their opening act, not an act you'd want to go on after

if you were going to be less than great, and an act from very similar Chitlin circuit routes to Jimmy Hendricks. So from their perspective, it made sense. If you're going to be spectacular yourself, you have no need to appear a spectacular opening act. Hendricks was less keen. He was about the only musician in Britain

who had made disparaging remarks about the monkeys, but opening for the biggest, touring band in the world isn't an opportunity you pass up. And again, it isn't such a departure as one might imagine from the bills he was already playing. Remember that Monterey is really the moment when pop and rock started to split, the split we've been talking about for a few months now, and so the Jimmy Hendrix experience was still considered a pop band, and as such had played the normal British pop band package tours. In March and April that year, they toured on a bill with the Walker brothers, Kat Stevens, and Engelbert Humperdink,

and Hendricks had even filled in for Humperdink's sick guitarist on one occasion. Nesmith, Dolans and Talk all loved having Hendricks on tour with them, just because it gave them a chance to watch him live every night. Jones, whose musical tastes were more towards Anthony Newley, wasn't especially impressed, and they got on well on a personal level. There were reports of Hendricks jamming with Dolans and Steve Stills in hotel rooms, but there was one problem, as Dolan's often recreates in his live act. This is what it was like, Jimmy Hendricks opening for the Monkeys.

The audience response to Hendrix from the Monkeys fans was so poor that by mutual agreement he left the tour after only a handful of shows. After the summer tour, the group went back to work on the TV show and their next album, or rather four individuals went back to work. By this point, the group had drifted. apart from each other and from Douglas, talk, the one who were still keenest on the idea of the group as a group,

thought that Pisces, good as it was, felt like a Chip Douglas album, rather than a Monkees album. The four band members had all by now built up their own retinues of hangars-on collaborators, and on set for the TV show, they were now largely staying with their own friends rather than working as a group,

and that was now reflected in their studio work. From now on, rather than have a single producer working with them as a band. The four men would work as individuals, producing their own tracks, occasionally with outside help, and bringing in session musicians to work on them. Some tracks from this point on would be genuine monkeys, plural tracks, and all tracks would be credited as produced by the monkeys. But basically, the four men would from now on be making solo tracks, which would be combined into albums, though Dolans and Jones would occasionally guest on tracks by the others, especially when Nesmith came up with.

the song he thought would be more suited to their voices. Indeed, the first new recording that happened after the tour was an entire Nesmith's solo album, a collection of instrumental versions of his songs called The Witcher Train Whistle Sings, played by members of the wrecking crew and a few big band instrumentalists, arranged by Shorty Rogers.

Howl Blaine in his autobiography claimed that the album was created as a tax-fight-off for Nesmith, though Nesmith always vehemently denied it and claimed it was an artistic experiment, though not one that came off well. Released alongside Pisces, though, came one last group recorded single. The B-side, Going Down,

is a song that was credited to the group and songwriter Diane Hildebrand, though in fact it developed from a jam on someone else's song. Nesmith, Talk, Douglas and Ho, attempted to record a backing track for a version of Moes-Alison's jazz blues standard, Parchman Farm. But after here on Paisman Farm

Well I'm sitting over here on Piedman Farm Well I'm sitting over here on Piedchman Farm And I ain't never done no man no harm But after recording it They'd realize that it didn't sound that much like the original And that all it had in common with it Was a chord sequence Nesbitt suggested that rather than put it out as a cover version

They put a new melody and lyrics to it And they commissioned Hildebrand Who'd co-written songs for the group before to write them, and got Shorty Rogers to write a horn arrangement to go over their backing track. The eventual songwriting credit was split five ways between Hilderbrand and the Four Monkeys, including Davy Jones, who had no involvement with the recording,

but not including Douglas Or Ho. The lyrics Hildebrand came up with were a funny patter song about a failed suicide, taken at an extremely fast pace, which Dolenz pulls off magnificently. Sack it to me! Floating in the river with a saturated liver and I wish I could forgive her, but I do believe she meant it when she told me to forget it, and I bet you will forget it when to find me in the morning wet and drowned, and the wood gets round, I'm going down, going down, coming up for air, it's pretty stuff under there, I'd like to say I didn't care, but I forgot to leave a note, and it's so hard to stay afloat, float, and soaking, went without a load, and I knew I should have taken off my shoes, it's front page new. The A-side, another track with a rhythm track by Nesmith, Torg, Douglas, and Ho,

