What No One Ever Told You About The Monkees

Hey, hey, it's the Monkees! For a very brief period in the late 1960s, wild pop-rockers the Monkees dominated pop culture. Despite being made for television at first, the Monkees eventually became a respected and quite popular band. Here's the un

told

truth about the Monkees. Some bands start in a garage. The Monkees started out at Raybert Productions. Led by television producers Bob Rafelson and Bert Schneider, the company had a deal with Screen Gems to develop a comedy about a rock band, inspired by the zany Beatles films A Hard Day's Night and Help! That idea became The Monkees, a show about a group of funny kids who also played music.

NBC was interested, so Rafelson and Schneider hired Colgems Records executive Don Kirschner to oversee the musical aspects of the show. To find the real Monkees, Rafelson and Schneider placed an ad in Variety and The Hollywood Reporter. It said: "Madness!! Auditions. Folk & roll musicians and singers for acting roles in a new TV series. Playing roles for 4 crazy kids, ages 17-21. They want energetic Ben Frank types. Have courage to work. You must come for an interview." Ben Frank's was a hot spot on Hollywood's Sunset Strip and set the tone for exactly the kind of show the producers wanted.

They were channeling the spirit of not only The Beatles, but also '60s giants like Lovin' Spoonful, who, by the way, had been approached by Rafelson and Schneider to do the TV show. They said no, recruiting ads were posted and the Monkees were hired. The producers ultimately auditioned 437 actors and musicians from the Los Angeles area and finally found who they were looking for. Among the notable names they tried out were folk singer Stephen Stills; Danny Hutton, just before joining the hugely successful Three Dog Night; and Paul Williams, who would appear in films such as Smokey and the Bandit and write award-winning songs such as "The Rainbow Connection" from The Muppet Movie.

And contrary to a famous urban legend, there is one notorious individual who almost didn't make it to The Monkees. Convicted mass murderer Charles Manson was in prison for violating his parole when the auditions were held in 1965. Monkee Micky Dolenz takes credit for starting the rumor and once

told

Gilbert Gottfried: "I just made a joke 'They all auditioned for The Monkees, Stephen Stills, Paul Williams and Charlie Manson!' And

ever

yone took it as gospel." Monkee teachers Bob Rafelson and Bert Schneider found three members for the band through that extensive audition process, but

ever

yone knows that the Monkees were a four-piece band.

What happened? Fourth place was supposed to go to seasoned folk musician Stephen Stills, before he became the "Stills" of the iconic trio Crosby, Stills & Nash. Stills turned down the opportunity to be a Monkee, but was kind enough to recommend his possible replacement: Peter Thorkelson, a guy he had played with in New York and who he thought shared the look the producers were looking for. Thorkelson, who adopted the stage name Peter Tork, landed the role of "Peter Tork" while he sang and played bass in the band. Shortly before his death in 2019, he explained to Rolling Stone: "They hired me to be an actor on a television show.

The producers were hoping that something musical would come out of us when they cast the four of us. But if they couldn't have done music, they would have been fine with us making the TV show." The Monkees debuted in 1966, joining an antiquated television universe that looked largely the same as it did a decade earlier. Among the hits of the day were Westerns like Bonanza and Daniel Boone, variety shows like The Red Skelton Show and The Lawrence Welk Show, and sitcoms aimed at an older rural audience, including The Beverly Hillbillies and Green Acres And then along came The Monkees, and it was wildly creative and revolutionary.

Inconspicuous, unlike the heavier competition, The Monkees stood out with bright colors and starred four young men with long hair wearing hippie-type clothes and lounging around their resting place playing rock 'n' roll music, a still terrifying and terrifying concept. strange to the public. The greatest generation. It represented the growing influence of the counterculture. Additionally, the show moved at a frenetic pace, using quick cuts, asides, actors breaking character, camera tricks, and standalone proto-musical videos at the end of each episode to make a series that fully embraced and expressed its rock 'n' rock. ' roll sensitivity. The Monkees may have suffered some

what

over the years from not being in charge of their own music, but it wasn't their fault.

That's how the producers wanted it and this caused serious tensions behind the scenes over the years. Not only that, but the showrunners also prevented them from having a say in the television series they starred in. When each individual Monkee was not needed on set, they were told to report to a black-walled room. There, they could do

what

ever they wanted as long as they returned to the sound stage when their assigned call light started flashing. The Monkees captured those experiences in art. In 1968, they were left to make an experimental film called Head. It was full of surrealism, symbolism and general madness, and was written with the help of the most unlikely screenwriter. "Here's Johnny!" Yes, that Jack Nicholson.

The film resulting from the partnership included so many strange sequences that fans weren't really sure what was going on, and some took it as a surprisingly pro-Vietnam stance. But according to what Dolenz told Mojo, that wasn't it at all. "A Monkees metaphor. We used to talk about being in a black box all the time. When we were on tour, especially but even when we were on TV. We couldn't leave a room or a hotel." The Monkees may have been designed as a corporate effort, but the producers left writers with pacifist and hippie-leaning sentiments in charge of the Monkee house.

The writers of both The Monkees and the band's songs expressed anti-Vietnam War sentiment quite a few times...which is notable considering the aggressive censorship of network television in the late 1960s. CBS fired the hosts of The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour for too much anti-war content, but The Monkees got their way. As? Some smoke and mirrors. According to a writer for the show who spoke to academic Dr. Roseanne Welch, "network executives didn't understand what we were saying, so we got away with a lot of things." Take the episode "Monkee Mother," in which the gang plays with dominoes.

