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Mission Statement: to do very little, for very few, for not very long. Disappointing the easily pleased since 1819. Not as good as it used to be from Day One. History is Bunk - PT Barnum. Artificially Intelligent before it was fashionable. Fat camp for the mind! Nothing lasts, but nothing is lost. The Shock of the Old! Often bettered, never imitated. "Wenn du lange in einen Abgrund blickst, blickt der Abgrund auch in dich hinein" - Pauly Shore.
Wow that's going to keep you busy FT3, I can see a definitive edit or alternative version coming from the Foamy Island in the future.
ReplyDeleteI'll leave it as it is, thanks! I already have five versions of the album, including extended/deluxe versions. I need help.
Delete"Hello, my name is Farq and I'm a Monkaholic...."
DeleteI'm not sure "help" is the right word, but I've mail-ordered for you a boatload of rhino tranqs which should arrive, what with the holidays and all, sometime next May.
DeleteI'm still waiting for that sack of soup greens you sent me back in August.
DeleteThank you sir!
ReplyDeletesister is two years younger than myself she went from listening to the stones the animals to the monkees i thought it must've been a girl thing from grungy to davey i couldn't advise her being already on the street by then myself
ReplyDeletei just couldn't give these guys a serious listen... am i the only one ?
....woody
Everything's serious in WoodyWorld©!
Deleteyou sir always make me smile
Delete...woody
Yes!! Sweet deliverable. An abundance of extras also. Thanks.
ReplyDeleteF word here!
ReplyDelete... gimme an I!
DeleteAll I can say is woe to those who disparage the Monkees . . . --Muzak McMusics
ReplyDeleteI say this ...
Deletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rzoPSV4ua94
Thank you, for the super-cut from So. Many. Films. that use the particular cliché, and for the juicy box of Monkees. I was exactly the correct age for a TV show about musician/scamps to suck me in, and I don't particularly regret that. Catchy music, and a valued sliver of my musical diet ever since.
DeleteD in California
Real Rock Stars (Zappa, Neil Young, CSN etc.) and the LA crowd in general had no problem with the Monkees. They all "got it", were in on it. They didn't play their own instruments on their records? They were basically actors, and most of the major LA groups didn't, either. Didn't write their own material? They wrote a fair bit of it, including some hits. Again, if you can rope in the best musicians and writers on the planet, why the fuck not? It's the records that count, and they made first-rate pop records that knocked everyone else off the top of the charts, and a crazily entertaining TV show, and the best movie ever made by a pop group. Yes, I skip most of the Davy Jones songs, but that still leaves a few hundred to enjoy.
DeleteA fabulous record, easily in the Top 10 best albums of 1967 (or 1968, as it came out at the tail end of '67). OF COURSE the Rolling Stone critical crowd hated records like this; I never forget the savaging they gave to Paul McCartney's RAM ("Ram represents the nadir in the decomposition of Sixties rock...Ram is so incredibly inconsequential and so monumentally irrelevant you can’t even do that with it: it is difficult to concentrate on, let alone dislike or even hate."
ReplyDeleteThe Monkees were the naked lunch where we could see what was on the end of every fork in the L.A. scene: studio musicians...most of whom were jazzbos who wanted to play bebop...playing pop-rock written by Goffin-King or up-and-comers like Harry Nilsson, Neil Diamond, Randy Newman.
Authenticity is overrated. Give a listen to Mick Jagger drawling his way through "Down Home Girl" (written by Leiber-Butler) and ask yourself if Mr. London School of Economics could really tell if a woman had "been walkin' through the cotton fields" from actual observations of a real cotton field. That's at least as phony as anything the Monkees ever did but, in both cases, I care not. What matters is what's down in the grooves, and I love these records.
I suspect there's something that came out of folk music, some desire that the musician actually be the character in the song. You can't sing about riding in boxcars unless you really rode the rails through Nebraska drinking Sterno strained through a bandana, which is why we think Bruce Springsteen knows how to adjust a Rochester 4-barrel carburetor and why Dylan claimed he'd traveled with a carnival.