was a song that had been written by John Stewart of the Kingston Trio, who you may remember from the episode on San Francisco as being a former songwriting partner of John Phillips. Stewart had written the song as part of a suburbia trilogy and was not happy with the finished product. He said later, I remember going to bed thinking, All I did today was right daydream believer. Stuart used to include the song in his solo sets to no great approval and had chopped the song around to bands like We Five and Spanky and Our Gang

who had both turned it down. He was unhappy with it himself because of the chorus. Stuart was ADHD and the words Tewa, coming as they did slightly out of the expected scantium for the line, irritated him so greatly that he thought the song could never be recorded by anyone. But when Chip Douglas asked if he had any songs, he suggested that one. As it turned out, there was a line of lyric that almost got the track rejected, but it wasn't the Tua.

Stuart's original second verse went like this. There's a white night on him, but now you know how funky I can be a good time starting in RCA records objected to the line, Now you know how funky I can be, because funky, among other meanings, meant smelly. And they didn't like the idea of Davy Jones singing about being smelly. Chip Douglas phoned Stuart to time they were insisting on changing the line

and suggesting happy instead. Stewart objected vehemently. That change would reverse the entire meaning of the line, and it made no sense. And what about artistic integrity? But then, as he later said, he said, let me put it to you this way, John. If he can't sing Happy, they won't do it. And I said, happy's working real good for me now.

That's exactly what I said to him. He never regretted the decision. Stuart would essentially live off the royalties from Daydream Believer for the rest of his life, though he seemed always to be slightly ambivalent and gently mocking about the song in his own performances, often changing the lyrics slightly. The monkeys are going to the studio and cut the track, again with talk on piano, Nesmith on guitar,

Douglas on bass, and Ho on drums. Other than changing funky to happy, there were two major changes made in the studio. One seems to have been Douglas' idea. They took the bass riff from the pre-chorus to the Beach Boys, Help Me Ronder. And Douglas played that on the bass

as the pre-chorus for Daydream Believer, with Shorty Rogers later doubling it in the horn arrangement. And the other is the piano intro, which also becomes an instrumental bridge, which was apparently the invention of talk who played it. 7-8. What number is this, Chip?

7-A. Okay, no, I mean like, don't get excited, man. It's because I'm short, I know. Neat the wings of the bluebird as she sings, the 6 o'clock alarm would never rain, The track went to number one, becoming the group's third and final number one hit, and their fifth of six million sellers. It was included on the next album, The Birds, the Bees and the Monkeys,

but that piano part would be Talk's only contribution to the album. As the group members were all now writing songs and cutting their own tracks, and were also still re-recording the odd old unused song from the initial 1966 sessions, the birds, the bees and the monkeys was pulled together from a truly astonishing amount of material. The expanded triple CD version of the album, now sadly

out of print, has multiple versions of 44 different songs, ranging from simple acoustic demos to completed tracks, of which 12 were included on the final album. Talk did record several tracks during the sessions,

but he spent much of the time recording and re-recording a single song, Ladies' Baby, which eventually stretched to five different recorded versions over multiple sessions in a five-month period. He racked up huge studio bills on the track, bringing in Steve Stills and Dewey Martin of the Buffalo Springfield and Buddy Miles to try to help him capture the sound in his head. But the various takes are almost indistinguishable from one another, and so it's difficult to see what the problem was. Either way, the track wasn't finished by the time the album came out, and the album that came out was a curiously disjuncted an unsatisfying effort, a mixture of

recycled old boys and heart songs, some songs by Jones, who at this point was convinced that Broadway rock was going to be the next big thing, and writing songs that sounded like mediocre show tunes, and a handful of experimental songs written by Nesmith. You could pull together a truly great 10 or 12-track album from the masses of material they'd recorded, but the one that came out was mediocre at best, and became the first Monkees album not to make number one, though it still made number three and sold in huge numbers. It also had the group's last million selling single on it, Valerie, an old Boyce and Heart reject from 1966 that had been remade with Boyce and Heart producing and their old session

