The birth of plastic pop
The Monkees were thrown together as one of pop’s first manufactured bands. But a half-century later, finds Michael Idato, they have forged deep relationships.
In contemporary pop culture the idea of a television show giving birth to a pop band is as everyday as the hordes squeezed out of the reality TV toothpaste tube and onto the charts. But in 1966, when The Monkees were created, such a notion was antithetical to the heart – and the art – of real music.
Five decades later the band’s three surviving members are releasing their first album of new material in almost 20 years and The Monkees, four mop-haired louts manufactured in a Hollywood boardroom, remain one of the most successful bands of all time.
In their heyday, at the giddy height of 1960s’ ‘‘Monkeemania’’, they sold more records than The Beatles and The Rolling Stones combined. In total they have sold more than 75 million records worldwide.
But to properly understand them, the band’s 71-year-old drummer Micky Dolenz explains, you must stop thinking of them as a band. Instead, he says, you have to return to the moment of their conception: as a television programme.
‘‘If you can get your head around that idea everything else becomes much easier to get,’’ Dolenz says. ‘‘Then, you’re talking about the cast of something like Star Trek, when you are tied to people not by choice.’’
Unlike classic super groups such as The Beatles or The Beach Boys, which evolved naturally out of shared experience, Dolenz says, The Monkees met – for all intents and purposes – on a sound stage at the Columbia/Sunset Gower Studios in Hollywood, at what might as well have been 9am on a Monday.
The band was formed by Bert Schneider, the son of the chairman of Columbia Pictures, and Bob Rafelson, a pair of rising star producers in Hollywood who would become, in effect, the Simon Cowell and Simon Fuller of their day. Their four Monkees were a Manchester-born lad, Davy Jones, and three American boys, Micky Dolenz, Michael Nesmith and Peter Tork. Jones was recruited off the Broadway stage; the other three were found after advertising in an LA trade newspaper offering auditions to ‘‘four insane boys, age 17-21’’ for roles in a new TV series.
The series was simple: four young boys in a band and sharing a house in Los Angeles hoping to break into the music world.
Though it lasted only two seasons – totalling 58 half-hour episodes – the TV Monkees never actually got their break. The reallife band, however, would enjoy a rare pop immortality. All four members remained with the group until 1971, when they disbanded. There was a crackle of life in the mid-1970s when a compilation album briefly charted. And then, in 1986, when the series was screened by MTV, ‘‘Monkeemania’’ was properly reignited.
Through the ensuing years, the fragile, uncertain friendship of four strangers who met late in 1965 has endured. ‘‘The relationships evolved in different ways,’’ Dolenz says, reclining in a chair in the quiet, overgrown back garden of his Los Angeles home. ‘‘At times I would hang out with Mike, he would hang out with David, David would hang out with Peter, and so on.’’
But the friendship between Dolenz and Jones became closer, in part because they both married and had children around the same time. ‘‘We had a similar lifestyle,’’ Dolenz reflects.
As the television show soared in popularity, the cast were trucked around the country performing live. And because of the band’s life on television, they had a library of 35mm film footage, which was used prominently at their concerts.
‘‘Nobody else had the footage, we brought the projectors, we brought the freakin’ movie screen, nobody had ever done that,’’ Dolenz recalls. ‘‘It was always very visual. And now, in the current shows, we have Davy up there singing. On this next tour I am hoping to do a duet with Davy because now, with technology, of course you can. [But] I don’t think we’re going to go quite as far as having a 3D laser Michael Jackson.’’
Before the end of the 1960s, they had completed two tours of North America, a tour of Britain and a tour of the Pacific, which
brought them to Australia in 1968. Aside from his beloved Akubra hat, which has stayed with him since, Dolenz’s memories of that tour are a blur. ‘‘You’re in the eye of a hurricane,’’ he says. ‘‘You’re being concerted, and wrangled and shepherded.’’
But perhaps the most peculiar measure of the band’s success was that at the giddy heights of ‘‘Monkeemania’’, Jimi Hendrix – then an unknown – was their opening act.
‘‘[Jimi] was a lovely kid. He was pretty quiet, and naive, just sort of gentle, you know.’’
As the music began to matter more to the band than TV fame, the four members of The Monkees had to fight to reclaim their musical birthright. ‘‘Mike used to say, it’s like Pinocchio became a real little boy. We went on the road, just the four of us and raw. At that point we said, we can do this. We had a palace revolt, we got the right to do the music, to control it.’’
