When talk turns to great albums from 1967, very few people seem to remember that the Monkees put out three albums that year: More of the Monkees (January), Headquarters (May) and Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn, & Jones LTD. (November). Taken as a whole, this is a body of work that stands up favorably to anything anyone else released last year.The latter two have just received Rhino's deluxe reissue treatment with complete albums in mono and stereo plus outtakes and alternate mixes (they did More of the Monkees last year). There are also detailed liner notes by Andrew Sandoval, including new interviews with Mike Nesmith and Peter Tork, and detailed credits of who played on each track. Most songs had Tork, Nesmith, and Dolenz playing all guitars, which should put to bed the myth that the Monkees weren't "real" musicians.
When I visited the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame ten years ago, I asked the curator if there was any chance of the Monkees making the hall of fame. He said probably not, because they weren't (perceived as) a "real" band, just actors who played a band on television. He was just playing devil's advocate for his corporate overlords at Viacom and Rolling Stone, but that argument doesn't hold much weight with me. By the time Headquarters came out, the Monkees were as real as the Byrds or the Doors or any other band. I tried to explain this to the RRHoF curator, but ended up just flipping Jann Wenner the bird under the table.
Relatedly, the next Monkees album in line for a deluxe reissue is The Birds, The Bees, and The Monkees. Here are a barrel of Monkees youtube clips from season two. Who's a "real band" now?
Bonus Question: On how many levels of punctuation is the quoted apostropheed "Monkee's" on that poster wrong?
4 comments:
Well, obviously that apostrophe doesn't belong there. Neither do the quotation marks. To get picky: on the rest of the poster, why is there a dash between the date and the year? And there's no need for spaces in "U.S."
I just love how '60s artists put out album after album, without any regard for creating demand. It seems like a sweetly archaic approach to marketing.
Artists from the 60s were more concerned about exploiting demand than creating it. The record label figured that these bands were only going to be around for a few years, so they wanted to grab all the sales they could!
the Monkees were as real as the Byrds or the Doors or any other band
Of course! They did all their own singing, played a lot of the instruments (including almost everything on Headquarters), and wrote and produced a lot of their best records. So they had Hal Blaine play drums on their early records? So did The Byrds, as you allude to.
But because of their TV show-audition origins, you'll never convince the Rock Establishment that they were legit.
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