The Monkees — Head

In 1968, with their TV show cancelled or about to be, The Monkees made a movie with Jack Nicholson and Bob Rafelson called “Head,” and put out a soundtrack by the same name.

I am pretty sure I got my first copy of “Head” sometime in 1980 – I have very strong memories of listening to it over and over and over in the apartment building we called The Embassy (for its predominance of foreign students). The little dialogue snippets featured on it figure on some of the longest-surviving compilation tapes I made. “Quick! Suck it before the venom reaches my heart!” The movie, which essentially blew up The Monkees (Mike Nesmith explained it all on an episode of Gilbert Gottfried’s Amazing Colossal Podcast, highly recommended, though it makes me truly sad that we just recently lost Gilbert), was a legend at the time we discovered the album – but a legend we’d have a hard time seeing.

I think one of the hardest things for younger people today to understand (admittedly, it’s hard for me to remember, too) is that when we were growing up, you often had just one chance at seeing something. Wanted to see a movie? Better go catch it in the theaters, because there was no guarantee it would ever appear on television. If it did, it would be cut up in sometimes incredible ways, and if you missed it when it was on TV, then . . . you missed it. There was no videotape, there was no home market. The reason weird things like photobooks from movies like A Hard Day’s Night, collectible picture cards from all sorts of movies and TV shows, and comic book adaptations and novelizations existed was because that was the only way you could really keep a piece of the movie you had loved. That’s why soundtrack albums frequently had dialogue from the movie – sometimes a lot of dialogue.

So we had this really quite interesting album with some great but perhaps perplexing songs, and some dialogue that made no sense to us (“Supernatural? Perhaps. Baloney? Perhaps not.” We couldn’t know that was from Lugosi’s “The Black Cat.”) We had articles that referenced what a wacky movie had been put together by Jack Nicholson and Bob Rafelson, coming on the heels of “The Trip.” While the movie was an unmitigated disaster in the eyes of critics and box office, it had gained a certain cachet and hip reputation by the time we were digging that album in 1980.

Incredibly, Wikipedia says that the movie was shown as a CBS Late Movie in 1975 (but one can only imagine how cut up it would have been). It got picked up and aired by a premium cable channel in 1981 that we didn’t have (in fact we didn’t have cable until late 1982). Home videotape didn’t exist.

Luckily, in the ’70s and ’80s, Syracuse University was absolutely awash in film series – a completely critical part of my undergrad experience, my social life, my romantic life. There were several film series sponsored by the student association University Union – Friday nights in the extraordinarily uncomfortable seats of Kittredge Auditorium (I mean, you had to balance precariously on one of the giant springs in the seat) in the basement of Huntington Beard Crouse Hall (HBC) they showed primarily old black and white movies (complete with serials) from the ’30s and ’40s, where I continued the education that I had begun as a teen insomniac with access to late night movie series on broadcast television. Those tickets were $1; there were two showings, 7 & 10 PM. On Friday and Saturday nights, more recent and mainstream movies were shown in Gifford Auditorium, also in HBC, and Grant Auditorium in the Law School; those were $1.50. Friday nights, there were four (!!) showings, 6, 8, 10, and midnight; Saturdays there were only 9 & 11. There was also a Sunday series in Gifford that varied – in spring 1979, it varied between “Woody Allen Cinema,” “Animated Fantasy” (which included a Daffy Duck festival), and “Cinema Infinity,” a sci fi series). Even on Sunday nights, there were three shows! I had no memory of that, but no wonder we were able to see so many movies – incredible flexibility. In addition to that, there was some other occasional series in Grant Auditorium in the Law School, and a more arty series sponsored by the Newhouse School. That’s not counting movies shown on the Quad at the beginning of the fall semester, some other special events, the Syracuse Cinephile society, movies at the neighborhood Westcott Theater, treks to the Landmark. Omigod, did we see some movies.

So, we were fortunate in that after only a year and a half or so of pining for it, we finally got to see “Head” in December 1982. It was mind-blowing, everything we could have wanted and more. Surreal, bizarre, inspired nonsense that we loved instantly. In those days you really had to memorize a movie if you wanted to keep it in hour head, but we had an advantage in having listened to the soundtrack so many times – now the snippets made sense, now the songs had a context, now it all came together.

This is easily my favorite Monkees album. The songs are excellent, more mature, and fitting for a surreal ending to the group. “Porpoise Song” is a beautiful opening (Goffin/King, surprisingly), “Can You Dig It” is the best Peter Tork contribution in their ouvre, and “Do I Have To Do This All Over Again” really felt like an anthem for me at the time. This album is a real touchstone for me – there are people who know and love “Head,” and those are my people. If not in my top 10, it’s certainly in my top 20.