Sometimes you can tell things are really off, just by looking at the album cover. And Changes, the ninth album from The Monkees, is clearly no exception to that particular manifesto. Where is everyone, and why is everyone decked out like Variety Show extras? And did I say The Monkees? I meant What Was Left…
By 1968, The Monkees had passed their zenith as a commercial entity. Their April album release The Birds, The Bees & The Monkees earned considerable success (although less successful than their previous five albums), selling over a million copies and featured their hits “Valleri” and “Daydream Believer”. From that point on? Things weren’t quite so rosy. NBC…
Delving into an album like Instant Replay is a really strange exercise for Monkees faithful, and I’m specifically using the phrase “Monkees faithful”, because heck knows, nobody else would be ostensibly interested in this record. That’s not a criticism, either. Just an exercise in outright pragmatism. The album has no big hits on it, no…
Hey, hey, we are The Monkees, you know we love to please A manufactured image with no philosophies… Jack Nicholson and Bob Rafelson wrote and produced the absurdist yet strangely (and often beautifully) endearing 1968 film Head. Directed by Rafelson, the movie takes The Monkees off the television screen and into their first cinematic adventure…
It took me awhile to really warm up to The Birds, The Bees & The Monkees, which was not only the band’s fifth studio album but their last commercially successful one. Their previous two records, Headquarters and Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones Ltd., showed that they weren’t just pretty pusses plastered onto prepackaged product for…
As strong as an album Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones Ltd. really is, it still represents something of a step backward for the band. While their previous album Headquarters (released earlier that very same year) represented an assertive statement of individuality and liberation of The Monkees as a self-sustaining band, PACJ has the band relying…
After two albums that were designed and marketed as tie-in product for the television show, The Monkees really had something to prove. To their audience, to rock critics, to themselves maybe, but they were hungry to contribute more of their own talents to their albums. That’s not to say Monkees and More of the Monkees…
It’s all my wife’s fault. No but really, I always liked The Monkees. I first discovered them in the early 80s the same way most people in my generation did: afternoon syndicated TV in the summer on a local UHF channel. Does anyone under the age of 25 even know what UHF was? No? Moving on… I…
Released three months after their debut album, More of the Monkees continues the band’s trend of crafting catchy pop tunes written by a host of great songwriters and… wait, doesn’t that album cover just REEK of being a photo from a Sears catalog? Well, you’d be close. It was taken from a J.C. Penney clothing ad.…
The 1966 debut release of The Monkees is an oddity, not so much because of the quality of its contents, but in its overall creation and “purpose” as an album. It all depends on how you look at it. Is it a “band” effort? Not in the strictest sense of the word, as the assembled…