Monkees Justus (Rhino)
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A few years previous, the notion of good-looking singers controlled by their management would have been taken very much for granted, but the Monkees had the misfortune to arrive during a major sea change in popular music. In the late 50s and early 60s, visionary producers like Phil Spector and the team of Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller developed rock ‘n’ roll record-making as an art quite distinct from live performance; they selected and arranged the singers as well as the songs, manufacturing celebrity to sell singles to a teen market. Bob Dylan’s evolution from folkie to a rock artist in 1965 redefined the role of the singer: now a visionary in his own right, the singer was expected to write his own material and control the recording process; the focus of the industry shifted from singles to albums and from teens to young adults. Hired only to act, sing, and make it through a Tiger Beat interview without bringing up Vietnam, the Monkees at first answered to their appointed hitmaker, Don Kirshner. But using their celebrity as leverage they eventually seized artistic control–as it turned out, a Pyrrhic victory.
More significantly, the Monkees prefigured the next major shift in popular music: the first group to chart number-one records as a direct result of constant TV exposure, they laid the groundwork for music television, a highly collaborative medium that would drag the singer right back into the role of a celebrity “trading on other people’s talents.” As actors they were part of an improvisational team that included producers Bob Rafelson and Bert Schneider, Paul Mazursky, and Jack Nicholson. Their hits were handed to them by a stable of crack songwriters like Neil Diamond, Carole King, Harry Nilsson, and Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart; their nine albums contain instrumental performances by the likes of Glen Campbell, James Burton, Hal Blaine, Billy Preston, Buddy Miles, Stephen Stills, and Neil Young.
For all his protestations, Nesmith evidently understood the power the Monkees had tapped, and in the late 70s, his Pacific Arts Corporation produced a Nickelodeon series called Popclips, which was used as a blueprint in conceiving MTV. “I can’t say that MTV is an invention of Mike Nesmith’s,” Bert Schneider testified in The Monkees Tale, “but it’s damn near his invention.”
The record cover exploits the clever guitar logo that so many associate with the Monkees’ heyday, but the craggy visages of band members peering through it are liable to scare off all but the most devoted fans. Perhaps there is some justice in the world after all: he who lives by the image dies by the image. Ultimately, the Monkees’ role in the transformation of rock music into a multimedia experience may prove more significant than anything they ever sent through a stereo speaker. In light of that, their new declaration of musical independence seems quaint and a little quixotic. That battle was won–and the war lost–many years ago.
