“10 Reasons Why the Monkees Should Be in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame”
A Paper Presented to the Experience Music Project 2006 Pop Conference
by Joseph McCombs
Friday, April 28, 2006
The Monkees played a significant and underappreciated role in the development of pop-rock music and its visual representation. They also, through their prefabricated origins, raised vital questions of authenticity in the post-Beatles climate, in which bands were expected to be self-contained units that not only performed but wrote the material on their records. As a result, they have been denied critical respect, acclaim that has also been withheld from comparable pop bands of the period like the Turtles, Tommy James, and Paul Revere & the Raiders. Trash singles and bubblegummy pop-rock lack a place at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame’s table. Common are reviews like those from Paul Evans in the Rolling Stone Record Guide, who gives each of their initial nine studio albums between 1 ½ and 2 stars out of 5; and the All Music Guide’s Richie Unterberger, who while favorably describing the tunes disclaims, “It would be foolish to pretend, however, that they were a band of serious significance.” My intent here is to pretend just that.
Why is this a big deal to me? Well, I’m a huge Monkees fan, of the third-generation variety. (That is, one who became a devotee during the band’s 1986 MTV-fueled resurgence.) I own every single one of their CDs—even 1987’s abysmal post-comeback Pool It! and 1996’s utterly ignored reunion album Justus—and for a time, had entire episodes of their TV show committed to memory. The Monkees did for me what The Golden Girls and Designing Women did for other gay men in my age demographic: They posited a family of choice, collecting people under one roof bound not so much by relations as by genuine camaraderie and shared goals. Blood may be thicker than water, but fake blood is thicker than blood.
Moreover, the Monkees are casualties of a larger matter, the question of “Is it the singer or the song?” For music industry historians to include the Monkees in the rock canon would be to legitimize the pop and the prefab, to acknowledge that it’s the song, not the singer, that makes for a musical memory; the product, not the process. Few are willing to make such a concession to the trash-singles aesthetic, in which studio musicians and staff songwriters play as large and as legitimate a role in the creative process as the artist on the label. That’s why I’ve compiled 10 reasons why the Monkees, who took the input from those musicians and songwriters and created great pop records, deserve to have their artistic contributions validated by being enshrined in the Rock Hall.
Reason #1: Their chart success.
Hey, I’m a chart guy. And their charts read like this: three #1 singles, six Top 10s, 12 Top 40s (10 of which made it into the Top 20), and a total of 20 Hot 100 singles. On the album charts, they were equally impressive, with four #1 LPs, including a self-titled debut whose 13 weeks at #1 remained a record for first releases until Men at Work’s Business as Usual in 1982. The band’s Billboard numbers compare very favorably to those of the recently inducted Blondie, who scored four #1s amid their eight Top 40 entries in a similar time span.
Also consider the time frame of those hits. 1967 is universally considered one of rock’s most vital and inspired years. And competing with such legendary albums as Sgt. Pepper, Surrealistic Pillow, The Doors, The Who Sell Out, Are You Experienced?, and Forever Changes, not to mention with singles-oriented artists at their creative peaks like the Turtles and the Four Tops, the Monkees more than held their own.
Reason #2: The quality of the songs, even those that weren’t hits.
There are many who sensibly think that what’s not organic is not good to eat, and that the same goes for bands. The inorganic Monkees defied logic, though, by arriving at a coherent sound despite having four very different musical backgrounds and not going through the normal vetting process that a developing band undergoes. The Monkees’ sound, while sometimes derivative, added original elements to the period pop such as jangly pedal steel guitar, a distinctive ring that was a signature Mike Nesmith contribution to the band and was part of the prototype for what would soon be called “country rock.”
The songs themselves appealed for all the right reasons: They were highly melodic, uplifting, enhanced by visual cues but not dependent upon them, and occasionally innovative, as on the improvised Moog swirls in “Daily Nightly” and the controlled chaos of “Randy Scouse Git.” Billboard was especially generous to the early material, gushing: “All the excitement generated by the promotional campaign . . . is justified by this debut disk loaded with exciting teen dance beats.” B-sides like “Words” and “The Girl I Knew Somewhere” were no less tuneful or hummable than their flipside counterparts. Though lyrics were generally of secondary importance, behind the novelty of Peter Tork’s frayed delivery of “Your Auntie Grizelda” lay clever internal rhyming and relevant moralizing. And the piano intro to “Daydream Believer,” played by Peter, remains one of the most memorable opening riffs ever.