Davy asks Peter what he calls the game, and his answer - "Southeast Asia" - is a cleverly ironic parody of the domino theory, the Cold War principle that if communism took hold in a country in the region, The rest would fall like dominoes. And then there's "Last Train to Clarksville," the Monkees' hit that's frequently repeated in the series. It is subtly about a young man recruited into the army and does not want to go. In fact, he wonders if he "will ever come home." Monkees songwriter Bobby Hart eventually said of the song and others: "We couldn't be too direct.

We couldn't really make a protest song out of it, we snuck it in." The Monkees made many fun and catchy songs that were enjoyed by millions of people. Their style: straightforward, jangly pop rock with the flavor of British bands like the Beatles and Herman's Hermits, showcased on "Valleri," "A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You," "Daydream Believer" and the title track. by The Monkees, which has to be the biggest opening hit for a sitcom. For all their charm, the Monkees are not considered a particularly innovative band. "Wow, it's not fair...we're just as bad as any other group in town." "Yeah, but all those other bands got invitations to audition." "Yes, except us" Or were they?

In 1967, when the band's management finally allowed the members to write their own material, The Monkees released Headquarters, which included a cut called "Zilch." A study experiment in which each Monkee says meaningless phrases that repeat and overlap. Peter Tork's line, "Mr. Dobalina, Mr. Bob Dobalina," was actually taken from the real world when he heard it repeated at an airport. Non-singing voices used for rhythmic effect? "Zilch" is basically a prehistoric rap song. Even hip-hop luminary Del Tha Funkee Homosapien thought so, trying out Tork's line for his 1991 hit "Mistadobalina." In early 1969, the Monkees began to fall apart. Peter Tork left the band and spent $400,000 to buy out the last four years of his contract.

Michael Nesmith left in April 1970, and that same year, Jones and Dolenz recorded the last of the Monkees' songs... at least for a while. Then each Monkee went their own way; some were more successful than others. Nesmith became the only Monkee with a solo hit, after his country rock group First National Band scored No. 21 with the single "Joanne." He was also an early adopter of music videos, making them for his own projects and creating the compilation show PopClips, which aired on Nickelodeon in 1980. Parent company Warner Cable thought that a 24-hour cable network that broadcast only videos might be a good idea. and they created MTV, which they asked Nesmith to develop.

Davy Jones, who looks like a teen idol, took the predictable teen idol route. "Rainy Jane" reached the lower reaches of the Billboard Hot 100 in 1971, but was most famously immortalized in an episode of The Brady Bunch in which he sings "Girl" and meets Marcia Brady, president of the Davy Jones Fan. Club. He died in 2012, after suffering a massive heart attack. As for Micky Dolenz, the child star of TV's Circus Boy is back in acting and has done a ton of voiceover work for cartoons like Batman: The Animated Series, The Tick, and The Scooby-Doo Show. He was a close second choice to play Fonzie on Happy Days, but was ultimately deemed too tall for the role.

In 1985, concert promoter David Fishof approached Peter Tork with a proposal to reunite The Monkees for a 20th anniversary tour. Together, Fishof and Tork worked with the rest of the band to come together. It took a few tries to convince Davy Jones and Micky Dolenz, while Michael Nesmith was even harder to convince. He was busy producing films and television shows with his company, Pacific Arts Corporation, and agreed to join when he thought the tour would consist of 10 to 20 dates. He later went public with his regret and backed out when those 20 dates turned into 200. What made the tour go from a modest, nostalgic affair to becoming one of the most massive musical projects of the mid-20s? the 80s?

MTV. In early 1986, the network aired every episode of The Monkees as a weekend marathon. MTV executive Tom Freston told Rolling Stone: "We have never received such a volume of mail. We were stunned by the whole thing." Suddenly, the 20-year-old show became the biggest thing among kids who weren't alive when it first aired. Almost every date on the Monkees' reunion tour was sold out, and the newly recorded single "That Was Then, This Is Now" reached the top 20. In 1986, the Monkees and MTV enjoyed a mutually satisfying relationship: reruns brought huge audience ratings for the channel. and MTV exposure made the Monkees' reunion tour the can't-miss event of the year.

Barely a year later, everything fell apart. After the success of "That Was Then, This Is Now", the Monkees reunited without Michael Nesmith. The product was the new album, Pool It!, with the single "Heart and Soul." But fans had a hard time finding the video, as MTV refused to air it. According to Monkee Business Fanzine, the Monkees were scheduled to appear on an MTV Super Bowl special in January 1987, but there was a miscommunication. The band had no intention of playing the show because they had been booked for another engagement. The executive in charge of the show had only been at the network for a couple of months and didn't understand the unique and loving symbiosis between the band and the network, so he unceremoniously retaliated by banning "Heart and Soul." It's no coincidence that with the complete lack of promotion from the Monkees' previous champion, "Heart and Soul" dropped at #87 on the singles chart, and sadly, Pool It! it stalled at number 72 on the albums chart.

Check out one of our newest videos right here! Plus, there will be more grunge videos about your favorite things coming soon. Subscribe to our YouTube channel and press the bell so you don't miss a single one.