Monkee business is happening
When the TV series “The Monkees” premiered on Sept. 12, 1966, by all rights it should have been nothing more than a effervescent bubble on the face of pop culture — something to be enjoyed now, because surely it would burst and quickly vanish.
Half a century later, many key players in that strictly-of-themoment enterprise are as amazed as anyone that the Monkees, once derisively nicknamed “The PreFab Four,” live on in 2016.
On May 27, the first Monkees album with new material in 20 years will be released by Rhino Records. Called “Good Times!,” the album bridges the group’s five-decade lifespan with newly completed tracks from the Monkees’ original heyday along with songs recently written and recorded expressly for the 50th anniversary.
Two of the group’s three surviving members — Micky Dolenz and Peter Tork — launched a still-expanding world tour last week in Fort Myers, Fla.
“It’s stunning to be part of a project that 50 years later is having a significant resurgence,” Tork, 74, recently said from his home in Connecticut.
“I don’t know how significant it will turn out to be, but it’s certainly the biggest tour we’ve been on in the last 10 years, including the times Davy ( Jones) was still with us.”
Although Jones died in 2012 at age 66 of coronary artery disease, he is represented on the new album in “Love to Love,” a song written by Neil Diamond. Period recordings from 1966 and ’67 were recently updated with “a little color here and there,” Tork said.
In a demonstration of the Monkees’ influence on subsequent generations, the album also includes songs written for them by a number of modern rock favorites, including Weezer’s Rivers Cuomo, Oasis’ Noel Gallagher, Death Cab for Cutie’s Benjamin Gibbard and the album’s producer, Fountains of Wayne bassist-songwriter Adam Schlesinger.
“Everyone knows at this point that the Monkees had some of the greatest songwriters in the world writing for them,” said Schlesinger, 48, who was born the year the TV show began its second and final season. “Personally, it’s an honor to be on that list.
The then-and-now idea for the new album came from conversations between Dolenz and their manager and tour producer of recent years, Andrew Sandoval.
Having looked together through unfinished material in the vaults — “not a few, but literally dozens of tracks,” Sandoval said — they chose several they thought represented the best unreleased songs to finish.
When Schlesinger came aboard to produce, “fortunately he pretty much agreed with the ones we liked.”
For all the fun the participants had working on the new album (“It was a blast,” Schlesinger said, “probably the most fun I’ve ever had making a record”), Dolenz, 71, conceded to being emotionally overwhelmed while working on the title track, which was written by Harry Nilsson, the songwriter whose own career was launched by the Monkees’ decision to record his song “Cuddly Toy.”
Working on a newly created duet that includes the voice of his friend, who died at age 52 in 1994, “I had to stop and take a break a couple of times,” said Dolenz at a West Los Angeles television studio where he’d just taped a morning show appearance. “Hearing his voice in the headphones and singing with him all these years later, it really got to me.”
The new version is built on the original demo recording that Nilsson made in 1967.
Later, he and Dolenz became particularly close, and were notorious Hollywood partygoers. In the 2010 documentary “Who Is Harry Nilsson (And Why is Everybody Talkin’ About Him)?,” Dolenz recalls Nilsson showing up at his house, inviting him to lunch, “and three days later I’d wake up and we would be in some massage parlor in Phoenix.”
To further commemorate the band’s anniversary, a newly remastered edition of the Monkees’ two-season prime-time run will be released on Blu-ray in June. A 50th-anniversary album blends new and old