players, though the production credit was still now given to the Monkeys. Nesmith said at the time that he considered it the worst song ever written. The second season of the TV show was well underway, and despite, or possibly because of, the group being clearly stoned for much of the filming, it contains a lot of the episodes that fans of the group think of most fondly, including several episodes that break out of the formula of the show had previously established in interesting ways. Talk and Dolans were both also given the opportunity to direct episodes, and Dolans also co-wrote his episode, which ended up being the last of the series. In another sign of how the group were being given more creative control over the show,

the last three episodes of the series had guest appearances by favourite musicians of the group members who they wanted to give a little exposure to, and those guest appearances sum up the character of the band members remarkably well. Talk, for whatever reason, didn't take up this option, but the other three did. Jones brought on his friend Charlie Smalls, who would later go on to write the music for the Broadway musical The Whiz, to demonstrate to Jones the difference between Smalls' as Black Soul and Jones's White Soul. Tell me, why don't I have soul? You've known me all these years. Why don't I have soul?

You do have soul, but I have to explain it to you rhythmically. That's the only way I can really talk is in music. Your soul would emanate on the accented beats 1 and 3, where my soul emanates on the extended beats 2 and 4. And to give you a good example of that, the Beatles play hard. and Funky on one and three. Funky. Really, Ringo plays the hardest one and three I've ever heard in my life. Now if you clap four, I'll show you.

One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four, one, fuck, three, four, one. Yeah, right. That's the whole thing. It swings.

As long as it swings, it's so. Right. Now, an example of two and four would be more of a more than more. One and three is like, is white soul, right? Right. And the two and four is the Motown.

It's Motown soul, brothers, you know, I'm giving you something, it's going to five over here. It would be the Motown soul, which would be, clap again. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four.

Oh, yeah, the accent now is on the two and a four. Nesmith, on the other hand, wrote on Frank Zapper. Zappa put on Nesmith's monkey shirt and wool hat and pretended to be Nesmith, and interviewed Nesmith. with a false nose of mustache pretending to be Zappa, as they both mercilessly mocked the previous week's segment with Jones and Smolls.

You know that after I quit the show, I'm going to join the birds, don't you? No, I didn't know that. When you quit the mothers, who are you going to join? I may join the birds too. I wanted to get into a very serious area that, of course, appeals to me as Frank Zampa, sometimes thought of as creative genius, especially in the area concerning your monkeys' music, which appears to me to be banal and insipid, you know?

Do you think that our music, the monkey's music, is banal and insipid? Well, words like that are hard to read, especially side by side. Have you ever tried reading Mike and Frank? I wanted to know where the soul of your music was. Is it on the one and the seven? Or is it on the one and the five? The soul of your music is on the one and the seven, sometimes on the three and the five. The soul of our music, the monkey's music, lies somewhere in between the one.

one and a half, the two and a half, the three and three quarters, and the giant C major chord on the piano, which I'll demonstrate for you. We have wonderful music. Match cut. Here we go, we turn over and we all take our positions in front of the camera, because this is the monkeys and we're really tricky. Nesmith then conducted Zappa, as Zappa used the sledgehammer to play a car, parodying his own appearance on the Steve Allen show playing a bicycle, to the presumed bemusement of the monkey's fan base, who would not be likely to remember a one-off performance on a late-night TV show from five years earlier.

And the final thing ever to be shown on an episode of the monkeys didn't feature any of the monkeys at all. Mickey Dolan's, who directed and co-wrote that episode, about an evil wizard who was using the power of a space plant named after the group's slang for dope, to hypnotize people through the TV, chose not to interact with his guest as the others had, but simply had Tim Buckley perform a solo acoustic version of his then-unrelease song Song to the Sivan. This is Tim Buckley.

