No, it turned out to be the opposite. They were much better without Davy.
Let me admit right up front that this was a nostalgia concert, not a music concert. Some 60s survivors can still do music. I saw Steve Winwood earlier this year and he and his band cooked. The Monkees didn’t. They were, oddly, much more like The B-52s on their current tour.
Start from the top. Filing in, we saw two longs lines and joined the one that was moving. Turned out to be the line to enter the auditorium. The other endless line was for … t-shirts. Ka-ching! Inside a big screen was playing clips, interviews, and an endless Kool-Aid commercial with the Monkees in an amusement park that isn’t on YouTube. (A much-edited slice is.) Made me wish I arrived a lot earlier.
More younger people were in the crowd than I expected, although it was at the Center for the Arts at the University of Buffalo so that must have played a big part. Nice place. I hadn’t been there before.
The screen stayed busy through the whole show. As much as possible the visuals were associated with the song being played. That meant that the video for “Goin’ Down” played while Mickey sang it. Clips from their movie *Head *accompanied the six[!] songs they did. At other times they showed a montage of fan magazine covers or girls whose eyes sparkled when looking lovingly at Davy. The Davy tribute was well-handled. They left the stage regularly as a couple of videos of him singing and his audition tape ran. And they pulled a women from the audience to sing “Daydream Believer” rather than re-assigning the song.
Mickey can still belt them out, though he doesn’t have much range. Mike has a pleasant voice for a celebrity. Peter’s voice is almost gone. One of the backup musicians had to double his voice for most of his leads. At several points five guitars were going at once, making a solid underpinning for the thin singing. But they also had a section with the three of them alone and it held up okay. The backups included Mickey’s sister, Coco, and Mike’s son Chris (yes, Mike was married with a baby during the Monkees heyday: shades of John Lennon!).
The highlights were the huge dose of Mike’s songs, solid early country rock, and the tribute to Headquarters, including “Randy Scouse Git,” never before played live, and the very pretty “For Pete’s Sake,” written by Pete and blasted into everyone’s neurons as the tv show’s closing theme.
What made it all work was the solidness of the original music. It’s almost impossible to remember today that The Monkees were an album band, not a singles group. They had five top 5 hits, fewer than Herman’s Hermits or the Dave Clark Five. It was the albums, at least the first four, that made them great, with good songs from top to bottom and little filler. Headquarters, a #1, multi-platinum album, didn’t have a single single in it. That’s not the way we remember them. And how many other albums of that era can you say that of? (The songs from *Head *were unmemorable, at best, but they weren’t bad.)
Only four shows left, and they’re probably sold out. If you can grab a ticket, do so. They may not live to do another tour. At times they didn’t look like they would live to leave the stage. Make all the old jokes you want. They got through it and most of the audience lived long enough to reach the parking lots. A triumphant evening at my age.
