Yes, that. I feel like a big piece of my childhood, which is a big piece of me, has been ripped right out. It’s gone. I didn’t worship Davy Jones. He was just a part of my life, and that’s gone. It sounds stupid. I’m intelligent enough to have thought, “hey, one of the Monkees will die sometime”.
But I didn’t think about that, because I was living a life, and when it happened I was taken stupidly by surprise.
It’s like those things you take for granted. Your parents love you. You have this pink blanket. The earth revolves around the sun. Don’t have to think about it!
Then, wham. It’s stupid, but it still hurts. Davy Jones?!? I never once thought of him dying. He was always there.
Some time in the morning…
Yeah, that’s a song Micky sang, but I adored him at LEAST as much. Maybe more. Shit. Is he okay? I’m old.
The Righteous Brothers recorded an updated version of Rock and Roll Heaven in 1992. I wish I could find lyrics (I know them, just can’t post them). It was a tribute to Elvis, John Lennon, Roy Orbison, Jackie Wilson, Rick Nelson, Dennis Wilson, Marvin Gaye, Sam Cooke, Cass Elliot, and Stevie Ray Vaughn.
Some of the opening lines went:
“Elvis loved us tender.
John cried, ‘Give peace a chance.’
And Roy introduced us to his Pretty Woman.”
If anybody wants to check the song out, it’s called “Rock and Roll Heaven '92” and it’s available for download from Amazon for 99 cents. You can also listen to a 30 second preview, but IMO it’s a worthy companion piece to the 1974 original.
If you’ve got Antenna TV http://www.antennatv.tv/ in your area, they’re running the entire series of the Monkees this weekend starting Saturday at 5pm and then just straight on through until Sunday night, and immediately following it with the Monkees movie, Head.
She did, which is why she wears such an enormous right shoe to hide it.
My understanding is that Dolenz and Jones were super close from the beginning and the other two were basically people they worked with. They were roommates from before the first episode until Jones moved in with his girlfriend (later baby-mama, later wife), and then Mickey and Davy kept performing together years after the Monkees grew up (for a while with Boyce and Hart as “the new Monkees” but, for obvious reasons, that didn’t work). After that Mickey visited Jones in England and liked it so much he moved there where he reinvented himself as a TV producer, mainly in commercials, occasionally peforming with Jones at minor gigs mostly for fun until the Monkeemania of the 1980s changed their lives.
Nesmith and Tork had muted solo careers before Nesmith ventured into video (after he resolved some major IRS problems and later inherited part of the Liquid Paper fortune) and Tork became a music and yoga instructor. (In interviews Tork seems absolutely humorless, but I’m aware that those can be misleading.)
The Monkees comeback in the 1980s is one of the great “who knew?” success stories of all time. The success of the repeats on MTV let people know there was a market for a reunion but it was expected to maybe fill out B and C list venues, yet ended up being second only to that years Guns & Roses tour in revenue. Even adjusted for inflation Jones, Dolenz, and Tork earned more for their tour and from royalties in that year from the tour and the sales of Monkee albums (mostly the reissued on CD originals but also their new recordings) than they earned in all of the years since the Monkees were formed combined. Only the STAR TREK movies come to mind as being a more lucrative wave of nostalgia.
I’m not one bit surprised. If the Monkees tour in the 80’s had been anywhere near where I live, I would have been in the front row. There are millions of us baby-boomers (yeah, maybe too many), and a lot of us have time and money to spend. As long as our favorites from the past are still up to touring (Peter Frampton, for example, just an EXCELLENT show), we’ll be there. We old people like music, we like to have fun, too, believe it or not. Who else are we supposed to go see? Justin Bieber? Some rapper?
One thing that made the Monkees 1986 tour such a phenomena was it was both the Boomers and their teenagers going to see it; it was a similar crowd when Paul McCartney did his late '80s and early '90s tour.
The Mirror did a story on him recently in the wake of the cancelled Monkees tour (he wasn’t part of it).
I wouldn’t have recognised him, and Mike was my favorite* – he’s really changed appearance in the last ten years or so, and not just the usual ‘Well of course, he’s got old!’
The videos he made in the 70s/80s plus ‘Doctor Duck’ are incredibly funny; unfortunately when he transferred a lot of them to dvd, he didn’t include a lot of the best bits.
*How can you not like a guy who gave us Neighborhood Nuclear Superiority
