Let's look at the facts in regards to these hacks:
I thought you only dealt in opinions...?
1. The Beatles were getting more "experimental" in their music and were leaving a hole in the pre-teen bubble gum scene. The Monkees were created to fill that hole.
Obviously the Monkees TV show was created to capitalize on the success of the Fabs' jovial characters in their "zany romp"-filled movies. Bob Rafelson could've saved some money by just turning in a copy of
A Hard Day's Night and telling the execs that it was the series' pilot episode. However, the hole-filling thing doesn't really seem right to me -- they were also created as a record-sales cash cow, and the formula for that at the time was "do exactly what the Beatles started doing last week"; anyone saying they wanted to do the opposite would be out of the biz in a Brill Building Minute!
2. Everything about the Monkees reeks of ripping off the Beatles pre-Rubber Soul. From their mannerisms on the show to the multiple singers...everything.
That was precisely the TV producers' goal. Musically, though, I don't see how anyone can say they even
tried to ape JPG&R. Aside from a very few specific examples (that Clarksville riff, Davy's awful "The Poster" in which he clearly was trying to rewrite "Mr. Kite"), the Monkees' songs never sounded
remotely like the Beatles'. Apart from Jones' accent, there was nothing even
British about their sound!
3. The Monkees did not even play their own instruments at first: they learned to do so only after getting together for the show and after having become a hit. Oh, and don't try to start with "Mike and Peter could play..." because 99.99% of the time when a band gets big all of them know how to play their fucking instruments.
First off, as Mike told me during a break from rehearsing for the Monkees '97 UK tour, "Can you believe there are still morons out there spewing that bullshit about us 'playing our own instruments'. Well, a-hole, this is my guitar, those are Micky's drums -- who the f*ck's instruments do you think we've been playing!" Second, 99.99% is probably a good guess as to the percentage of pop/rock bands on the radio in 1966 who
didn't play on their own recordings! I can guarantee a few specific ones...
Paul Revere & the Raiders, Mamas & Papas, Strawberry Alarm Clock all come to mind off the top of my head.
Most of the bands were pissed off about it, too, but the record companies weren't about to waste valuable studio time on young, untried kids when they had a corral full of fast, tight, dependable studio-savvy guys ready to jump in at the drop of a hat! Unless people were buying your records because of your playing style, a la
Hendrix, Yardbirds, Stones, etc., you were expected to stay out of the way until the call came for adding vocals to your songs... assuming they hadn't demanded that all your A-sides got penned by one of their songwriting "ringers". What happened was that Nesmith told the press about their situation, and neglected to add that a whole mess of major label acts were in the same boat as the Monkees were.
It may be easy to criticize the Monkees, but it is in no way pointless. The television show was beyond awful and the music wasn't much better.
The music was no different than every successful pop act in the era BB (Before Beatles). Like
Elvis, Sinatra, Jolson, etc., a Monkees album involved assembling some of the country's greatest songwriters (
Harry Nilsson, Michael Martin Murphy, John Stewart, Neil Diamond, Louise Goffin, Carole King, Carole Bayer Sager, Holland/Dozier/Holland, etc.) and having some of the planet's best instrumentalists play them. Duh, winning?!?
The TV series mostly got old real fast, due to a horrible sameness from one episode to the next. In fact, the reason there was no season 3 was that at the end of season 2 the Monkees announced to the executives at Screen Gems/NBC-TV that they wouldn't sign up unless there were some
major changes made -- and in reply, the executives at Screen Gems/NBC-TV said...
Fuck the Monkees.
Exactly!
-- mnw
PS: Here's a sad coincidence/comparison: The Monkees' final production as a complete group before their self-destruction in 1970 was the hour-long special "33 & 1/3 Revolutions Per Monkee". This disjointed piece of... something... drags on and on with little plot, lots and lots of filler that doesn't even feature any of the members of the group, and was seen by almost noone at the time of its release. Also, thanks to its nonexistent budget and equally absent care in preservation, the official DVD release of the show suffers from truly wretched video quality and frankly piss-poor audio. Remind you of another swan-song production that was in production at around the same time? ("Kook's Tour", anyone???)
