The Garden State Greats 

Saint Peters’ run in the NCAA Tournament revived all sorts of proclamations about New Jersey pride and Garden State grit. In response, here is a list of 21 songs that either bear some of that New Jersey attitude or at the very least have a strong Jersey connection. Missing in action: Whitney Houston, who could have been from Los Angeles or Miami for all the New Jersey she brought to her music, and Bon Jovi, because they’re Bon Jovi. 

Candy Girl – Four Seasons (1963)

The last holdouts of the urban doo-wop sound and briefly New Jersey’s answer to the Beatles. Three members were born and raised in the melting pot that was Newark and next-door Belleville. “Candy Girl” is a Frankie Valli vocal showcase.  

How Can I Be Sure – Young Rascals (1967)

Eddie Brigati of Garfield sings lead on this accordion-driven Paris on the Passaic ballad. 

My Boyfriend’s Back – Angels (1963)

Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow – Shirelles (1960)

The Angels were from Belleville and Orange, the Shirelles from Passaic. “My Boyfriend’s Back” offers the immortal warning, “If I were you I’d take a permanent vacation.” 

Hasbrook Heights – Dionne Warwick (1972)

Written by Burt Bacharach whom, the internet says, briefly lived in Hasbrouck Heights. While the lyrics are complimentary, he awkwardly changed the name of the town to protect the innocent. Sung, of course, by an East Orange native. 

Pleasant Valley Sunday – Monkees (1967)

Like Burt Bacharach, Carole King and Gerry Goffin were commuting into Manhattan from New Jersey while they worked at the Brill Building. The Goffins lived on Pleasant Valley Way in West Orange, among “rows of house that are all the same/And on one seems to care.” 

Brandy – Looking Glass (1972)

Ariel – Dean Friedman (1977)

Lies – Knickerbockers (1965)

One-hit wonders from, respectively, New Brunswick, Paramus and Bergenfield. 

At Long Last Love – Frank Sinatra (1957)

Cole Porter acknowledges that New Jersey isn’t exactly the Garden of Eden as he asks the musical question, “Is it for all time or simply a lark/Is it Granada I see or only Asbury Park?” Sung, of course, by a Hoboken native. 

You Can’t Catch Me – Chuck Berry (1956)

America – Simon & Garfunkel (1971)

Racing a car with “hideaway wings” late one night on the Turnpike and with a state trooper bearing down, Chuck’s car takes flight: “Bye-bye New Jersey, I've become airborne.” The narrator in “America” stares out the window of a Greyhound Bus and counts the cars on the Turnpike. 

Jersey Girl – Tom Waits (1980)

Tweeter and the Monkey Man – Traveling Wilburies (1988)

The two best Bruce Springsteen songs not written by Bruce Springsteen. Bob Dylan’s “Tweeter” perpetuates the myth of New Jersey lawlessness: “In Jersey anything's legal as long as you don't get caught." 

4^th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy) – Bruce Springsteen (1973)

Palisades Park – Freddy Cannon (1960)

The singer in “Sandy” has come to the realization that once you get to the boardwalk, there’s nowhere left except the ocean. “Palisades Park” was written by Chuck Barris; Springsteen used the song as the intro to concerts when he was touring the “Tunnel of Love” album. 

Slip Away – David Bowie (2002)

Somehow, Bowie successfully makes The Uncle Floyd Show a mournful metaphor for lost times. “Back in the late ’70s, everyone would rush home in the afternoon to catch the Uncle Floyd Show. He was on UHF Ch. 68 and the show looked like it was done out of his living room in New Jersey. I knew so many people of my age who just wouldn’t miss it. Two of the regulars on the show were Oogie and Bones Boy, ridiculous puppets made out of ping-pong balls or some such … I just loved that show." 

Song For My Father – Horace Silver (1964)

Rudy van Gelder converted a couple of rooms in his parent’s home in Hackensack into a recording studio before moving into a much grander space in Englewood Cliffs and oversaw the production of hundreds of jazz albums, including many by Miles, Monk and Coltrane, all those jazz dudes known today by one name. Donald Fagen and Walter Becker based “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number” on the main riff of “Song For My Father.” 

