I’ve heard the live Robert Wyatt version and it ROCKS.

I love that. That’s one of those ideas that floats around in your head for a long time in a muddled state and then someone else says it exactly right and the light bulb goes on.

“Poor Side of Town” was a ballad - possibly Johnny Rivers’ only hit that he wrote himself - that starts with him singing, “Doo doo doo wah, shooby doowee. (Which looks like Sinatra in print, but doesn’t sound like him as Johnny delivers it.) The real hook is a neat little guitar lick, but I don’t know how to present a typed facsimile.

It’s very interesting that you compare “Clarksville” to “Paperback Writer.” I heard a radio interview with Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart and one of them said that he was in his car one night when he heard the last few notes of the new Beatles’ single, “Paperback Writer,” fading into the distance on his car radio. He thought it had a great riff. but he mis-heard the lyric as “Last train something-something.” So he and his partner took that initial inspiration and wrote “Clarskville.” (That place name turned out to be the name of a major embarcation point for soldiers headed to Vietnam, giving it another layer of meaning that I assume the writers hadn’t anticipated.)

wwolfe

You’re right about ‘Stepping Stone’ which my book says got to 20 in the US charts. It wasn’t listed on the UK chart, but obviously became well-enough known to inspire plenty of covers. Mickey Dolenz directed the video of PJ & Duncan’s version, you know.

The show itself, at least for its first year before the creativity dried up, was hilarious and was unlike any previous TV show, and in some ways took the Lester films farther. Their basic plots were standard enough - usually “we are four young nonconformist friends who stick with each other” - the nonconformity never really being spelled out (no more than the theme song, wherein they declared themselves the young generation with something to say, ever actually said anything), but the details would head towards lunacy. I remember once the lads are romping around on the beach, leaping over sand dunes, and the last one, Peter, is about to leap, and suddenly it’s not sand on the other side, but a sheer cliff. And even better, there was the episode where Davey has something he has to stay home for, and the other fellows, having to go out and realizing that Davey is Davey and likely therefore to wander away if left on his own, handcuff his leg to a chair so he’ll stay put. But after they leave, a party invitation is delivered to Davey, so he takes off anyway, dragging the chair along with him. The guys come home, find both Davey and chair missing, and run up and down the city streets looking for him. Suddenly they sight him from the back, in the distance, a guy with a chair trailing along in his gait. So they run up to him, pull him by the shoulder, say “Hey Davey,” and oops! It’s not Davey but some other guy who also happens to be wandering around the same city on the same day with a chair chained to his leg. “Sorry,” they tell him, and run off and find Davey.

I don’t know if Nicholson was involved in any of the scriptwriting, but the show was a Bob Rafelson production and definitely tried for a genial hipness.

“I’m a Believer” was one side of what was a TWO-SIDED SINGLE, the other side getting a lot of airplay (though not as much as “Believer”), which probably helped propel the record to number one and keep it there for seven weeks. And unlike “Believer,” the flip was not particularly modeled on the Beatles (or to the extent it was, it was the Beatles of “You Can’t Do That” and “Day Tripper”). In fact, it used what was becoming a standard formula in the U.S.: instrumentals taken from Yardbirds (or Animals or Kinks or Them), vocal attack taken from Jagger. Dolenz was weak as Jagger, of course, but that didn’t undercut the impact of the overall sound, which was hard and angry. Or at least it was for a 12 year old listening through the ears of 1966, and I guarantee you that I did not feel an ontological difference between “Steppin’ Stone” and “Hanky Panky,” “Mother’s Little Helper,” “96 Tears,” “When I Was Young,” “Too Much to Dream,” “Get Me to the World On Time,” “Pushin’ Too Hard,” “Psychotic Reaction,” etc. etc. etc. Also - Rosie take note - the chord pattern for “Steppin’ Stone” (with one variation, “Steppin’ Stone” starting on a major chord where its models started on a minor) is taken from the Yardbirds’ “For Your Love” and the Animals’ “House of the Rising Sun.” Also, it’d be wrong to set up “Believer” and “Steppin’ Stone” as some kind of Ying and Yang, “I’m a Believer” vs. “I’m NOT a Believer,” seeing as how “I’m a Believer” contains within itself the same tension, what the narrator used to feel before his conversion:

What?s the use in trying
All you get is pain

Such stuff, which pop music conveyed then and conveys now - love or pain (which pretty easily morphed into “love is pain,” in fact that’s exactly what it is in the “before” part of “I’m a Believer”) - had a not necessarily great effect on my budding sense of what romance was to be.

My mum was a Monkees fan, so when they repeated the TV series in my childhood, she insisted we watch it. I didn’t really understand it to be honest, but I liked the car and there were some great tunes too; ‘Daydream Believer’ was back in the charts at the time, and for some reason I quite liked ‘DW Washburn’.

Random free-association memory: my Mum telling my Dad what ‘Alternate Title’ was really called. Or at least, telling him that the initials were “RSG” but refusing to go further until my brother and I had gone to bed. I did find out eventually though, don’t worry.

Can’t think of a THING to say about the Monkees. They were made up, they made some pop trash we love because we were young, they went away.

Or they almost did. Check out Michael Nesmith’s country records from the 70s, and you’ll find out what happens when the record company isn’t dragging the talent in whatever direction it deems profitable. I remember Newmith being interviewed on Newsight (or its equivalent) shortly after the Monkees broke up. They had the decency to play a few bars, and he was in tears.

Which kind of sums up what the Monkees product stood for.

The Monkees, I think, were a decent enough band (even when they actually did play there own instruments), but had the misfortune of being the end product of a typically American all-things-to-all-people commercial scheme in the form of entertainment. They were the pre-fab four as opposed to the Fab Four, but they came along just at the time it became evident that the Beatles were no longer “cute.” Thus they filled a certain need the public had for “cute” teenybop attractions in their music and in their programme. The attempts to rip-off A Hard Day’s Night are more than evident in their TV series–but it goes without saying that they fell quite short of the mark in attempting to replace the Beatles. (Indeed, the landscape is littered with the corpses of those who foolishly tried to do just that.)

Despite all that, the song is, as Tom says, certainly a well-crafted piece of pop work that beats much of what was produced in 1966-67, and the lads were surely not without talent. I don’t know if any of them actually played any instrument(s) on the recording–but the unrelenting and infectuous optimism of the vocals is surely worth at least a bit of applause.

[But now that you mention it, I suppose most of us who have been born since the television age began were probably traumtised by that medium at some tender age. Personally, I was given nightmares by a number of Disney films. So much for wholesome entertainment.]

A historical footnote: the Monkees’ first single, “Last Train to Clarksville,” hit #1 on the American charts before their TV show aired its first episode. This is not to argue that the show wasn’t crucial to their chart success, but it might explain why I never think of their music in connection with their show, despite having watched the show every week when I was a kid: ultimately, the only thing that lasts is what’s in the grooves. (Or, nowadays, in the binary code.)

wwolfe

And the TV Show was just a serialized Hard Days Night. Can you think of any other reason for such tosh ?

You’ve never seen ” A Hard Day’s Night ” ?

i have owned JC Penney shirts from charity shops. whilst i don’t think they had shops, i think they sold in concessions in dept stores (this is a guess).

AK - don’t remember.

ST

You are right about the RHG.

the red hand gang was better than the monkees anyway…