It wasn’t any surprise to 16 SPEC & 16 Magazine regulars that the re-runs of The Monkees at noon each Saturday on CBS-TV broke all weekend daytime network show records! In fact, the return of The Monkees was so dynamically overwhelming that one of the rating services submitted a poll indicating that over half of the households of America (in which there are TV sets) are now watching The Monkees every Saturday noon!!
Monkee music changed Permalink
For those of you who are Monkee lovers from away back, the show revives some of your most cherished moments. What a thrill it is to see cute Davy, zany Micky, “innocent” Peter and serious Mike as they go about their Monkee business with all the tongue-and-cheek aplomb of the kid who stole the cherry pie off the windowsill!! If any of you true-blue Monkee maniacs are a little confused by the music tracks that are being played on the show, here’s a reminder: several months before the CBS re-runs started, Mike, Micky and Davy got together and re-cut the musical numbers for the show.
“What we wanted was for the re-runs—though they are, in a sense, ‘dated’—to reflect our present day taste in music,” Mike Nesmith said recently. “So we put in more of our latest songs and dropped some of the stuff that we felt wasn’t as timely or interesting.”
For all of you new Monkee maniacs—a great new “race” of youngsters which is growing in leaps and bounds as each progressive Saturday passes—here’s a reminder: the Monkees’ show that you see on TV in the re-runs was actually taped over two years ago, and the Mike, Micky, Davy and Peter of today are four very, very different fellows from those four crazy guys you see on the telly.
For instance, Peter left the group sometime ago because, as he put it, “I want to make my own kind of music and though I love the Monkee scene, it isn’t really inherent in my background of folk-blues orientation.” So Peter went off and formed his own group, which he calls Release. Several months ago, when Peter appeared as a judge on the amateur band part of Happening (sporting super-long hair and a beard) he hammed it up with host Paul Revere and appeared to be happier than ever before.
Davy’s secret Permalink
Micky and Mike, as the world knows, are both happily married. Mike and Phyllis have two sons and Micky and his wife, the former English model Samantha Juste, have a lovely daughter. Perhaps the biggest shock and surprise in Monkeedom occurred this past summer when Davy Jones announced that he had been secretly married to an American girl named Linda Haines for over two years and that they had a daughter named Talia. Though some of Davy’s fans turned their backs on him, feeling that he had “deceived” them, the majority of his fans were happy that their idol had finally found a girl to love and had created a real home for himself in America.
At the present time, Davy, Micky and Mike are the Monkees. They record together, do concerts together and do TV shows together. But the boys also work alone. Mike spends a great deal of time in the studio, not only recording the Monkees but other groups and individuals on his special contract with Dot Records. Micky and Sammy have recently opened a boutique in Hollywood and Micky is mulling over various TV and movie offers. Davy has made several solo TV guest appearances-including one recently on a Kraft Music Hall, which was taped in London, England. Davy also is receptive to movie and TV series offers. But all of the Monkees—Davy, Micky and Mike—want the whole world to know that they are still together and that, come what may, they always will be!!