On a float on, shipless oceans, I did all my best to smile till you're singing eyes and fingers drew me loving to your eyes By the end of the second season everyone knew they didn't want to make another season of the TV show

instead they were going to do what Rayfelson and Schneider had always wanted and move into film the planning stages for the film which was initially titled Changes but later titled Head so that Rayfelson and Schneider could build their next film as from the guys

who gave you head had started the previous summer, before the sessions that produced the birds, the bees and the monkeys. To write the film, the group went off with Ravelson and Schneider for a short holiday, and took with them their mutual friend Jack Nicholson. Nicholson was at this time, not the major film star he later became, rather he was a bit part actor, who was mostly associated with American International Pictures, the ultra-low-budget film company that has come up on several occasions in this podcast. Nicholson had appeared mostly in small roles

in films like The Little Shop of Havours. Most people don't like to go to the dentist, but I rather enjoy it myself, don't you? I mean, there's a real feeling of growth, of progress when that old drill goes in. I mean, I'd almost rather go to the dentist than anywhere, wouldn't you? Yeah. No, No, Bacaine, it dulls the senses.

This is gonna hurt you more than it is me. Oh goody, goody, here it comes. He'd appeared in multiple films made by Roger Cormon, often appearing with Boris Karloff, and by Monty Hellman. But despite having been a working actor for a decade, his acting career was going nowhere, and by this point he had basically given up on the idea of being an actor, and had decided to start working behind the camera.

He'd written the scripts for a few of the low-budget films he'd appeared in, and he'd recently scripted the trip. the film we mentioned earlier. Wildest of pleasures possess you. Blow your mind. So the group, Rathelson, Schneider, and Nicholson, all went away for a weekend,

and they all got extremely stoned, took acid, and talked into a tape recorder for hours on end. Nicholson then transcribed those recordings, clean them up, and structured the worthwhile ideas into something quite remarkable. As you look for meanings,

inform as they do fact, we might tell you one thing, but we'd only take it back. Not back like in a box back, not back like in a race, not back so we can keep it, but back in time and space. You say we're manufactured,

to that we all agree. So make your choice and we'll rejoice in never being free. Hey, hey, we are the monkeys, we've said it all before. The money's in, we're made of ten, we're here to give you more. The money's in, we're made of ten,

we're here to give you. If the Monkeys TV show had been inspired by the Marks Brothers and three stoogers and by Richard Lester's directorial style, The only precursor I can find for Head is in the TV work of Lester's colleague Spank Milligan. But I don't think there's any reasonable way

in which Nicholson, or anyone else involved, could have taken inspiration from Milligan's series Q. But what they ended up with is something that resembles, more than anything else, Monty Python's Flying Circus, a TV series that wouldn't start until a year after Head came out. It's a series of ostensibly unconnected sketches linked by a kind of dream logic,

with characters wandering from one loose narrative into a totally different one, actors coming out of character on a regular basis, and no attempt at a coherent narrative. It contains regular examples of channel zapping, with excerpts from old films being spliced in, and bits of news footage juxtaposed with comedy sketches and musical performances, in ways that are sometimes thought-provoking, sometimes distasteful, and occasionally both,

as when a famous piece of footage of a Vietnamese prisoner of war being shot in the head, hard cuts to screaming girls in the audience at a monkey's concert, a performance which ends with the girls tearing apart the group, and revealing that they're really just cheap-looking plastic mannequins. The film starts and ends with the monkeys themselves attempting suicide, jumping off a bridge into the ocean. But the end reveals that in fact the ocean they're in is just water in a glass box, and they're trapped in it.

and knowing this means that when you watch the film a second time, you find that it does have a story. The monkeys are trapped in a box which in some ways represents life, the universe and one's own mind, and in other ways represents the TV and their TV careers. Each of them is trying in his own way to escape, and each ends up trapped by his own limitations, condemned to start the cycle over and over again.

The film features parodies of popular film genres like the boxing film, Davy is supposed to throw a fight with Sonny Liston at the instruction of gangsters, the Western and the War film, but huge chunks of the film take place on a film studio backlot, and characters from one segment reappear in another, often commenting negatively on the film or the band, as when Frank Zappa as a critic calls Davy Jones's soft shoe routine to a Harry Nelson song, Very White,

or when a canteen worker in the studio calls the group God's Gift to the 8-year-olds. The film is constantly deconsweree, and commenting on itself in the filmmaking process. Talk hits that canteen worker whose wig falls off revealing the actor playing her to be a man, and then it's revealed that the behind-the-scenes footage is itself scripted, as director Bob Raifelson and scriptwriter Jack Nicholson come into frame and reassure Talk, whose concern that hitting a woman would be bad for his image. They tell him they can always cut it from the finished film if it doesn't work.

