https://www.facebook.com/TheMonkees/...7379701612400/
Like last Thursday being Star Trek Day per the 50th Anniversary of the Pilot Episode, today is the 50th Anniversary of The Monkees Television Series.
Antenna TV is running a marathon this Sunday in Celebration.
I've been watching them regularly on FamilyNet for the last few months.
The money's in!
We're made of tin!
Let's do it all again!
I loved the music and tv show as a kid and still enjoy their music. I saw the tour with Mike, Mickey and Peter. Huge fun.
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The Monkees put me on the path to true music LOVE (at age 8) and I never looked back. Saw a reunion in the mid '80's (minus Mike) but was still a truly great experience.
I remember watching them when I was a little bugger. I always did like "Pleasant Valley Sunday" which I know they did not write but I still like it.
final show with Nesmith (apparently).
^This entire show is on Dime (audio).
Ya know, I realize this is nitpicking, but I just realized a slight error int his statement. The Thursday in question (September 8th) wasn't the 50th anniversary of the Pilot episode airing, but rather the anniversary of the first episode airing. There were two pilots for Star Trek, the first of which, The Cage, didn't air on TV until the late 80's (though much of it was actually used in the two part The Menagerie later in the first season).Originally Posted by mnprogger
The second pilot, Where No Man Has Gone Before, aired as something like the third or fourth episode of the series. The first episode to air (chosen by whichever NBC henchman who was given the job of doing so) was called The Man Trap, and according to Nimoy, it was one of six episodes they had completed at the time, and the one that the production team was least happy with. And Star Trek was the first series where a network commissioned a second pilot after rejecting the first one.
Yeah, I know one week later, it doesn't really matter, and I don't know why I didn't spot this last week when the OP first appeared, but that's what happens sometimes.
[QUOTE=JJ88;616477]Actually, it was still commonplace at the time for bands to do outside material. That was changing, a lot of bands (spurred on by The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, in particular) were writing their own songs, but there was still a lot of bands relying heavily on cover tunes and other material they themselves didn't write.I think that's always been an issue for some, in an era where many bands were writing their own material- I can understand it.
I think the big issue most people had was the extensive use of studio musicians. There's one episode where, during one of the interview bits they'd stick at the end of many episodes, Mike Nesmith even addresses the matter. He says someone walked up to him just before a concert, "Is it true that you don't play your own instrument?". He says "I"m fixing to go onstage in front of 50,000 people, if I don't play my own instrument, I'm in big trouble!". I even remember this being brought when I mentioned The Monkees in a music store sometime in the mid 90's, someone said "But they didn't even play on their own records".
Of course, what most people didn't know was that the use of studio musicians was standard operating procedure at the time, particularly in LA, where The Monkees recorded. There's lots of records by "bands", including some who get a great deal more respect than The Monkees, where there's maybe one or two guys from the band playing on the record.
There was the perception that The Monkees were "actors playing musicians", and were hired for reasons other than their musical ability. Well, first of all, that's actually them singing on the records, so at the very least, they must have wanted performers who could sing. And all four of them actually had some experience in music. Tork and Nesmith were both singer/songwriters. Jones had recorded several singles as a vocalist, and Dolenz had been in a couple teenage bands that he was in after his first burst of fame (he was on a TV show in the late 50's called Circus Boy).
The other thing is, there was the perception that The Monkees were riding on the coattails of the Beatles, in particular, there's the widely held belief that the show was a knock off of A Hard Day's Night and Help. It's pretty obvious that there's a lot of similarities...a quartet (one of them English, no less), with "personalities" like The Beatles had (ie "the cute one", "the funny one", etc). Bob Rafelson has always insisted that he had the idea for The Monkees way before The Beatles hit America, but it's likely that, if nothing else, it was the success of A Hard Day's Night that made executives say, "Hey, we should do something like that".
Daily Nightly was actually written by Nesmith. He actually had songs on every Monkees album he played on. One of his best songs, actually, is Circle Sky, from the Head movie (you have to actually watch the movie to hear the awesome live version used therein, becuase some idiot decided to substitute an inferior studio version on the soundtrack album).But the quality of the songs are inarguable. I'd say 'Pleasant Valley Sunday', a Goffin/King track, is their best record, and there are some really great lesser-known songs- 'Daily Nightly', 'Star Collector' (some early Moog on these two tracks) and 'Love Is Only Sleeping' spring to mind.
And from Headquarters onwards, the other also wrote or co-wrote songs that appeared on the albums. The closing theme for the second season, For Pete's Sake, was written by Peter, and Randy Scouse Git was written by Mickey. And though Davy's songs aren't as well known, he had some nice pop type material on some of those later records, too.
And yes, Daily Nightly and Star Collector are possibly the first two rock tracks to feature a Moog synthesizer. The synth actually belonged to Mickey, who bought one after seeing it being demonstrated at a booth at the Monterey Pop Festival, and that's him playing it on Daily Nightly (on Star Collector it's studio musician Paul Beaver playing it).
The new album is pretty killer.
The Prog Corner
And let us not forget that the Jimi Hendrix Experience opened for the Monkees on their first concert tour...
Just for the first few shows, though. Jimi got tired of playing to a bunch of teenyboppers who didn't dig his music, so he quit. I'm not sure who, but somebody cooked up this phony press release that said that The Daughters Of The American Revolution were protesting Jimi's "erotic" act being put on in front of the "wholesome" Monkees, with that supposedly being the reason Jimi was dropped from the bill for subsequent shows.
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