TOMMY BOYCE AND BOBBY HART HAVE ALREADY TAKEN YOU TO A MONKEES’ RECORDING SESSION! SO, NOW…
“COME TO OUR RECORDING SESSION!”
Tommy and Bobby are frequent visitors to The Monkees’ recording sessions, because they are two of The Monkees’ favorite songwriters!
But, this month, they’ve left Davy and Micky at their session and gone off to record a song for themselves. They tell you all about it!
Hi FLIPers. This month we’d like to take you to our recording session.
We arrive at the studio in the middle of a warm afternoon and listen to a few records while waiting for everyone else to arrive. We’re particularly interested in the production work on Simon and Garfunkle’s “At the Zoo” and “Fakin’ It” and the Beatles’ “All You Need Is Love,” which is our engineer’s favorite record.
We’re dressed comfortably in sports clothes. Everyone’s feeling pretty good and it looks like it’s going to be a good session.
With us are several good session musicians including Keith Allison, former “Action” regular, who’s come over to play guitar with us.
We start by working out pieces with the musicians. We decide how we want it to sound and then try to explain it to them. We’re cutting what we hope will be our next single.
The beginning and end sound good but the middle’s a little weak. We’ll have to strengthen it a bit later.
Once we get started everything seems to run smoothly. We cut most of the instrumental track first then add the vocals.
Hours later it’s getting near 2 a.m. and we’re all pretty tired. But it’s been a good session. We started from scratch and now we almost have a single.
Two of the musicians had to leave to go play a concert at the Hollywood Bowl with the Mamas and Papas, but they’re back now so we can complete the instrumental track.
There’s a machine out in the hall that sells coffee, tea and chicken soup. Although we both want some coffee to keep awake, we’re drinking soup ’cause it’s better for us and it soothes sore throats.
We’re all very groggy now, but we think we’ve almost got a good single. We listen again and decide we’re too tired to really tell if it’s what we want.
So we’ll go home now, get a few hours sleep and come back tomorrow to put any finishing touches on it.
The title of the song you’ve just watched us cut is “P.O. Box 9847” and by the time you read this it should either be out as a single or we’ll have decided to save it for an album track.
Well, thanks for coming by our session. See you next month.