while Dittie Diego, the almost rap rewriting of the monkeys theme that we heard earlier, sets out a lot of how the film asks to be interpreted and how it works narratively. The spiritual and thematic core of the film is in another song, Talk's long title, Do I Have to Do This All Over Again? Which in later solo performances, Talk would give the subtitle, The Karma Blues. Head is an extraordinary film, and when it's impossible to sum up in anything less than an hour-long episode, of its own. It's certainly not a film that's to everyone's taste, and not every aspect of it

works. It is a film that is absolutely of its time, in ways that are both good and bad. But it's one of the most inventive things ever put out by a major film studio, and it's one that rightly secured the monkeys a certain amount of cult credibility over the decades. The soundtrack album is a return to form after the disappointing birds' bees, too. Nicholson put the album together, linking the eight songs in the film with collages of dialogue and incidental music, repurposing and re-contextualizing the dialogue to create a new experience, one that people have compared with Frank Zappa's contemporaneous were only in it for the money, though while the collage elements have had are similar to what Zappa did. The songs are much more accessible,

as in the Carol King and Tony Stern song, as we go along, which features a bank of guitarists including King herself, Rikuda and Neil Young. Unfortunately, while Head is one of the great art films of the 60s and an artistic highlight of the career of everyone involved, it had one major problem. The Monkees fan base was mostly children between the ages of about 10 and 14, and while there are, of course, some exceptions. Very few 11-year-olds want to see art films influenced by the French New Wave and Eastern philosophy,

deconstructing themselves, the nature of consumer culture, the media and karma. Conversely, in 1968, very few intellectuals and artistic types were at all interested in anything from the monkeys, who they disdained as plastic, commercial and fatini-boppers, and weren't persuaded to come and see the film, even by trailers which showed the unblinking, unsmiling, black and white face of literary agents and, later sadly, associate of Jeffrey Epstein, John Brockman, looking into the camera rather than footage from the film itself.

Head made only $16,111 at the box office, on a budget of $790,000. Without promotion from the TV show, their previous single, D.W. Washburn, a song Reba installer had also given to the coasters almost simultaneously, had only made number 19. but Porpo's song, the single from Head, only made number 68, and the album made number 45. At this point, pretty much everyone washed their hands of the monkeys.

Raffleson and Schneider continued with their film career, and would go on to be among the most important filmmakers of their generation, producing films like Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces, and The Last Picture Show, and becoming the nucleus around which the movement known as New Hollywood formed. It's outside the purview of this podcast, but I would recommend anyone who hasn't read it read the book Easy Rider's Raging Bulls to see how much of the modern film industry

owes its existence directly or indirectly to Ravelson and Schneider and to the start they got with the monkeys. The group still had a contract to make a series of TV specials. They ended up only making one. 33 and a third revolutions per monkey is possibly the most despised piece of media,

that will be discussed in this series, and it's easy to see why, even though I have more time for it than most. Production on head had been problematic and caused a final rift in the band, when Dolan's, Jones and Nesmith had gone strike at the beginning of filming, saying they weren't going to work without getting screenplay credit. Tork refused to join them because he didn't believe they deserved the credit, leading to the bizarre situation of Nesmith, the Rockefeller Republican, falling out with Tork the Socialist, over a labour dispute, in which Talk was the one breaking a picket line, albeit an informal one.

The management dispute had been rectified, but this had only hastened Rayfelson and Schneider's decision to part with the group once and for all, and Talk and Nesmith were no longer on speaking terms. Rather than being produced by Rayfelson and Schneider, 33 and a third Revolutions per Monkey, was co-written and produced by Jack Good, who seemed far more interested in guest stars, Brian Orga and Julie Driscoll, than in the monkeys. We have the knowledge, evil there it be, to twist the mind to any lunacy we wish. Through this electro-thought machine,

I'll demonstrate exactly what I mean. We'll take the means of mass communication, use them for commercial exploitation, create a new four-part phenomenon, Four simple lands of talent, little or nine, and through the latest fad of rock, under all. 33 and a third is basically what you get

if you try to remake Head with the production values of a subpar primary school play and with a half-written script by someone who watched Head and didn't understand it, and who thinks the peak of music was 1957, and any movement away from 1950s rock and roll has been a terrible example of moral decadence. I find it fascinating,

but I can't say it's good, though there are good moments, like a madly featuring Fats Domino, Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis, all playing pianos once stacked on top of another, singing their classic hits. The one dissenting voice on the special

came from George Melly, a more perceptive cultural critic than most, who said in his review, quoted in his great revolt into style, What made this film worthwhile was that it demonstrated with a certain brilliance how yesterday's revolutionary can turn into today's reactionary. Good's enthusiasm is reserved for rock and roll, sexy, extrovert, good, dirty fun.