Why hold the Monkees to a standard that isn't applied to any of these other strolling players?
There's also a solid argument that they were on to country-rock before any of 'em....they were recording that 1st LP a few weeks before Buffalo Springfield was in the studio in the summer of '66.
The Monkees were hated (incredible that the word is accurate) especially by those who thought The Beatles were inviolate, and that The Monkees were some kind of cheap copy and an insult to the Art of Pop - the Pre-Fab Four. In a sense they were; a bunch of savvy businessmen, inspired by the Fabs' zany on-screen antics, rushed together a TV show to milk the teenybopper cash cow. At the inception of the show, nobody expected the records to be anything other than a side effect. But this is exactly what makes them so interesting - unlike every other group, they were hired as actors to play a pop group. They didn't form a band because they wanted to make records. The hits surprised everybody. Nobody cared that they didn't write the songs, or play the instruments (although they did a bit of both), because the records were so damn great. Last Train To Clarksville? Wow. The Springfield hit that never was. I'm A Believer? Eternally great, the essence of what pop can do. And the hits kept on coming. It looked so easy - another cause for resentment from the Authenticators. Where was the struggle? Where were the lean years? Where was the craft apprenticeship, the years on the road? Art does not happen like this, dammit! BOO!!
DeleteThe story didn't stop there. In a few months, Nesmith in particular exerted independence of artistic control based on talent, and they became a Real Group, playing live and recording the statement Headquarters album (a hit) themselves.
In the end, it's the records that matter, and Monkees records are as good/bad as records made by any other pop group. Wiggly lines in plastic do not discriminate, teenage ears do not listen to back stories, and that's the story of pop.
And Pisces Aquarius, from that shimmeringly lovely cover on in, is as perfect a capsule of the summertimes of our lives as anything.
And some will never get it, not even in retrospect.
I've been thinking about "cheap copies." Third-rate copies are what I try to avoid; what I love is a FIRST RATE copy. Consider, say, Mouse & the Traps doing "A Public Execution." This is a knock-off of Bob Dylan's 1966 sound, but it's an EXCELLENT copy, with the added bonus of better singing than you usually find on a Dylan record.
DeleteI'm not going to pretend the Monkees were the artistic equals of the Beatles; they didn't write as much (or as well), and they weren't as good on their instruments...but again, we come back to what is actually in the grooves, man, and we can argue that Carole King was as good a writer as Paul McCartney or James Burton a better guitar player than George Harrison. I'd urge us to NOT make niggling little comparisons and just ENJOY THE RECORDS. The Monkees made top notch pop records, a handful of which can proudly stand right next to the Beatles.
*whorehouse lesbian show applause*
DeleteIt's all about the records. Everything else is back story. And (Carole King's) Porpoise Song (f'rinstance) is as good a record as almost any and better than most.
This has got me on to "Who are some other first rate copy-cats?" And I thought of "On The Dark Side" by John Cafferty and the Beaver Brown Band. It's top notch fake Springsteen. "Lies" by the Knickerbockers is a first class knock-off of the Beatles. Greta Van Fleet is very good fake Led Zeppelin.
DeleteGreta Van Fleet? They still going? Must be in their teens by now ...
Delete(The comments have changed the status of this epochal piece to "permanent" - thanks as ever particularly to draftervoi.)
ReplyDeleteThe TV show wuz pretty cheezy, but "clever" for the time. Rose Marie wuz a regular, as I recall, and guests such as FZ were "far-out". Always loved Nes (a fellow Texan that attended San Antonio College a few years prior to me).
ReplyDeleteYou can't deny the talent of the writers & the Wrecking Crew and their own work. Goin' Down was a favorite 45 that I still have. They were better than their reputation, but not the best band that ever wuz. I've got more Nes than Monkees in my collection, but yeah, they put out some good stuff.