The Nightfly – Donald Fagen (1982)

Fagen grew up in Kendall Park and found life in suburbia stifling enough that he escaped into a teenager bedroom fantasy as a tragic figure chain-smoking through the night while hosting a jazz and talk radio show. 

Day of the Locusts – Bob Dylan (1970)

When Princeton University gave Bob Dylan an honorary degree at an outdoors commencement ceremony, the seventeen-year cicadas were loud enough to drown out the speakers. He described the “locusts” – which sounds a lot more biblical than “cicadas” – as “singing for me.” 

White Castle Blues – Smithereens (1986)

Also included on the soundtrack of the New Jersey epic Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle. “I think I'll get some crisp onion rings/To compliment 10 of those little square things.”

 

March 1974: Can it be that it was all so simple then? 

The early 70s were transitional years. Time moved forward, but culturally everyone still seemed stuck in a gear clearly marked “60s.” 

The National Book Award winner for 1974 was Robert Stone’s Dog Soldiers (later adapted into the movie Who’ll Stop the Rain), a bleak travelogue about smuggling heroin that starts in Vietnam and ends with a firefight on a California mountaintop equipped with speakers and lights to accompany Ken Kesey-styled Acid Tests. 

In the 1974 film The Parallax View, a shadow-shrouded federal “commission” rules that a lone gunman was behind a Robert Kennedy-styled political assassination, leading reporter Warren Beatty to track down a connection between the shooting and the equally shadowy Parallax Corporation. (A strange movie, sort of The Manchurian Candidate meets Cannonball Run, merging serious themes with a “smash-everything-in-sight” barroom brawl and a police car chase that ends with a car crashing through the front window of a supermarket. All that’s missing is Jerry Reed). 

In real life, even with Vietnam more or less over, as well as the military draft, Richard Nixon’s re-election in 1972 was enough to get the revolutionary arm of the counterculture to declare itself alive and well, and begin blowing up banks and ROTC training buildings. 

Combine these 60s hangovers with the OPEC oil embargo, Watergate and the unresolvable resolution to Vietnam and amateur sociologists will tell you that America’s reaction was to “go back to simpler times” – AKA the 50s. 

And we got back with a vengeance. Grease opened on Broadway in 1972, American Graffiti in theatres in 1973 and Happy Days on television in January 1974. In July 1972, New York City’s WCBS-FM changed to an all-oldies format. John Lennon released an album of favorite 50s songs in early 1975, as did the Band. 

Re-entering the Billboard charts in March 1974 was Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock,” 21 years after it was number one for eight weeks. Powered by its inclusion in the soundtrack to American Graffiti and as the first theme song to Happy Days, it reached #39 in May. 

Bill Haley & the Comets

The inherent irony in the rush for happier days was what got conveniently ignored, mainly the dark side of American society in the 50s: segregation, gay repression, cold war tensions and fear of The Bomb, the Red Scare. Joe McCarthy might have been the real face of the 50s, not the sassy drive-in carhop on roller skates who takes your order for a cheeseburger and a Coke. 

It took a long time to run its course, but the 50s fascination finally hit the wall in the early 80s; that Sha-Na-Na had its own variety show that lasted four seasons gives you an idea of how unescapable all this was. 

Here are Billboard’s top ten records for March 1974: 

SEASONS IN THE SUN –•– Terry Jacks

BOOGIE DOWN –•– Eddie Kendricks

DARK LADY –•– Cher

SUNSHINE ON MY SHOULDERS –•– John Denver

THE WAY WE WERE –•– Barbra Streisand

MOCKINGBIRD –•– Carly Simon and James Taylor

JUNGLE BOOGIE –•– Kool and the Gang

SPIDERS & SNAKES –•– Jim Stafford

ROCK ON –•– David Essex

HOOKED ON A FEELING –•– Blue Swede 

“Seasons in the Sun” was a maudlin entry in the 70s genre of deathbed pop (“Yesterday When I Was Young,” “Reflections of My Life”). Terry Jacks was part of a strange run of studio vocalists who had multiple hits around this time, nearly all one-hit wonders and under different names. 

