I didn’t think I owned More of The Monkees, except in a late-purchased digital version. It was released in January 1967, just three months after their debut. It’s an absolute classic with several songs that I remember very well and that were all over my ’60s mix tapes – but I assumed it was one that went away when my roommate Danny moved away, and I never filled in the collection. So if I wanted to hear “She,” “Your Auntie Grizelda,” or the incredible “(I’m Not Your) Steppin’ Stone,” I had to rely on my taped versions, that was fine.
But it turns out I was wrong, and I did have a copy of More of, beat up although it is – it was just in the cover of Instant Replay, the really pretty bad contractual obligation album that lacked Peter Tork or any spark of creativity. So, how did this happen? Did I buy a copy of “Instant Replay” that always had the wrong record in it and just didn’t notice (or remember), or, perhaps more likely, did my IR end up in Danny’s More Of cover, and vice versa? As I said, it’s a pretty rough disc, so even these days if I wanted to hear this, I’d probably go to the digital version. The hits are the hits, all heard perhaps too many times, and the non-hits, while fine, don’t necessarily stand out (“Grizelda” excepted). So, again a pretty perfect pop album but perhaps not as strong as the debut or the album that followed.
I think this is the only time this will happen – that a record cover has the wrong record inside – but we’ll see.
As I mentioned last time, I’m really not listening to a lot of Monkees these days, but it’s a vital component of any collection of ’60s pop.
Mentioning “Stepping Stone” reminds me of the time Danny, Lee and I went to see Peter Tork and The New Monks at J.B. Scott’s in Albany (Jan. 9, 1982). Tork wasn’t in the best of moods, and at a point before they launched into Stepping Stone, he expressed anger/frustration that The Sex Pistols had done the song better than The Monkees had. I couldn’t blame him – he had been in tight with the whole Laurel Canyon scene, had been made incredibly famous by the Monkees TV show, and yet here he was, on a tour of the smallest clubs in America, primarily playing oldies.
Here’s an interview Tork did around that time:
