Right. Which brings me to the statement I always wan to make:
If The Monkees were fake, so was Elvis.
Yes, Elvis really performed those songs. On stage. With a band. Live. Did he write them? Did he Hell. Of course not. We had a thread about it.
So, how was Elvis real while The Monkees were fake? How does that work?
The Monkees were every bit as real as the Brady Bunch Kids and Johnny Fever.
Or Elvis. Or any other pop act which didn’t write their own material.
And since The Monkees wrote their own songs and played their own instruments… uh, how is that not being a real band?
Largely unrelated to the general zeitgeist of this thread, but I just want to question how many of the ladyfolk under 35 are looking at these images and thinking “hot stuff”?
https://peopledotcom.files.wordpress.com/2017/04/the-monkees-2-2000.jpg?w=2000
They don’t even seem to have aged well in particular:
http://www.monkeeslivealmanac.com/uploads/7/8/9/5/7895731/2864203_orig.jpg
The drummer guy looks like Al Franken and the small guy looks…well, a little weird.
They’re not ugly, but they look simply…normal? Was the concept of “handsome” different then, or did the casting agent simply not pay much attention to their looks?
When they tried writing and playing, they were a “real band”. But real mediocre. They stuff they did with session men and outside songwriters is often enjoyable. Ijust disagree with people who feel that by themselves, they were great.
But yeah, they were at the crossroads of a lot of stuff being wriitten by outside songwriters and played by session musicians. Since the Monkees were on the “vast wasteland of television” and appealed to lots of teenage girls, they took more grief than they deserve.
I remember an interview in “Musician” magazine in the early 1980s where 1950s songwriter Doc Pomus poured scorn on people who thought that since Dylan wrote his songs, they could too. Now if one needs to be nasty, maybe Pomus thought his livelyhood was being threatened and reacted that way. Perhaps Dylan’s emergence as a performer began the crusade that everything “must be pure”.
I’ve had a lot of thoughts about this stuff my own self, and while I’ve never heard of Pomus, my apple doesn’t fall far from his tree: What, fundamentally, is wrong with keeping a divide between singer and songwriter? We don’t expect actors to be the people they portray, so why do we expect singers to have a deep, personal connection to the songs they write? Even the most Method of Acting still comes down to reading words written by someone else, under the direction of yet another person, and we view those performances as authentic, or at least as something other than vicious lies.
The rap world is better about this, I think: Rappers can sing about being thugs and pimps with and hoes and drugs and money and caps being popped and urban Gothic grimdark porn while eating at Spago and never participating in any wars not occurring on Twitter. Their criminal front is a put-on, and who thinks otherwise? Who? Nobody.
It comes back to the notion of authenticity, and there are multiple ways to be authentic. The singer-songwriter ideal is just one of them, one which excludes some who are otherwise good performers, just as the purely performer role would exclude those who can hold their own as singer-songwriters but who’d never be considered on the basis of their voice alone.
And, well, historically, nobody expected Caruso to write his own opera. Is classical music less authentic because they’re all cover bands? (Taking “classical” sensu latu, and you can’t complain at me unless you know what I just said without looking it up. So there.)
But, as I said, The Monkees are authentic even by the singer-songwriter standard, even though they weren’t originally meant to be. They’re the creation which went its own direction, as opposed to staying strictly under control. They’re Skynet.
Getting discovered and shaped by a 1-man operation in Memphis (aka Sun Records) and blowing up local radio with a cover of a Big Boy Crudup song is a little different than being prefabbed in Hollywood for a TV, hitting the ground with Brill Building songs and backing by the Wrecking Crew., yes?
At first, I thought you said ‘The dummy guy’.
It seems to me that your second paragraph is a non-sequitur; that you’re changing the subject from whether or not performers write their own material to whether they perform as personas different from who they really are. These are two different things. These rappers you bring up, who sing about being thugs, still may (or may not) write their own material.
Some comedians adapt a persona that’s not who they really are as people. (For example, the Jack Benny character was cheap and miserly, but that’s not how Jack Benny was as a private individual.) Some stand-up comedians write all their own material; some have writers.