Jacks hit the top ten with “Seasons in the Sun” and in 1969 as part of the Poppy Family (Jacks and his wife) with “Which Way You Goin’ Billy?” Ron Dante was recruited to sing lead on the Archies’ "Sugar, Sugar," Billboard’s #1 record for 1969. Later that year he recorded an album under the group name the Cuff Links and had a second top ten hit with “Tracy.” But nobody comes close to Britain’s Tony Burrows, who sang lead with five groups that didn’t exist outside of the recording studio, four of the five hitting the Billboard Top Ten: Edison Lighthouse's "Love Grows (Where My Rosemary Goes)"; White Plains' "My Baby Loves Lovin'"; the Pipkins' "Gimme Dat Ding"; Brotherhood of Man’s “United We Stand” (all from 1970) and First Class' "Beach Baby" (1974).

 

February 1974: I don’t like spiders and snakes

In its February 1974 issue, The Monster Times (yeah, that was the name of the publication, and it was a good read even if sometimes embarrassing to bring up to the counter) published a list of “The World’s 50 Worst Monster Movies,” “monster” being an umbrella term covering science fiction, horror and fantasy – sometimes it’s just easier to call them all monster movies. And it’s not as snooty as calling them genre movies.

The list mostly offers up the black and white flicks you’d catch back then on Chiller Theatre on Saturday night or on a Sunday afternoon, and their titles are a roll call of B movie greatness. Plan Nine from Outer Space. Bride of the Monster. Attack of the Killer Shrews. The Navy vs. the Night Monsters. The Horror of Party Beach. Santa Claus Conquers the Martians (which The Monster Times claims as “absolutely the worst sci-fi flick ever made, bar none”).

Today, how many of the original 50 would make a current list of the worst? In a world where Battlefield Earth, Waterworld, and Batman and Robin will stream into eternity and the Wikipedia page for the cheesy original movies produced by the SyFi Channel lists more than 400 (a total probably eclipsed by the Hallmark Channel’s original Christmas flicks, another kind of horror), how bad is Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster, even if its star is James Karen, known throughout the East Coast as the “Pathmark guy”? Would you rather watch John Carradine in a Dracula cape give a hammy, but credible performance or Will Smith wandering through yet another CGI post-apocalyptic wasteland?

John Carradine in Billy the Kid vs. Dracula

Since 1974, Tim Burton’s Ed Wood movie, Mystery Science Theatre 3000, the Golden Turkey Awards and Captain USA’s Groovie Movies have all done their part in giving The Monster Times 50 a safe – if always with varying degrees of dry irony – haven. Today, most of these films are seen as quaint labors of love, a geek’s vision filmed in a basement or a public park (usually without a permit) with an amateur cast and a special effects budget limited to what can be bought at a local hardware store. In 1974, nobody would have used a word like oeuvre to describe William (Jesse James Meets Frankenstein’s Daughter, Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla) Beaudine’s work. Today, there are books about him.

Yes, you can see the zipper on the back of the monster in Horror of Party Beach, the wires suspending the flying saucer tin plates in Plan Nine and that the giant grasshoppers “attacking” the Sears Tower in Chicago in the Beginning of the End are normal-sized grasshoppers climbing over a postcard, but they were all entertaining, unforgettable and sincere.

The top ten songs for February 1974 aren’t the worst, but at the same time nothing to treasure.

