By Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart
A very special Monkee scoop
Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart do much more than write hit songs for The Monkees! They are also two of their best friends! And they have the pleasure and privilege of seeing The Monkees in a very special way. From now on, exclusively in FLIP, they will share their Monkees moments with you alone. Look for Tommy and Bobby’s very personal column in every issue of FLIP!
It sure does get lonesome around here when those guys aren’t around! What guys? Why, The Monkees, of course!
You see, they’re on vacation this month: Mike and Davy went to England, Micky went to Europe in general and Pete has just disappeared!
We’re glad that they’re finally getting a rest, but what do we do in the meantime? (How ’bout writing some songs for them? Yeah, that’s not a bad idea!) Anyway, it does give us a rest from the wild antics of the new Fab Four and time to think about just who they are and what they’re like.
The thing we miss most about Micky is the way he just sort of “appears” at our house at odd hours. He lives only a block away and when he’s lonesome (or, more often, when he’s thought of a new practical joke to play on one of us!) he just pops over to chat and drink our Coke and keep us from doing our work, if you can call writing songs for the Monkees work!
A lot of people have asked us whether Micky (and the others, too) is as funny in real life as he (or they) is on their television show. The answer is a definite YES!! Their ability to say funny things is one of the many qualities that got the boys on The Monkees show—it’s not just a put-on.
Micky’s big on practical jokes, but Mike is just as funny in his own sort of quiet way. You have to listen closely to catch his jokes, but it’s worth it! We work with him very closely since he’s the most musical Monkee. Though he prefers to work on his own, he occasionally will ask us for advice during a recording session. He won’t do it directly, since he’s very proud and independent, but he’ll find a subtle way to see whether or not we like what he’s doing.
Like he’ll say, “I sure do like the way so many groups are using strings and string quartets on their records, don’t you?” Then maybe we’ll say, “Yes, but only when it’s appropriate” and if we smile when we say it, then he knows that we think it’s OK for him to do it. If we kinda frown, then he knows we don’t think this particular song is appropriate. See?
At first, we had a hard time getting Davy to be serious at recording sessions. But when we closed the session completely and didn’t let anyone in, but the boys themselves and one or two of the stand-ins, he quickly got down to business. Though he doesn’t sing lead much, his are usually the hardest to do because they’re slow. That’s where his acting ability came in handy—on the slow numbers, it was easy for him to get the proper amount of emotion into it.
Pete’s been singing only in the background for a while, until “Your Antie [sic] Grizelda”. We weren’t at that particular recording session, but have we heard tales about it! From the beginning, Peter wanted to do it (in fact, we think it was written exclusively for him) and did he have a ball hamming it up. Funny songs are definitely in his bag and he climbed right into it and stapled the top down!
Our time is running out—we’ve got to dream up some fantastic new sounds for our friends and for YOUR best friends. Dig?