The argument remains, though, that the Monkees were incidental to the songs, and I’d like to decenter that. Before the singer-songwriter era, a talented songwriter without comely visual attributes had to be discovered by writing songs for others. For example, Three Dog Night, the last of the non-writing hit rock bands, were instrumental in propelling the careers of Randy Newman, Laura Nyro, and Paul Williams in this fashion; and the Monkees—whose 1969 recording of “Someday Man” gave Williams his first chart hit—were even more important in this area, introducing Williams and Harry Nilsson to the pop world, turning Neil Diamond from a hack into a commodity, and giving Carole King one of her better outlets.
Reason #3: The many talents they helped foster and/or discover.
Thus we begin to see the Monkees’ impact as a way station for developing artists. Much as the Buffalo Springfield, elected to the Hall despite being together only two years, are as much revered for the careers and projects they spawned as for the albums they released in their short lifespan, the Monkees warrant acknowledgement for their role as a launching pad for talent.
• Diamond, who’d hit with “Cherry Cherry” by then but wasn’t established, had his first monster hits by authoring “I’m a Believer” and “A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You” for the band.
• King, already considered a writer of contemporary standards, took advantage of this high-visibility outlet with some of her shinier gems; “Take a Giant Step,” “Sometime in the Morning,” and “Sweet Young Thing” are among the many standouts she had a hand in writing.
• Glen Campbell, as part of Hal Blaine’s Wrecking Crew, had a session gig playing lead guitar on “Mary, Mary” and other tracks before becoming a lineman for the county.
• Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart had written Jay and the Americans’ “Come a Little Bit Closer” and a few other charters, but their Monkees involvement on such smashes as “Last Train to Clarksville” and “(I’m Not Your) Steppin’ Stone” made them names and allowed them to launch their own career with the hits “I Wonder What She’s Doing Tonight” and “Alice Long.”
• Neil Young, newly successful with the Springfield, further cut his chops as a studio musician by lending a searing guitar solo to Davy Jones’s scathing “You and I,” while
• Michael Martin Murphey, who ran calling “Wildfire” and had a series of C/W charters a few years later, scored his first songwriting breakthrough with the Nesmith vehicle “What Am I Doin’ Hangin’ ’Round?”
• Jack Nicholson was already a working actor but added “writer” and “producer” credits to his résumé with his work on the band’s sole film, Head.
• Jimi Hendrix toured with the Monkees in 1967 for a very short while in his quest for American exposure post-Monterey, a famously mismatched pairing that nevertheless introduced the Experience to broader swaths of America than he could have reached without them.
• Finally, later episodes of the lads’ TV series offered early glimpses of Charlie Smalls, who went on to write the songs for The Wiz, and doomed troubadour Tim Buckley, whose rendition of “Song to the Siren” on the show’s final episode is an unqualified and understated highlight.
That’s the short list of artists whose careers were aided and abetted by the Prefab Four—who may have been artificial, but at least had good taste.
Reason #4: Their standoff against Don Kirshner, the music prefabrication process, and indeed, the music industry.
The artifice of the Monkees didn’t just bother critics and music purists. It bothered the boys themselves, leading to a showdown with music supervisor Don Kirshner, who’d assembled the studio musicians and staff songwriters responsible for much of the first two albums. Kirshner had been hired for expediency’s sake: They’d contracted for 32 episodes, requiring more songs than Boyce and Hart or any other in-house unit could have possibly composed in such a brief time; Donnie, on the other hand, had access to a stable of the best, Brill Building and beyond. The Monkees, who’d been forbidden from playing the instruments on those early albums, rejected the puppet roles that they’d been assigned, in a confrontation with Kirshner and his executives that brought to light for many the machinations of the song factory. VH1 referred to the showdown as “a high-stakes musical mutiny,” Nesmith threatening to quit the show and Kirshner ultimately being fired instead. It was a defining moment in the Monkees’ history, one that could have dissolved them or made them the Curt Floods of the entertainment biz. Instead, the boys were given the autonomy to write and perform nearly everything on their next album, a garage-rock classic called Headquarters. A courageous stance, and punk as fuck.
Reason #5: Their vital innovations in music video.
