“We were in Studio A and The Monkees were in Studio B and we made lots of music together!”
By Tommy Boyce & BOBBY HART
Two of The Monkees’ favorite songwriters and friends
Hi, FLIPers.
What a month this has been! We’ve been working in the studio for the last three months on both the Monkees’ next album and our own album.
We really enjoyed cutting our own album. We gave a lot of our material away because certain people needed it then, but we still had some groovy things left for ourselves. Our album’s titled “Test Patterns” and our first single is “Out And About.” We hope you like it as well as some of the stuff we’ve done with the Monkees. It was fun recording because we recorded the album at RCA and we were in studio A while the Monkees were in studio B. We’d go back and forth between the two studios and see what they were doing, too.
They recorded three new songs of ours—“Mr. Webster,” “I’ll Spend My Life With You” and “I Can’t Get Her Off My Mind.”
“Mr. Webster” is a song we wrote a couple of months ago. It’s a caricature of a number of people we’ve met around Hollywood. It’s about this bank detective who stands there in the bank for 20 years making $68. He prevents lots of robberies but never gets a raise.
When he goes to retire they throw a banquet for him and give him a gold watch—after all those years and the robberies he prevented they give him a gold watch! But Mr. Webster doesn’t show. In the middle of the banquet they get a telegram saying “I split with all your cash and I’m in Jamaica.”
If you want to see the real Mr. Webster, go down to the Bank in Hollywood where we do all our banking and there’s this one guy that we see all the time. He just putters around the bank and whenever anyone uses a pen he rushes over and straightens it out. We observed him for about 3 or 4 months and nicknamed him Mr. Webster. Then we wrote this song about him.
The story behind the writing of “I’ll Spend My Life With You” isn’t quite as interesting. We were in the office one Sunday working on a song called “Music, Music, Music” which wasn’t working out. Tommy had the title “I’ll Spend My Life With You” and Bobby liked it so he filled in the lyrics and we finished it by the pool later.
What were we doing in the office on Sunday? Well, our job doesn’t consist of 9 to 5 Monday through Friday. Sometimes we’ll take Tuesday off and go to the beach and then work Saturday or Sunday.
Besides it’s quiet in the office on Sunday. Nobody’s around and we can think better.
This month both we and the Monkees are going on extensive nationwide tours, so we won’t see much of them. But we do cross paths with them several times. We leave after they do, but we just discovered that we’ll be in Miami, Fla. on July 9 and so will they, so we’ll get to see them there.
We return the first week in August and then leave again the 1st week of August for England. It’s our first trip to England and we’re really excited about it.
Talk at you next month.