LOVE’S THEME –•– The Love Unlimited Orchestra

THE WAY WE WERE –•– Barbra Streisand

YOU’RE SIXTEEN –•– Ringo Starr

UNTIL YOU COME BACK TO ME –•– Aretha Franklin

AMERICANS –•– Byron MacGregor

SPIDERS & SNAKES –•– Jim Stafford

LET ME BE THERE –•– Olivia Newton-John

BOOGIE DOWN –•– Eddie Kendricks

SHOW AND TELL –•– Al Wilson

I’VE GOT TO USE MY IMAGINATION –•– Gladys Knight and the Pips

Motown seemed to have no idea how to use Gladys Knight and the Pips. Their version of “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” preceded Marvin Gaye’s by a year and its unrestrained wildness made it totally unlike most of Motown’s polished productions. After signing with Buddah, they had their biggest hit with “Midnight Train to Georgia”; “I’ve Got to Use My Imagination” was the follow up. In the aftermath of the Vietnam debacle and with Watergate storm clouds bearing down, “Americans” was a hug and a hair-mussing recitation by Canadian broadcast Byron MacGregor, listing how great a neighbor/big brother the U.S. was to the rest of the world. “Spiders and Snakes” by Jim Stafford, the future Mr. Bobbie Gentry, was a memorable novelty.

Debuting on the Billboard Hot 100 this month were three cash-ins based on the news: “Energy Crisis ‘74” by Dickie Goodman, “Get That Gasoline Blues” by NRBQ and “The Crude Oil Blues” by Jerry Reed. Also new to the Hot 100, “Midnight on the Oasis” by Maria Muldaur isn’t about the oil crisis, maybe more about distracting some horny sheikh while others make off with the oil.

 

 

Skipped the light fandango 

OK boomer, time to put down the Arts & Entertainment section and take another glance at the obituaries. 

Gary Brooker, a co-founder and lead singer of Procol Harum, died this week. He sang and co-wrote the baroque and stately “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” a song that helped, along with the Sgt. Pepper album, define the music of the Summer of 1967. It’s also one of a handful of pop songs so out of leftfield that even now, more than 50 years later, they remain stunning listens (see also Good Vibrations, Papa’s Got A Brand New Bag, Like A Rolling Stone). 

We took an immediate liking to “A Whiter Shade of Pale” when WABC began playing it that July and rooted for it each Tuesday afternoon when the station introduced its new weekly Top 20. It rose as high as #2 the week of August 8, blocked from the top spot by “Light My Fire.” How did two songs based around a keyboard sound grounded somewhat in the music of Bach occupy the top two places in a popular music survey? (A sound that also found its way in 1986 to Crowded House’s “Don’t Dream It’s Over”). 

The enigmatic lyrics could be viewed as hip Cliff Notes to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales with its “vestal virgins” and “the miller,” but to take a more down-to-earth perspective, it could have also recounted a night of epic drinking down at the pub, falling into bed with the puke-inducing spins (“the room was humming harder, as the ceiling flew away”). 

Procol Harum favored a dual keyboard set-up, with Brooker on piano and Matthew Fisher playing organ. Brooker’s piano drove one of their FM standbys, “Simple Sister,” with a bridge “borrowed” from the Capitol’s “Cool Jerk,” a reminder that while the band was a pioneer of progressive rock, it always had a strong R&B feel. Otis Redding never got the chance to cover “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” but it would have been interesting. (Considering how Otis messed up the lyrics of “Satisfaction” and “Day Tripper” when he sang them, “A White Shade of Pale” wouldn’t have stood a chance). 

Brooker’s obits are mostly about “A White Shade of Pale,” but he also wrote and sang “Conquistador,” one of the ten greatest progressive rock tracks ever, and the epic, evocative “A Salty Dog”. He played on George Harrison’s “All Things Must Pass” album, toured with Ringo Starr and had a bit role in the “Evita” movie. Who knew?

 

The Perfect Day: February 4, 1977

It’s a Friday and two inches of snow have fallen overnight. The day's temperature will hold steady between 31° and 32° until mid-afternoon when Arctic air moves in; by midnight the temperature drops to 10°. But it’s okay, because we’re at home for the next 24 hours with nothing to do but watch television.

6:30 – 8:00 AM: We’re stuck on Channel 11: Felix the Cat, the Little Rascals and the barely-tolerable-but-we-can-sit-through-it Banana Splits.

8:00 AM: According to TV Guide, Dick Shawn joins Captain Kangaroo and Mr. Green Jeans on a safari. Shawn’s crazed mama’s boy in It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World and Hitler/hippie Lorenzo St. DuBois (aka LSD) in The Producers were highlights of those movies, so this seems worth catching, although Shawn should probably speak with his agent. 

