Say what you will. The humor of the show was not without its’ subversive aspects. As witness:
You beat me to it. I was going to point out that Peter, Paul & Mary were a manufactured group.
To me the “point” of The Monkees is that they were FUN. I still pull out my DVDs of the series from time to time and get a chuckle out of their antics. The music, whether they wrote it or not or played all the instruments in the studio, still provides joy…and that’s all that matters.
True, but some were actually relevant to the times. For example, The Last Train To Clarksville is about a soldier (implicitly) deploying to a war zone (Vietnam), and, Pleasant Valley Sunday skewered Suburbia, ‘keeping up with the Joneses’, etc.
I was born in 73, but I remember seeing the show in reruns a few times. I remember it being silly and fun. I really enjoyed a lot of their songs. I still sing “Pleasant Valley Sunday” to myself when I’m feeling angsty about my soulless suburban life.
I don’t really care about bands much one way or the other. I like or dislike songs. I don’t much care how “Last Train to Clarksville” came into existence. It could have sprouted from the ground fully formed. It’s a good song.
What was the point of The Brady Bunch or Eight is Enough, those big, jolly loving families where they all had cute sibling-rivalry squabbles but ended up after 20 minutes hand in hand, all smiles? They might have been based on reality, like the ‘Yours Mine and Ours’ movie with 16 kids in one house. I imagine such an existence was rather hellish in reality, and the father of half the kids in YM&O, in real life, was supposedly grossly abusive while the mother of the other half just stood by. But all the big jolly family tv shows made it all funny and fun, all the time, and those shows were certainly manufactured.
According to what I’ve read, you have some things wrong. Minor thing, Ringo was NOT chosen by outsiders, he was chosen by George Paul and John. In fact, Ringo wasn’t allowed to play drums on their first recorded song for George Martin,and a stand-in studio musician was used. You got things entirely wrong with that.
The Monkees were designed and built primarily by one man, who was indeed (as someone else said) trying to cash in on the explosion of monies being made by people lie the Beatles and the others. His original plan was to completely control them, from the songs they performed, to their public appearances. As they developed a streak of independence, he got more and more annoyed with them, and eventually dumped them and created a new, entirely “virtual” band, called “The Archies.”
It wasn’t the Monkees fault the way things went for them, especially that the pop world developed that rabid aversion to crafted “stars,” and forced the Monkees to “get real,” or suffer public humiliation.
By the way, I think it’s a bit much to say they were more popular than the Beatles, except in a fairly narrow short term way. The adoration of the fickle public is a tough thing to measure in that way.
As for record sales, the best bands didn’t always top the charts. The Monkees were on TV from 1966 through 1968. Here are some #1 hits of that time period:
Lightnin’ Strikes - Lou Christie
The Ballad of the Green Berets - Ssgt. Barry Sadler
Hanky Panky - Tommy James and the Shondells
Winchester Cathedral - New Vaudeville Band
Windy - The Association
To Sir with Love - Lulu
Love Is Blue - Paul Mauriat
Tighten Up - Archie Bell and the Drells
Some of these records are pretty good (although “Green Beret” is complete crap, in my opinion). None of them is as good as The Beatles or The Stones best records of the time, though. I think the Monkees’ #1 records were better than most of the stuff on this list.
So if the question is “What was the point of the Monkees TV show?” then the point was entertainment. The TV Monkees were a wholesome version of a rock group, irreverent borrowing the madcap style of the Help! and Laugh-In. The target audience was teeny-boppers, young teens trying to act cool. It was Rock&Roll without the sex and drugs.
The point of the band was to be a band. The actors each had musical talent and frankly were just as good as many of the second tier bands of their day. With the advantage of a TV show to make them known they sold vinyl as well as the top groups, which subjected them to some scorn, but eventually their success and longevity earned them grudging respect in the music biz. Without the TV show they didn’t hold together, but not many bands did.
There’s another thread that asks what movie captures teen life when you were a teen. For teen kids in the 60s, the answer was “none.” Television was as bad or worse. The only shows aimed at a teen audience were music programs. Kids were nice nothings controlled by parents.
The Monkees was a technicolor bombshell in the middle of that wasteland. They lived together on their own. None ever had a mother or father. Their house was a playland. Yet they were hardworking, ambitious, and striving to be great in the one field that was open to teens and that everyone cared about: music. As the show found its feet, it got wilder and wilder. Plots were piffle. Linearity itself went out the door. They were fun. And they appeared at precisely the time that the Beatles stopped touring and disappeared into a studio. The Monkees were accessible and American and everywhere. We thought they were wonderful.
Was the tv show a classic? The first episodes were pretty awful. They got better fast. By the end of the first season/beginning of the second they were as good as any competing show. They won the Emmy for Outstanding Comedy! That was jaw-dropping in those days. It beat Hogan’s Heroes, The Andy Griffith Show, Get Smart, and Bewitched. And deserved to. Yeah, it all fell apart by the end of season two. That’s a shame. But the same thing happened to the Fab Four not all that much later.
The Monkees and More of the Monkees were number one on the charts for the 31 straight weeks in 1966-67. Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones Ltd. added five more weeks. *Headquarters *was one for a single week. To nitpick it was Headquarters, not More of the Monkees that they took control with. It was not a weaker album, despite the charts. It appeared one week before Sgt. Pepper’s, and then spent the entire summer at number two to the most acclaimed album of all time. If not for *Pepper *the Monkees would have spent 44 weeks at number one in 1967. Not even the Beatles ever achieved such domination.
Some art is timely. Some is timeless. The Monkees were the former, The Beatles the latter, though they were timely as well. You had to be there, just as I’ll never get the teen music of today.
The Monkees weren’t about music, Reddy Mercury. They were about rebellion, about political and social upheaval.
I doubt any band that alludes to Robert A. Heinlein is as vapid and shallow as they may present itself.
Heh, just realized that the Monkees are more real than the Gorillaz.
What was the point? Money. Bob Rafelson and Bert Schneider saw The Beatles in Help! and sold the idea of a band of mostly American boys doing the same thing every week on tv. They hired Don Kirshner who saw it as a way to make more $$ off of his stable of songwriters. Headquarters, the first album they made after the ouster of Don Kirshner, was number 1 on the album charts. For a week. Nobody knew Sgt Pepper would come out the next week.
At the time, there were a lot of acts that didn’t play their own instruments. The Mamas & the Papas, Sonny & Cher, The Righteous Brothers, Lulu, hell, everyone from Motown, just off the top of my head.
Interesting you should mention the lack of sex & drugs. I remember watching a reunion style interview of The Monkees in front of a live studio audience(I assume in front of their then middle-aged female fans). Davy Jones, in his light hearted impish manner, made a joke about the band taking drugs at the height of their fame. I have rarely seen a celebrity misjudge his audience so badly. The audience went from adoration & clapping to hissing & booing in an instant. If the females fans of The Monkees were anti drugs in the 1960’s they were *really *anti-drugs as mothers in the late 1980’s.
Interestingly, The Partridge Family recordings were originally planned to be 100% session musicians. When David Cassidy was hired, they didn’t know that he could sing.
A clip from the A Family Thing special with 9-year-old Susan Cowsill stealing the spotlight.
As Stills tells it he never went to audition, but rather to pitch songs. Which the producers were uninterested in, especially since they already had Boyce and Hart on the payroll. But it did inspire him to suggest Tork.
Took me a second to get that. Almost ready to google, then it hit me.
That’s what *Music * is about
Davy Jones was so cute, perfect crush material for a little girl. I loved then and still love “Daydream Believer”.