Originally Posted by
GuitarGeek
One thing about The Monkees you hear is "Oh, but they didn't play their own instruments". Well, neither did anyone else who was recording in LA at the time. In fact, I just saw a great documentary on the topic a few months ago, called The Wrecking Crew. That's not the Beach Boys playing on Pet Sounds or Smiley Smile, that's not the Association playing on Windy or Cherish, that's not Gary Lewis And The Playboys on This Diamond Ring, and it's not the Marketts on Out Of Limits either (in fact, the Marketts, as an actual band, didn't even exist when Out Of Limits was recorded. The band was formed later after the single was a hit, and they "needed" to go on tour). Oh, and apart from Roger McGuinn, that's not The Byrds on Mr Tambourine Man and it's respective B-side (the only time nearly the entire original Byrds got shoehorned out of their own record, incidentally).
Even in the 70's and 80's (possibly to this very day) there are lots of records where studio rats deputized for band members. Alice Cooper, Aerosmith, Kiss, Cheap Trick, and Chicago all made use of studio deputies at one point or another. Billy Sherwood once told me Outside/Inside by The Tubes was "pretty much Toto pretending to be The Tubes".
So that whole "they didn't play on their own records" thing smacks of ignorance and/or hypocrisy.
While it's true they did a lot of songs by outside songwriters, once Kirshner got his ass fired by Col-Gems (and that's exactly what happened because he put out a single he wasn't unauthorized to release), they actually did a lot of their own songs. Eight out of fourteen songs on Headquarters (the first album they did after Kirshner was deposed) were written or co-written by band members. OK, so on the subsequent albums the outside songwriters outnumber the group written songs, but so what? Some of those are great tunes.
It's also worth noting that the Monkees are remembered as "bubblegum teenyboppers", the truth is the TV show, the movie (don't tell me you've never seen Head) and even some of the music were rather satirical. Especially during the second season, the TV show took a "biting the hand that feeds" approach to commenting on the TV industry and the blatantly manufactured aspect of the group.
There's one episode where the plot hinges on the band walking off the set because they tired of doing the same story every week (the rest of the episode is basically an extended "romp" in Paris, whilst Bob Rafelson figures out how to rework the script so it will be "different", though as I recall it's invariably trivial stuff he changes). One episode had Peter selling his soul so he could play the harp (kinda like the Faustian covenant they had agreed when they were cast on the show), with the band blatantly flaunting the fact that, at the time, you couldn't say the hell on TV (at one point, Mickey even looks directly into the camera and says that's the scariest thing of all).
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