OK, I turned in my proposal tonight. I should have had someone edit it, but was too lacking in time. Here are the specs; we'll see what happens in a month or two.
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“33 1/3” Series Proposal: The Monkees,
HeadquartersSubmitted February 14, 2007
By Joseph McCombs
It was 40 years ago in March that the Monkees began recording the most crucial album of their career. They’d already scored two No. 1 albums (the cleverly titled
The Monkees and
More of the Monkees) and two No. 1 singles (“Last Train to Clarksville” and “I’m a Believer”) in their short lifespan, yet they’d also become in some ways the most hated band in America. The Prefab Four were catching flak from the press, and more important, from fellow musicians, for not playing their own instruments on their records, for being “phonies” by some judges’ senses of cred. Micky, Mike, Peter, and Davy had reached a crucial existential moment: They didn’t just want to be the stars in a show called
The Monkees; they wanted to
be the Monkees.
It was out of this rather unique quest for authenticity that the boys laid the tracks for
Headquarters, the album that liberated them from Don Kirshner if not from prefabricated songcraft, the album that legitimized the band’s previous successes, the album that I wish to discuss in a forthcoming volume of the “33 1/3” series.
The Monkees have been biographed many times, but always in the most casual of ways. Few writers and critics have seen fit to take seriously their musical output (despite a half-dozen Top 10 hits and four No. 1 albums), and this book on their most important album can make great strides in correcting that.
Headquarters is not only the story of a band making an album, it’s the story of a band making a band. The lads had a very short amount of time to get onto the same musical page—in terms of aptitude as much as direction. Michael Nesmith was a gifted and prolific songwriter, and could more than hold his own on pedal steel; Peter Tork played bass, banjo, guitar, keyboards, and harpsichord with flavor but was maddeningly imprecise; Micky Dolenz, whose malleable, Top 40–friendly vocals were already the group’s strongest suit, gamely achieved competence on the drums and contributed the exuberantly chaotic “Randy Scouse Git” as his first songwriting credit; and Davy—well, he played the tambourine and sang as well as he needed to.
Over several weeks in March the boys accumulated and tracked a dozen songs (plus two well-received goof tracks) that were of their time, and more than competitive with their time. Upon its June 1967 release, the album shot straight to No. 1—a perch it lost the next week to
Sgt. Pepper, but to its lasting credit, hung on at No. 2 for 11 weeks afterward. Hindsight tells us that the album is imperfect, but engaging: pleasant bite-size nuggets of garage pop with strong elements of what would a year or so later become known as “country rock,” and some faint hints of the then unnamed “sunshine pop” genre that would be explored months later on the boys’ less autonomous follow-up,
Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones Ltd. With such highlights as the clopping Nez opener “You Told Me,” Torkian peace missive “For Pete’s Sake,” and the semi-improvised romp “No Time,”
Headquarters is an album well worth placement on the shelves of any fan of 1960s pop. And
Headquarters, the book, will legitimize the album as well as the four men whose band name could finally be their own at the end of the day.
About myself: I’m a music journalist and aspirant historian with a particular bent toward the pop music of the late 1960s through mid 1970s. I learned to program selections on diner-top jukeboxes at age 3 (thank you, Captain & Tennille), discovered the Beatles at age 5 and immediately memorized “Penny Lane,” and took dual citizenship in the Jefferson Airplane and Monkees camps a few years later. Teenage years spent in part memorizing entire Monkees episodes (thank you, Nick at Nite rerun schedule) may not have prepared me to biograph one of their albums, but subsequent years of close, critical listening and employment in music criticism have. Since 2001 I’ve written album reviews, brief biographies, news, concert previews, and other short-form pieces for the All Music Guide,
The Village Voice, and various music-related websites. My writings in recent years have included over 100 AMG reviews, hundreds of indie-artist reviews for musician-development website Starpolish.com, over 200 concert listings and several features for the
Voice, and papers delivered at the past two Experience Music Project Pop Conferences. Last year, my (nearly) unhyperbolic presentation was “10 Reasons Why the Monkees Should Be in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame,” and the positive response to the paper I received from EMP attendees encouraged me to go forward with this proposal. I have a strong grasp of the Monkees’ history, a smart appreciation for the quality of their music and the role they played in evolving the country-rock and sunshine-pop genres, and an exceptional ability to express the history and the pluses and minuses of the album in terms that will engage Monkee fans, music historians, pop aficionados, and casual readers alike.
Revisiting the below as 33 1/3 has put out another call for submissions. I'm heeding more than before this helpful advice of theirs -- "Choice of album is important - we're here to sell some books, after all. We're more likely to accept a proposal on Odessey & Oracle than on Angels With Dirty Faces, as much as I love them both." -- and will be proposing something other than "Red Octopus." Most likely "Headquarters," which has an interesting backstory and more saleability (there are a lot more Monkees fans in 2007 than Jefferson Starship fans, obvs).
Here are the specs. Interested in any suggestions.
http://33third.blogspot.com/2007/01/time-of-season.html
