Movie that killed off the Monkees

Following the death of The Monkee’s lead singer Davy Jones, Henry Fitzherbert examines how the career of the band was ended by a young writer-producer named Jack Nicholson and a psychadelic film called Head

TELEVSION made The Monkees and the movies fi nished them off thanks to their bizarre, ill-judged, fi lm debut, Head, released in 1968. Co-written and co-produced by a then unknown Jack Nicholson, the psychedelic picture destroyed the carefully cultivated image of the fresh-faced band and mocked their origins as a manufactured group.

It was an experience that still rankled with British-born lead singer Davy Jones up until his untimely death last week of a heart attack at his Florida home, aged 66. “We were pawns in something we helped create but had no control over,” he said last year.

A more inappropriate celluloid vehicle for the band is hard to imagine however much the trippy, disjointed picture has its admirers today (Quentin Tarantino and Shaun Of The Dead director Edgar Wright are fans).

A series of vignettes set within different celluloid genres (a western, a war movie, a mystery) its raison d’être was to deconstruct the band’s image through a stream-of-consciousness-style exploration of free will.

The four band members lead singer Jones, bassist Peter Tork, drummer Micky Dolenz and guitarist Mike Nesmith try to prove they are masters of their own destiny but are constantly thwarted with evidence that their every move and utterance is scripted in advance; right up to the bleak ending where they attempt suicide by jumping off a bridge, only to learn that this too was scripted.

The final scene sees the film’s laughing director Bob Rafelson haul the drenched cast away trapped in a huge aquarium, gasping for breath. The aquarium is deposited in a movie studio warehouse, merely a prop to be used again. Artifice triumphs. The director is the one having the last laugh, the frustrated musicians merely his pawns.

As a metaphor for the entire project the image could not be more apt: it was Rafelson who had masterminded the genesis of The Monkees on television and now Rafelson who was seemingly destroying them for the furtherance of his and co-conspirator Nicholson’s own ambitions in the movie business.

Released in November 1968 (after the TV series had been cancelled) the picture was a critical and commercial flop, alienating The Monkees’ huge fan base by demolishing the group’s carefully cultivated public image, while failing to attract older audiences.

“Most of our fans couldn’t get in because there was an age restriction and the intelligentsia wouldn’t go to see it anyway because they hated the Monkees,” recalled Dolenz.

Plans for further movies starring The Monkees were put on ice while the group’s popularity as musicians plummeted. The film’s soundtrack album only reached number 45 in the US charts, the first of the Monkees’s LPS to not reach the Top 5, while the album’s signature single, Porpoise Song, failed to crack the Top 40.

Soon afterwards a disillusioned Tork quit. “My FAME GAME: The Monkees with Jack Nicholson in 1968, above; Mike Nesmith, Micky Dolenz, Davy Jones and Peter Tork in a 1966 publicity shot of the band and Jones as a child actor in Coronation Street opposite Violet Carson (Ena Sharples) in 1961 whole goal had been to be a member of a band that worked,” said Tork who was a folk singer before auditioning for The Monkees. “The next thing I know we’re making a movie and it doesn’t have anything to do with the business of being in a band together. So I felt it was up to me to leave.” Nesmith followed him out in 1970.

For The Monkees it was all over, seemingly as fast as it had started, but for Rafelson, Nicholson and Head’s co-producer Bert Schneider it was just the beginning. The trio’s next film, Easy Rider, was a box office smash the following year (Rafelson was a producer) capturing the counter-culture zeitgeist Head had also attempted to skewer with, arguably, The Monkees as sacrificial lambs.

The New York-born Rafelson and Nicholson would also team again successfully for the Seventies Five Easy Pieces, Rafelson’s TV days now firmly behind him. It was Rafelson and his TV producer partner Schneider, whose father was the head of Colombia Pictures, who had come up with the idea for a TV show about a rock band inspired by the Beatles’ film A Hard Day’s Night.

Led by the cherubic-faced Jones, a former child-actor who had played Ena Sharples’ grandson in Coronation Street, The Monkees were the smiley, unthreatening face of the counterculture.

“The only time you saw long-haired kids on television was when they were being arrested and then we came along and all we want to do is have fun and dance and sing and help little old ladies across the road,” says Dolenz.

The TV show’s chirpy knockabout spirit, inventive direction and brilliant songs such as the Neil Diamond-penned I’m A Believer kept The Beatles off the top of the US charts. The movie was