Here’s the well known story about the Monkees:
In the mid 1960’s– 1966, to be more precise– Screen Gems decided that a TV show inspired by (read– copied from) the Beatles’ movies “Help” and “A Hard Day’s Night”– might be a hit. They already had a young British singer and potential heart-throb Davy Jones under contract so they put out an ad in Variety looking for young male singers/actors and held auditions. They ended up with a couple of actual musical artists in Peter Tork and Michael Nesmith, and a singer Mickey Dolenz. They were hired as employees of Screen Gems and put to work.
The whole project was a typical piece of exploitive corporate derivative trash. It was conceived of as trash, executed as trash, and will never not be be trash, no matter how much nostalgia one wafts over it. It catered to the most manipulable segment of the television audience, adolescents and pre-teens.
The original sin of this project was Screen Gems trying– not too, too hard– to make it look like the Monkees were a real band. They tried to hide the fact that the musicians on their first album were all paid studio ringers, though the vocals were provided by the actual Monkees. On the TV show, the Monkees pretended to be playing their instruments as they performed the songs. They were also pretending to sing, but that goes without saying– almost every piece of dreck at the time used studio recordings dubbed over the video of the performance, even on American Bandstand and Hullabaloo. (Ed Sullivan was, generally, the rare exception.)
The boys did record the vocals, in a studio. Producer Don Kirshner quickly discovered that they had to bring the boys in one at a time or they would clown around endlessly and run up expensive studio time without getting a decent take down.
Here’s the popular conception about it today: the Monkees really wanted to write their own songs and play their own instruments and they complained bitterly that the studio, led by a crass producer, Don Kirshner, wouldn’t let them. Most writers about the issue today are sympathetic to the band members. They were oppressed and exploited by Screen Gems and their talents cruelly repressed.
Because, after all, they really were a great band.
Let’s get that out of the way for a moment: the Monkees were a shallow pop band of no artistic significance whatsoever. Like ABBA and Bobby Sherman and David Cassidy and the Partridge Family, they were a product, shallow, derivative, inane, and trivial. The studio musicians used on the recordings were competent– sometimes excellent– but they were interchangeable parts of a complex of almost mechanical production.
(I saw a recent interview with Bobby Hart, one half of one of the song-writing teams that wrote songs for the band, and he was quietly lobbying for more respect by insisting that “Last Train to Clarksville” was actually a protest song because the narrator had been drafted and was going to Clarksville to be sent overseas: “I don’t know if I’m ever coming home”. Yeah. Deep.)
They began to believe their own press. They became delusional, attributing their popularity to something magical they had in themselves, outside of the entertainment complex that nurtured and managed and exploited them.
I am not sympathetic. I absolutely believe that Michael Nesmith, and Peter Tork, and Davy Jones, and Mickey Dolenz should have been completely free to not sign contracts with Screen Gems, not audition for them, and embark on musical careers on their own, play gigs, rehearse, practice, go to New York, whatever they want. On their own. Without the massive and overwhelming support of the Hollywood machinery that made them famous.
Nesmith might well have had a career. He had money– his mother invented Liquid Paper (that’s a whole other era!) and time. Tork was somewhat known as a solo artist in New York, though I doubt he would ever have become famous. Dolenz and Jones were not going to have an impact anywhere, though Jones might have made it on TV as a Bobby Sherman type teen heartthrob for as long as it lasts. They were all born on third base and thought they hit a triple.
But this righteous indignation! If I had been in Kirshner’s position (as much as I despise him), I would have fired them all and enthusiastically encouraged them to go for it: embark on careers in the music industry and fulfill your heart’s most passionate desires, to write songs and perform with your instruments, and the best of luck to you.
Does that mean we won’t be on TV in prime time every week for a couple of years? Well, no: that’s the job you turned down.
That is not what you were hired for. And that’s not the agreement that was signed. You voluntarily signed up to be actors in a contrived, derivative TV program. Then you decided you wanted to be co-creators of the TV show for which you were hired as actors. The creative jobs were already taken when you signed on. Good bye.
It is unseemly to take advantage of the monumental publicity apparatus Screen Gems provided them and the privileged access it gave you and declare that, as someone else observed, you really are Vulcans.*
It’s similar in some ways to Hilary Clinton running for president. Yes, she may have been cute and had a great hair-style, but she obtained the platform from which to run by virtue of being married to Bill Clinton, who did start from nothing, built a career as a local politician and then a governor, acquired a stable of donors to fund a presidential run, and ran for and won the presidency. He gave you some high-profile jobs in his administration– and a lot of privileged connections– which you leveraged into a Senate run and then a run for the presidency which, against all odds, you lost, to an idiot, the worst candidate for president in 200 years.
She may have been smart. She may have been as qualified as any other presidential candidate in recent history. But there really are lots of those around. She was the fucking wife of a former president who leveraged her privileged access to the corridors of party politics to push herself to the front of the line.
- * Peter Tork stated: “The Monkees creating the album Headquarters was like Leonard Nimoy becoming a Vulcan”. Here.