It is true that, as Newsweek noted at the time, the Monkees were “direct videological descendants of the Beatles.” The sitcom was heavily inspired by A Hard Day’s Night. But the lads and their crew of directors and producers took the medium of TV to new places. Rapid jump-cuts, fourth-wall-smearing nods to the camera, and inventive direction techniques gave the series a feel and a pace unprecedented on American television, a vibe soon after replicated by Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In for a more adult crowd. More importantly, the show presented romp scenes and performance clips that presaged the music video we came to know and love. Promotional clips were not completely new, but they achieved an aesthetic and a focus on The Monkees that would prove highly influential.
Years later, Nesmith took the aesthetic a few steps further, first with a series of videos called Popclips and then with a broader special that incorporated comedy skits as well as music, titled Elephant Parts. Shortly thereafter, Music Television appeared—but without Nez and the Monkees, there’d have been no MTV; and as testament to his foresight, Nesmith won the first ever Video of the Year Grammy.
(The Monkees also did a little-known, but intriguing, hour-long musical show in April 1969. Airing on NBC against the Oscars, 33 1/3 Revolutions Per Monkee attracted little attention then, and even less since. I’d hoped to spend some time on it here, as it’s definitely something that can only be enjoyed in the shadow of doubt, but for lack of time will just move on and show the clips in the background.)
Reason #6: Their (OK, not so vital) innovations in music itself.
Before the band’s emergence, there were no such branches in rock’s family tree as “Bubblegum” and “Sunshine Pop.” The former, a sound consciously invented in 1968 to appeal to youthful listeners while encoding adult themes for older ones, owes its livelihood to the desire to capitalize on Monkee success (in fact, “Sugar Sugar” was offered to the band years before the Archies were contrived). Lester Bangs summarized the genre thusly: “The basic bubblegum sound could be described as the basic sound of rock & roll—minus the rage, fear, violence and anomie . . . Ladle on a bit of Beach Boys here and there, keep the ball rolling but let it bounce. . . . A calculated innocence, perhaps, but the wonderful irony was that it worked.” It did work, and the Hall should recognize this.
The related sunshine-pop genre finds its origins also perhaps in the Beach Boys, with their Pet Sounds album, but the All Music Guide’s definition of the sound—“rich harmony vocals, lush orchestrations, and relentless good cheer”—describes the Monkees’ later recordings to a T. These more complex records provided the crucial link between the Brill Building pop of the early ’60s and the psychedelic sunshine of the tail end of the decade, taking those professional lyrics and smart melodies and adding personal twists to them, like the use of the Moog synthesizer—Micky is said to have owned one of the first three in existence—on two tracks from their 1967 artistic peak, Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones, Ltd. Other bands soon followed, but in this case, the Monkees were for once the leader.
They also led, courtesy of the forward-thinking Nesmith, in the development of the country-rock sound, alongside the Byrds and the Buffalo Springfield. Some say the Flying Burrito Brothers, formed by two Byrds that had flown, created the style, but really, Nez preceded them, giving the group’s songs an identifiable twang. He is sometimes cited as a solo artist for his offerings to the genre, but the Monkees should be given credit as well. Few have done so, although David Cantwell and Bill Friskics-Warren, authors of 2003’s Heartaches by the Number: Country Music’s 500 Greatest Singles, did include “Last Train to Clarksville” in their list.
Michael Nesmith’s songwriting, besides pursuing the country-rock idiom when few others were, had a distinct maturity to it: He contemplated long-term relationships rather than high school crushes on such introspective ballads as “Nine Times Blue,” “While I Cry,” and a personal favorite, “Carlisle Wheeling.”
Reason #7: The amazingly pliable vocal and lyrical talents of Micky Dolenz.
Nez wasn’t the only Monkee with legitimate musical chops and ideas, though. Before Sonny Bono invented rap with “My Best Friend’s Girl Is Out of Sight,” we had this astonishing vamp about drowning in the sea of love in 1967 from the underrated Mr. Dolenz:
“Floatindowntheriver/withasaturatedliver/andIwishIcouldforgiveher/
butIdobelieveshemeantit/whenshetoldmetoforgetit/andIbetshewillregretit/
whentheyfindmeinthemorningwetanddrowned/and word gets ’round/goin’ down.” It’s a peak in their catalogue.
