An exclusive story by Derek Taylor
The Monkees are coming, so you might as well enjoy them, because that’s what you’re supposed to do!
There never was a more honest pinch than their dramatised finger-pop of a television series based on a rock’n’roll foursome, fringed, laughing and tumbling through a couple of dozen chapters of contrived accident.
The inspiration, clearly, is the Beatles, and the plot pattern comes directly from the paced excitement of “A Hard Day’s Night”.
The Monkees’ hit single, “Last Train to Clarksville”, made number one in the American Charts, and sold a million copies. Their album, simply titled The Monkees, also passed some massively established competitors to top the LP. charts. Their new single “I’m A Believer” has also taken off like a rocket in America.
The Monkees themselves are not a group in the Olde Caverne sense. They are not even musicians, though they have become musicianly—which, for the purpose of the television series, is enough.
The people planning the series auditioned hundreds of boys, and by process of elimination selected the four who looked right together, felt right together, sounded right together, and seemed most likely to become Monkees (whatever that term was going to mean).
And the pleasing thing about this calculated piece of chemistry is that it worked! The Monkees are now, like Pinocchio, real live boys. They have passed all the tests, survived the callous scrutiny of the music industry, shrugged off the sneer-jeers of the “real” groups. And if you like escapist entertainment, the Monkees are for you—carefully compounded, perfectly packaged like an individual fruit pie or a TV dinner.
And here they are: David Jones, 20; Micky Dolenz, 21; Mike Nesmith, 22 and Peter Tork, 22. Together they are the Monkees—harmless, happy, hopeful, humorous, home-made to an expensive “Do-It-Yourself Group Kit”.
I suppose there are worse ways of putting a rock’n’roll group together. Certainly there are better ways. But what the establishment of the Monkees has really done has been to signpost the end of whatever route the early, explosive Liverpool groups rough-mapped out.
If the Monkees can be “cast” like a soap opera, then we do indeed live in sophisticated times!
Well anyway, here they are, undoubtedly in for a long, long run on the world’s television screens. All the Universe loves rock’n’roll and if you can pick four Monkees out of five hundred potentials, then you can certainly replace one if he should lose his popularity rating.
Who is to say we haven’t got a pop Coronation Street or an Archers with amps?
For now, anyway, we have these four, very engaging lads. David Jones is the most obvious favourite and it is nice, though not necessary, that he is also the only British Monkee.
He was in the hit musical “Oliver” as the Artful Dodger, and in “Pickwick” with Harry Secombe. He is tiny and a jockey and very good too. From Manchester, now living in lovely-ugly Los Angeles and becoming rich and cheeky.
Micky Dolenz is very tall and looks like a young boxer does before the crunching gloves have begun to glaze his eyes and brutalise his skin. He wasn’t born in a truck (“Who was?” you may well ask), but his father was an actor, and at ten years of age he joined the cast of a series called “Circus Boy” on television. He has also appeared in “Peyton Place” and “Mr. Novak”. He is a good Monkee, and I am waiting for him to start worrying about the dangers of being involved in a long-running series which may “type-cast” him.
Reality Permalink
Micky was born in Los Angeles, which is one way of learning to live with reality!
Mike Nesmith was born in Dallas, Texas which is another.
He is the Monkee known as “Woolhat”, and when he was nineteen he learned the guitar. He became a country and western singer and followed in the steps of Cat Whittington and found his way to Hollywood, where the streets are paved with gold stars bearing the names of some truly appalling people who have become famous there.
“Woolhat” wears one, and it is very much part of the show. He looks right in it, and was probably wearing one before the Beatles ceased to be Silver.
He worked in a very good folk club in Los Angeles (Ledbetters), where he sang his own material.
Peter Tork may become the fave rave. He comes from Washington DC and has a rough grin which, in its infancy and youth, was practised in Connecticut (where he went to school), in Minnesota (where, at college, he prepared to be a teacher and didn’t become one), and in Greenwich Village (where, myth says, everyone is a folk singer, and almost everyone is).
Strangely he was playing at the Troubadour Club at around the same time as Nesmith was at rival Ledbetters, and it is probably helpful (though purely conversational) to point out that it was entirely coincidental that both should end up as Monkees! Neither helped the other in the casting, for they are, like everyone else in American television—bar the network bosses—quite without power.
Thus the Monkees in a capsule.
There are some good things you should know about them. One is that they don’t give a monkey’s… about public opinion which is in the Great Tradition Of Beatle-Launched Frank Talk.
When an American magazine asked for the standard loves and hates list, Peter Tork said, “I don’t keep a list like that at the top of my head.” He asked the magazine to print that and they did and it looked fine!
Mike Nesmith, lanky, long sideburned, gave his hates as iron, tips, grommets, set screws and hairspray, and I don’t believe he had any help from a publicist on that!
Contempt Permalink
In America, the show was powerfully promoted and long in preparation. I don’t recall any TV. series reaping so substantial and haphazard a harvest of contempt before anyone had seen it, heard the music, read the script or evaluated the personnel.
We were all in there, at the mass preview, muttering curses, fingers crossed for failure.
Lo and behold. It succeeded!
In lovely colour (write to your MP and ask him why you haven’t got colour TV) beautifully directed, spendidly edited with flair and sharp economy, musically elating, dramatically tight and right, the Monkees made it first episode out.
They pranced through a field of sophisticated corn with so much leaping elan that only the very mean could withhold mental applause.
“Last Train to Clarksville”, a very skilfully constructed song, well recorded moved easily up the Charts, followed by the theme tune “We’re the Monkees” and flanked by the million dollar album.
It was clear that nothing at all had been left unguarded. Someone, somewhere had said: “This is going to make it. We will make it.”
Enjoy the Monkees. They enjoy it.
Watch out for the Monkees in their own thirty-minute television show scheduled to appear on BBC-1 any moment now!
[Magazine provided by Senti.]