The distinction between a group and their records is too subtle for some to make. I don't think anyone other that a twelve year-old in 1967 would claim that The Monkees are "the best band that ever wuz". Or that any band is, come to that.
DeleteI'm not claiming they were a great "band," either. The records were wonderful. They were a collaborative studio effort. Consider the sources: Neil Diamond, Boyce-Hart, Jeff Barry, Goffin-King, Carole Bayer Sager, David Gates, Mann-Weil, Leiber-Stoller, Harry Nilsson, John Stewart on songwriting...to pick out a few session musician names...Hal Blaine, James Burton, David Briggs, Earl Palmer, Glen Campbell, Larry Knechtel, Neil Young, Tommy Tedesco, Leon Russell, Jerry Scheff, Ry Cooder, Doug Dillard, Neil Sedaka, Jim Gordon...
Delete... Davy Jones on maracas ...
Delete"On my left Sir Kenneth Clark, bass sax... a great honour, sir"
Delete"And looking very relaxed ..."
DeleteCount Basie Orchestra on triangle. Thank you.
DeleteNot gonna type out my whole argument that I have to use way too often,... but I maintain, in a unique way of popularizing music-rock music- as a passion that was so much fun to pursue, they were as influential in so many people picking up instruments an starting a band as any other band - Yes, that includes the fabs, as well.
ReplyDeleteYou mean ... *clutches pearls* ... as influential as the Velvet Underground ??? ... *faints* ...
DeleteFarq, that was a genuine LOL here. I listen to both V.U. and the Pre-fab Four, but the latter a bit more than the former. Different bands for different moods, I'd say.
DeleteD in California
Even as influential as the Banana Splits.
DeleteOK, that made me laugh. I think I have shared here before the story of when my pal Ronnie and I were literally jumping on the beds in his room screaming along to the Monkees (I believe it was "Stepping Stone" that drove Richard over the edge) when his eldest brother came in, took it off, and made us listen to a side of the Velvet Underground, who I later came to love. We hated it. Give us back our Monkees. And, honestly, my kids loved the Monkees and now my grandkids do too. And one kid shares my love for the Velvet Underground...the rest not so much.
ReplyDeleteMonkees & the VU--as my grandson often says when given a choice: both.
An article in which Louie Shelton, the guitar player on "Last Train To Clarksville" recounts a conversation with John Lennon while he was recording Shelton as a player on the 1975 Lennon solo LP "Rock and Roll," wherein Mr. Lennon compliments him for his guitar playing on the Monkees record. Note that purists will say Shelton's playing on "Clarksville" is fake but his playing on "Rock and Roll" is legitimate. https://www.guitarplayer.com/guitarists/the-accidental-1976-smash-hit-created-by-a-virtuoso-rock-group-and-the-most-recorded-guitarist-in-history
ReplyDeleteAh yes. Rock "purists". That old authenticity thing. There's a comment over at ProfStoned's site where a "purist" laments that the Prof doesn't let us hear the raw tapes before he, you know, corrupts their artistic integrity. These are the people who prefer the "ragged glory" of raw Hendrix tapes to the "Frankenstein" productions of Alan Douglas. They're a miserable breed who prefer studying a menu to enjoying a meal.
DeleteI'm a big fan of primary sources: "Go right to the source, and ask the horse, he'll give you the answer that you endorse, he's always on a steady course, talk to Mr. Ed."
DeleteIn this case the horse says John friggin' Lennon, a guy who might just have an INFORMED OPINION in the Beatles vs. Monkees debate, thought that the guitar playing was pretty good on "Clarksville," and hire the same player to play on one of his LPs. You'd think that it was be enough that the same guy on "Clarksville,,' hired to play on a song the Monkees didn't write was hired by Lennon to play on a song Lennon didn't write, but it's not: one is "authentic" and the other is "product." But which is which?