Dolenz showed his vocal flexibility there and elsewhere: He had a grand pop-sensible malleability that allowed him to go pseudo-punk on “Steppin’ Stone,” cheese-Louise on “I’m a Believer,” breezy commentator on “Pleasant Valley Sunday,” and restrained high-harmonizer on “Shades of Gray.” In addition, he demonstrated a fine playfulness in his songwriting: “Randy Scouse Git,” which became a #2 hit in England under the alternate title “Alternate Title,” combined a vividly imagistic stream-of-consciousness lyric with tympani on the refrain and scatting on the bridge, while 1969’s “Mommy and Daddy” was an accusatory treatise on parental responsibility, coming from someone still seen as a teenybopper role model. The released version was startling enough in its commentary on American adults’ treatment of Native Americans, pharmaceuticals, and the soldiers in Vietnam, but an unreleased take that surfaced several years later is downright seditious, Micky tackling the JFK conspiracy, suicide, pill-popping, and careless parenting, all in under two minutes, chanting gleefully at the close, “They’re all living a lie!”
I claimed in my abstract that Dolenz was “the best Carole King interpreter this side of Dusty Springfield,” which may have been hyperbolic, but it’s worth considering. The aforementioned “Sometime in the Morning” is a gorgeous high-tenor effort, as are the high-water film tracks “Porpoise Song” and “As We Go Along,” the latter of which received a tasteful, if period-dated, treatment in Head.
Reason #8: They gave us Head.
It’s a stoner film, doubtless, but it’s a then rare example of artists critically examining their own roles in the entertainment/media machine. Unlike the sitcom, the movie is content to take its time making its points, including its (few) jokes. Largely self-absorbed and mostly unfunny, it’s nevertheless miles beyond your typical Elvis vehicle. Where the Beatles giddily ran from their fans in A Hard Day’s Night, the Monkees opened their late-’68 film by running to a suicide leap off “one of the largest suspended-arch bridges in the world.” Despite the randomness of many of its images and lines, the film is definitely about something: the boys’ efforts to get out of the box they perceived themselves personally and professionally trapped in, a box made literal and crucial to the film’s most effective scene—the closing, wherein their reprised jump off the bridge at first appears liberating, but soon reveals itself to simply have landed them back in their place, a crate being trucked off backstage along with the other props.
Head found the boys on a mission to do “adult” things: They make out with girls, shoot guns, smoke hookah, mouth off to waitresses, throw haymakers, and let éminence grise Frank Zappa give them shit, calling their music “pretty white.” (Davy’s clever rejoinder: “Well, so am I, what can I tell you.”) It’s an important document in the band’s history and in the history of artists responding to their public perception.
Reason #9: Their central role in defining “authenticity” in rock (and authenticating pop).
The Monkees were fully aware of their role in the larger debates of “authenticity” in rock music. They knew that their records were largely trash singles, and continued to make them. Trash-pop singles are valid! To make a statement of inclusiveness with the Monkees can open the doors for appreciation of a broader section of the music spectrum. The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame isn’t just rock & roll, despite its title: It’s R&B, punk, funk, folk, blues, and now with Black Sabbath, it’s heavy metal. Yet pop music remains a bastard child where the Hall is concerned, and it will take an artist of the Monkees’ caliber and catalogue to legitimize and authenticate the genre in the Hall’s eyes.
Further, the complaints about them not playing their own instruments are a red herring: The Beach Boys and the Byrds used studio musicians on some of their best-loved recordings, and as Micky was fond of pointing out at the time, Sonny & Cher and Frank Sinatra and the artists on Motown didn’t play the instruments on their perfectly authentic records either. The Monkees were the first to be called out on it, though, giving us a framework with which to deal with Milli Vanilli, Ashlee Simpson, and so many others.
Reason #10: The real purpose of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.
Finally, the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame isn’t just about musical talent or output, it’s about cumulative impact. Just ask the Sex Pistols! As the Hall’s own induction process declares: “Criteria include the influence and significance of the artist’s contributions to the development and perpetuation of rock and roll.” The Monkees played a vital role in rock’s development: the careers they helped launch, the genres they helped popularize, the visual aesthetics they innovated. Had they only played one of these three roles, they’d be a historical footnote, a pleasant memory. But taken together, these purposes, along with the massive hits they had and the great records they made, show that their position in the pop-rock continuum was not an ephemeral blip, but rather a lasting mark.
As a wise friend once told me: “Rock ’n’ roll has always been a dialectic between art and commerce. The Monkees were conceived as pure commerce, but the art was still within, and the guys struggled against high odds to bring it out. Any rock band that manages to get a hit on the charts is a result of this dialectic, from Elvis to the Beatles to Nirvana. It’s just that the particular circumstances of the Monkees throw it into sharp relief. This is certainly worthy of being recognized by the Hall of Fame.”