And I agree with you that there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with either approach. Why should singers/bands have to write their own material? Though I, personally, tend to prefer the ones that do, and to respect them for their multi-talentedness.
(When it comes to classical music, yes, most performers don’t write their own music. But the way it’s marketed is sometimes focused on the performers, and sometimes on the composers and their compositions. So, personally, I’d rather buy an album or attend a performance of classical music of a specific composition, without worrying about who was performing it as long as they did a good job; but some other people would rather buy an album or attend a performance by a specific performer, without worrying too much about what, specifically, they were going to play.)
‘Great’ is a matter of taste. I think there’s only a small contingent that considers them great based on their music.
The Monkees did emerge in the age of the singer-songwriter, that’s the ‘realness’ that most bands would claim in that era. But tons of music is studio produced now, and even then bands covered songs written by others. I’m no big Monkees fan (although I did enjoy the TV show at the time), they were just a pop band, certainly not as much of an affront to the gods of rock and roll than the Archies who were a band of cartoon characters with a number one hit.
Originally, “The Monkees” was a sitcom inspired by The Beatles’ movie “A Hard Day’s Night.” Peter and Mike were genuinely talented musicians, but that was almost irrelevant to the casting directors: they were hired as ACTORS, just like Davy and Micky. They Monkees weren’t originally a rock group, just actors PLAYING a rock group on TV.
The show needed songs for the “band” to play, and the producers hired Don Kirschner to handle that. He had a stable of great songwriters, including Carole King, Neil Diamond and Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart. He also knew the best session musicians around(Hal Blaine, Leon Russell, Carol Kaye, Glen Campbell, etc.). The early Monkees records were just Davy or Micky singing well crafted pop songs with some of the world’s best musicians.
Were these songs masterpieces? No, but they were usually catchy and fun. And the sitcom itself won an Emmy as Best Comedy.
The show and the music weren’t always great, but they were much, much better than they had to be and much better than anyone had a right to expect.
Correct, except that the Monkees very quickly started fighting for the chance to play their own instruments on their albums. Starting with their third album, they were performing the material. Mick and Peter were professional musicians to begin with, and Mickey learned to play the drums adequately enough. One of the episodes actually documented their life stage show.
Note that Lillian Roxon, author of The Rock Encyclopedia, said that by their third album putdowns of the group by other musicians were simply not done.
Still, he’s right about how we view actors who write their own material: we know that some of them do it, and – we don’t, by and large, care, do we? If you’re a movie star who wins Oscar after Oscar for your acting, we don’t sneer at you for not banging out screenplays before delivering your lines; we just stop and look off to the side and go oh, yeah, I’d forgotten about that when reminded that so-and-so actually writes the occasional script instead of just memorizing lines from it.
Mike has retired from touring, but he, Peter, and Micky released an album last year called Good Times! which has received some glowing reviews. It also contains vocals by the late Davy Jones.
One of the songs on that album is the beautiful “Me And Magdelana”, written by Ben Gibbard of Death Cab For Cutie. When asked about penning the song for The Monkees he said, “I can say with absolutely zero hyperbole that contributing “Me & Magdalena” to this album has been the greatest honor of my career.”
Andy Partridge of XTC–a huge Monkees fan–contributed a song as well. “I could not believe it. Like a weird dream, where I dreamed I wrote a song or two for one of my favorite all time bands and then they recorded them, and made one a SINGLE!? Then I woke up, and found I had that I couldn’t make it up. If I’d have said this to the thirteen year old me, he would have laughed…and then rang the lunatic asylum.”
I learned something about Pleasant Valley Sunday not too long ago. Soon after they were married Carole King and Gerry Goffin moved to West Orange New Jersey while still employed as song writers in NYC. They lived near my National Guard armory. The Main Street they lived off of? Pleasant Valley Way. I knew the song and I drove on that street for years before I knew the connection.
Nice. And they made a pile of money by sneering at their neighbors.
The answer is clearly stated in their theme song. They were the young generation, and they had something to say.
What’s so wonderful about neighbors that you can’t sneer at them? Are neighborhoods pure monoliths that don’t allow contrary opinions? Does buying a house also mean buying a set of principles and throwing your old ones out?
I sneer at my neighbors for free.
