The Monkees — The Monkees

I’m not going to get into the all the obvious discussions about The Monkees – if you want to beat on them for being manufactured and not having played their instruments, you’d better toss away all your Beach Boys records and pretty much every Top 40 record made in the US in the ’60s – most written in the Brill Building and performed by the Wrecking Crew. Given the chance, these guys showed they were great musicians, even great songwriters, and certainly great entertainers. So yeah, a 20-year-old like me who was hoovering up everything to do with the mid-’60s music scene in about 1980 was definitely going to suck up some Monkees discs. The TV show existed primarily in memory then – it wouldn’t be revived by MTV for a few years yet, so there was no way to see it. (“Head” was another story, which we’ll get to.) But those of us who’d been little kids when the show aired remembered them very fondly, and those first chords of “(them from) The Monkees” or “Last Train To Clarksville” would always make us all jump to the dance floor at oldies night.

I have two copies of this 1966 debut album, both kinda beat-up. My shame with regard to the Monkees is that, although I respect and enjoy them, and am perfectly willing to listen to their albums, I never really invested in them – I settled for dollar-bin quality all these years. (I likely bought these both at Desert Shore or some garage sale in 1979 or so.) Not too long ago, I got some good digital copies of most of the albums, but in the early years I settled for scratchy and beat-up copies. So it goes. Loved them, but not enough to pay for them twice.

Except that I did pay for them twice, in that i have duplicates of FOUR Monkees albums. I think in each case, I bought a second, slightly better quality copy to make up for my original not great release. Some albums I missed entirely on vinyl, and one did a bait and switch on me decades ago that I haven’t fixed yet.

This is a great ’60s pop record, with great songs and production by Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart, songs by Goffin-King, and even a song and a half by Mike Nesmith. A super solid debut, but of course with a successful release and TV show, a second album would be forced out of them just three months later, and another five months after that. Even picking up songs from others, that’s an insane pace.

I always had a fondness for The Monkees – though in honesty I don’t know that I saw the show much in first release – and no doubt some of it was nostalgia, some of it was the music, some of it was their personalities. But this album is fun, solid pop rock too. It doesn’t get a lot of play anymore – I’m not as enamored of this style as once I was, and I have heard these many times when there is so much that I missed and need to catch up on. But it’s still great, and well worth a play now and then.