When Pop went high brow it lost him. I dare say Sergeant Pepper was his Waterloo, and he used this film to make this point with considerable panache. The monkeys were originally computerised into existence as plastic beetles, but have become not only adequate performers, but discontented with their lot. Good used this discontent as the vortex of an inventive piece of nostalgia and attack. The final sequence in which he evoked chaos with great discipline was remarkable. As it happened, Talk was so discontented with his lot

that he paid a report of $100,000 to buy out his contract and quit the monkeys right after making 33 and a third, which was put up against the Oscars as the network realized nobody was. would be interested in watching it. The rest of the group continued as a three-piece and recorded two more albums together, Instant Replay and The Monkeys Present. Those albums had some fine music,

but nobody was listening. Possibly the most interesting track is one on instant replay. You and I, a song Jones co-wrote with Bill Chadwick, which is the howl of anger of a teen idol who's been cast aside, with some scorching guitar from Neil Young, recorded just before Young started recording in this style on his own records. After The Monkeys present, Nesmith bought his contract out too,

and the final album released us by the Monkeys before they split for good, Changes, was largely a collection of tracks Jeff Barry and Andy Kim had produced for a rejected Andy Kim album, onto which Dolans and Jones overdub vocals. Talk tried to start a band with his girlfriend and Lowell George, who had briefly been a member of the Mothers of Inmate. invention and would go on to form little feet. Talk tried to submit a song to the soundtrack of Raffleson and Schneider's next film, but it was summarily rejected, though he would go on to record it as a solo artist decades later.

The song they chose instead, incidentally, worked a little better in the film, which finally brought Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper and Jack Nicholson to stardom. Torque quit music and became a teacher for a while, though over the next 15 years or so he would make occasional ventures back into the music industry. But any chance he had of rebuilding his career was derailed by drug and alcohol dependency. Dolans and Jones meanwhile started up solo careers, though unsuccessfully. Jones did make a famous appearance on the Brady Bunch singing his solo track, Girl, while Dolans made several quite decent singles, but neither made a dent,

and Dolan spent much of the early 70s going out and partying with a group of rock star friends nicknamed a Hollywood vampire, a loose group of people including Harry Nelson, John Lennon, Vingo Starr, Keith Moon and Alice Cooper. In the mid-70s there was talk of a monkeys reunion, for when Nesmith wasn't interested, Dolanson Jones instead teamed up with Boyce and Hart, who had had a few hits as performers themselves after stopping work with the monkeys, and formed Dolan's Jones Boys in Heart, who toured as

The Great Golden Hits of the Monkeys Show, the guys who wrote him and the guys who sang him, and recorded an album of new material, which flopped. After that group split up, Dolans and Jones performed in a stage musical in London, based on the album, The Point, by their old friend Harry Nelson.

But the two fell out during the production and didn't speak to each other for a decade. Jones went on the Nussain. nostalgia circuit, while Dolan stayed in the UK and became a TV director, directing children's shows like Metal Mickey and From the Top, the latter of which starred Bill Oddy, whose own comedy series The Goodies, owed more than a little to the monkeys. The reason they started talking to each other again actually had to do with their old bandmate Nesmith. Nesmith, unlike the others, had something of a successful career outside the Monkeys. After quitting the group, he formed

the first national band, who are now regarded as one of the great pioneers of country rock, and he had some minor hits with them, like Joanne. With a look that spoke to me of her sweet love. His early 70s, records didn't sell in huge numbers, but they got a great deal of critical respect and stand up very well to this day. He also, though, formed a company called Pacific Arts and got into the home video distribution business, becoming one of the major players in the business in the 80s, though the company got stuck in various lawsuits by the 90s. Part of the success of Pacific Arts was down to Nesbeth inheriting a fortune from his mother in 1980, which allowed him to branch

out into film production, producing cult films like Repo Man and Tapeheads. But even before that, he'd been interested in the possibilities of music video, especially when he made a video for his late 70s single Rio and had a surprise hit with it as a result. Nesmith got very involved in music video production, putting together his own video special, Elephant Parts, which won the first Grammy for music videos, and his company would also, to produce videos for Lionel Ritchie and Michael Jackson, and he created a TV series called Pop Clips, which just featured music videos hosted by a video jockey, or VJ.

Pop Clips was shown on Nickelodeon, and Nickelodeon's parent company, Warner's, decided to start an entire cable channel inspired by the format, which became MTV. And given the lack of music videos available at the time, MTV started showing old episodes of the monkeys, The group got a new fan base and reformed, without Nesmith, who was busy running his companies, and even had one last hit, though it was released as by Mickey Dolan's and Beat to Talk of the Monkeys, as the musicians didn't own the trademark on the name, and could only license it for touring at the time. Dolan's Talk and Jones toured off and on for the next 15 years, and put out a new Monkees album, Poole It, in 1987.

They even briefly reunited with Nesmith for the group's 30th anniversary, doing a short tour together, making a TV special written and directed by Nesmith, and recording a final album as a four-piece, Just Us, which, as the title suggests, is the only Monkees album to be entirely made by the four members, who wrote every song and played every instrument without any outside assistance at all. Talk quit again in 2001, and the remaining duo split up soon after, but they reformed in 2011 for a 45th anniversary tour where they gave some of the greatest performances of their career,

performing sets that included the whole head album and which featured talk playing keyboards, banjo, guitar, and French horn. When Davy Jones died suddenly in 2012, it seemed like it might be the end of the monkeys, but then rather remarkably, Michael Nesmith decided to rejoin the band, and the group toured as a trio for a few years. Both Nesmith and Tork started having health problems, though, and also seemed to have not got on with each other. And so in 2015 and 2016, Tork and Dolans toured us the monkeys without Nesmith.

Nesmith did, though, contribute to the group's final studio album proper, 2016's Good Times, an astonishing return to form produced by Adam Schlesinger of Fountains of Wayne, which feature completed versions of songs they'd left unfinished in the 60s, plus new songs written for them by writers they'd influenced, like Schlesinger, Andy Partridge of XTC, Ben Gibbard of Death Cab for Cutie, and this one by Noel Gallagher and Paul Weller. It was a great final album, though sadly they spoiled it somewhat by later releasing a Christmas album put together by the same team. But by that point, both Nesmith and Tork were clearly struggling with their health, and the music suffered as a result,

with most of it just being Dolan's performing solo. In 2017 Talk became too ill to tour and Nesmith joined Dolans in his place for a tour in 2018 as The Monkeys Present The Mike and Mickey show Talk died of cancer in 2019

and Nesmith and Dolans toured as the Monkeys in 2019 and 2021 and released a live album as a duo I need help on for Tell me I can live

without her Nesmith was himself having health problems though Not helped by the fact that he was raised a Christian scientist And so didn't like going to see doctors Even when in serious pain Though he did eventually relent and have a quadruple bypass in 2018 The Monkeys played their final show on November the 14th 2021 And Nesmith was clearly extremely unwell on the final tour

He died less than a month later finally bringing the monkeys to an end, though Dolan's now tours with his solo show, paying tribute to his former colleagues. The monkeys were the first manufactured pop band of the rock era, and they have often been despised for that reason. But when you look at their work in its own right, and at their own lives and history,

you find a group of people who consistently chose to try new and different things, and who, whatever their origins, ended up making some remarkable records, and a film which is one of the great 60s psychedelic masterpieces. There were four very different individuals who were in many ways totally incompatible and who had never have come together organically, but precisely because of that

they had a catalogue that spans more genres than any of their contemporaries I can think of, and does most of them remarkably well. There will still, I know, be a portion of the audience for this episode who don't understand why I've spent so much time on a band they consider worthy of contempt. To them, all I can do is suggest that you do as the song says and listen to the band.

Weren't they good? They made me happy. 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. Born to Be Wild by Stepan Wolf. Visit patreon.com slash

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