The Monkees sat awkwardly on a cultural fault line between the counterculture and the corporate monolith that had brought them into being. Music in the 1960s was properly political, a reaction to the social upheaval of the era, and The Monkees seemed, at first glance, to be the antithesis of that. And yet, buried somewhere in the lyrics, sat a small note of protest. ‘‘We’re just tryin’ to be friendly, come and watch us sing and play,’’ go the lyrics to the television series’ theme. ‘‘We’re the young generation, and we’ve got something to say.’’
Indeed, The Monkees would come to be considered so antiestablishment that they even had their own FBI file. When I bring this up, it’s news to Dolenz. ‘‘I didn’t even know that,’’ he says, genuinely surprised. It was released, I inform him, several years ago among a slab of declassified FBI material. In it, the FBI observer sent to spy on their concert notes that, ‘‘during the concert subliminal messages were depicted on the screen which ... constituted left wing innovations of a political nature’’.
Even when the series was pitched to the US network NBC, it was cautious about it, Dolenz recalls. ‘‘The only time you saw young 20, 22-year-old kids on television at the time, they were being arrested for something, either something political, something social or some kind of protest,’’ Dolenz says. ‘‘If you look back it still surprises me, how the hell the show even got on the air. We had heavy censorship in the records and on the television show.’’
At the age of 71, Dolenz still looks remarkably like his younger self. Perhaps somewhere here, in LA’s quiet, secluded Bell Canyon, with grassy hills in the shadow of sweeping canyon ridges, there is a fountain of youth. This is where Dolenz lives a relatively simple life with third wife Donna Quinter and the youngest of his four daughters, Georgia, who still lives at home. It’s an oasis, of a sort, seemingly a world away from LA’s trademark chaos. Though he says he has nothing to compare it to, he agrees being the father of four daughters has given him a specific perspective on the world. ‘‘I would like to think there’s a real internal respect for women, I’ve tried to give them the best advice I can as a man, I’ve tried to be a good father,’’ he says.
He pauses, and for a moment is lost in his own thoughts. ‘‘You know, you never stop being a father,’’ he says. ‘‘You do stop being a parent, but a father, or mother ... you always are a father or mother. How it’s changed my life, or how it’s affected my life? I don’t know. Sometimes they’ve been very, very honest with me in saying, daddy, you’re embarrassing me. When I like run around with a lampshade on my head or something like that.’’
Family matters to Dolenz. It perhaps explains why the defining characteristic of The Monkees is not that, at different times, they went their separate ways but that, for the most part, they have remained together.
‘‘There’s been times when it’s been tense [but] it’s usually always been creative differences ... this song, that instrument, this thing, that tour,’’ Dolenz says. ‘‘It’s never been anything that bad.’’ In February 2012, the four became three, when Jones died from a heart attack. ‘‘You miss him as a sibling, a family member, and of course you go through all the other stuff like your own mortality,’’ Dolenz says. The three surviving band members decided not to replace Jones with another singer. ‘‘He could never be replaced,’’ Dolenz says.
And yet, Jones lives on in the band’s new album, Good Times, the first Monkees album with new material in almost two decades. It delves deeply into the band’s vault, and draws out an unreleased song Love To Love, written by Neil Diamond and performed by Jones. Another track, written by legendary songwriter Harry Nilsson, was recorded at a session in 1968 but production was never completed.
Having Jones’ voice on the album, Dolenz adds, was a necessary personal touch. Why? ‘‘Because we can,’’ he says simply. ‘‘Davy’s kids and ex-wife, they’re thrilled, are you kidding?’’
The year 2016 also marks the 50th anniversary of the launch of The Monkees. But the anniversary doesn’t mean that much to Dolenz. Not that he’s unsentimental, but he gently takes us back to the reality that he’s not the mop-haired boy you met on The Monkees, but merely an actor, cast in the part, and still playing it five decades later.
‘‘I’ve been in the business for 65 years,’’ Dolenz says. ‘‘And after The Monkees, I did not continue to try to be a Monkee. When we went on that first reunion tour, I went back wide-eyed, bushytailed. I couldn’t remember the lyrics of the songs. For the fans, for the public, it’s never gone away. For me, I, dipped in, dipped out, dipped in, dipped out.’’
That disconnection, he observes, is the reason he’s still sane.
‘‘You hear stories about people trying to reinvent themselves, people that get on stage and will not sing their hit or if they do, it’s very begrudgingly,’’ he says.
‘‘I understand this contract that you have with an audience and I always have. I remember thinking, before 1986 and the first reunion, if I am ever asked to go back and sing those songs, goddammit, I’m going to give them what they want,’’ he adds. ‘‘I’m going to make sure that I fulfil that contract.’’
‘We brought the projectors, we brought the freakin’ movie screen, nobody had ever done that.’ Micky Dolenz, on The Monkees concerts in which TV show footage was used.
Good Times is out now.