Tear The Top Right Off Your Million Dollar Head

The Monkees HEAD movie has been a passion of mine for decades. One of my most-watched movies, right up there with Kubrick, the Marx Brothers, and It's A Mad Mad Mad Mad World. And the album soundtrack remains endlessly playable. There have been numerous [finger-waggle] "alternative" versions over the years, both digital and physical, but they've always been basically playlists of alternative versions of the songs, and/or songs not on the original album but recorded contemporaneously. There's been no attempt at new sound collages using the wealth of material now available. So I assembled all the sources (the various Rhino special editions, the movie soundtrack itself, and other Monkees recordings) and started on something that at the very least showed me why no-one had attempted this before. It's hard.

The original soundtrack album uses sound collages made in the studio by (among others) Jack Nicholson, and they add the mind-fuck element I wanted more of. Working out the song sequence, I made the mildly controversial decision to axe Davy Jones's minor contribution (singing a crap Nilsson vaudeville number) because a) it doesn't fit the vibe, man, and b) it's a crap Nilsson vaudeville number, which everyone needs less of. For all his many qualities, Jones could never be described as a "head", and it's telling that the song he co-wrote for the movie (Changes - a working title for the movie) was so far off the mark it was never used. And there's a "where's Davy?" sub-theme in the movie which works nicely here. The songs I finally chose are mostly unfamiliar versions of the familiar tracks (including a rare non-Rhino stereo version of the original album sound collage that'll make your head swim with the mermaids), or entirely new songs chosen for their appropriateness, recorded during the right time frame. It's worth remembering that there were never any recording sessions devoted to making the Head album. Nesmith's lyric for Hollywood seems to distill the essence of the movie, even playing on the end-is-the-beginning trope that informs the entire movie. There - I said trope and informs in the same sentence, to keep the Millennials happy. To compensate for less Jones, there's more Tork, more Dolenz, more Nesmith. More songs. Exactly which and where I leave you to discover. And more trippy mind-fuck sound collage, winding in and out of it all. See if you can spot the Added Frankness, and the almost subliminal Firesign Theatre snippet. I used Audacity (the great free audio program) to edit everything together at granular level in one seamless file - this is absolutely not a playlist, dude, it's immersive.

You'll need headphones, and half an hour to yourself. If you have neither, you may want to pass on this. Otherwise, relax and float down a different stream for a while.