9:00 AM: The inevitable run of mid-morning game shows: To Tell the Truth, Concentration (it reruns on the Game Show Network today as “Classic Concentration” – who knew it was classic?), The Price Is Right and Hollywood Squares, featuring Earl Holliman, Karen Valentine, John Byner, Isabel Sanford and Paul Williams – giants walked the Earth back then.

11:00 – 1:30 PM: A run of weirdness. A game show called Shoot for the Stars (with the star-crossed Debralee Scott), a variety-show half hour hosted by Don Ho, then Phil Donahue, whose guest is the catty Mr. Blackwell, unveiling his Worst Dressed Women of 1976 list. 

1:30 – 2:30 PM: It’s the long-running Midday on Channel 5 with lantern-jawed, but likeable Bill Boggs. He doesn’t seem to do much TV anymore and he’s listed online nowadays as a motivational speaker, but Boggs was synonymous with New York City afternoon television for decades.

2:30 PM: Tough decision between Casper the Friendly Ghost cartoons on Channel 5 and Bozo the Clown on Channel 11, but only if its the live Bozo program. I think it's likely going to be the lame cartoon, so Casper gets the nod.

3:00 PM: Another hour of old cartoons.

4:00 PM: Put on a comfy sweater, it’s time for Dinah! (Remember the exclamation point). 

Dinah! 

Unfortunately, this isn’t the episode with David Bowie and Iggy Pop, that'll come later April. Today it’s some sort of theme show, with Carroll O’Connor and wife, Bill Bixby and wife, and Marilyn McCoo and Billy Davis.

5:00 PM: An easy downshift from low-key Dinah to the catatonic Mike Douglas, with guests Dr. Buzzard’s Original Savannah Band, no doubt performing a medley of their hit, Cherchez La Femme.

6:00 PM: Time to adjust the antenna so we can pick up Channel 68 and watch Uncle Floyd with hopefully only a minimum of what used to be known as “snow” on the screen. Strictly through word of mouth and the occasional newspaper article, the show is starting to pick up viewers; in another year or two it will become a minor miracle of hip pre-Internet entertainment.

6:30 PM: Since the rabbit ears are working well, we’ll keep it on Channel 68 for a rerun of the long-forgotten Peyton Place. Will it be Mia Farrow with long hair or her pixie cut?

7:00 PM: Bowling for Dollars on Channel 9. A couple of times a year there was always the cousin of a friend of a friend competing on Bowling for Dollars, being cheered on by other friends of friends. Filmed at a bowling alley somewhere in the bowels of Madison Square Garden and hosted by Larry Kenney, who went on to make a living doing voice work on cartoons. 

7:30 PM: We’ll leave Name That Tune on Channel 4 and try to play along.

8:00 PM: 1977 is right square in the middle of network television's Tarnished Age of Lame Variety Shows and tonight we watch Exhibit A: the unbearable Donny & Marie. While we await the weekly “I’m a little bit country, he’s a little bit rock & roll” medley, we’ll sit through, according to TV Guide, a Charlie’s Angels spoof, guest Milton Berle as an anxious stage mother (allowing him to reprise his eternally unfunny drag bit) and “a musical salute to Hawaii.”

9:00 PM: Rust never sleeps and the Tarnished Age continues with Sonny & Cher, whose guests include Ruth Buzzi, Barbi Benton and William Conrad. Expect plenty of fat jokes when the hefty Conrad is on camera, and some excuse to get Benton and Buzzi onscreen together to compare looks. I’m sure this travesty was clobbered in the ratings tonight by the competition on ABC, the latest installment of Roots.

10:00 PM: I don’t remember a Serpico series, but it’s on tonight, starring David Birney wearing Al Pacino's shaggy hair and beard look in the movie.

11:00 PM: Back to the rabbit ears and Lucha Libre on Channel 47. The world is a poorer place without Spanish-language wrestling and guys wearing masks in the ring.

12:00 AM: We’ll have to settle for the last hour of The Tonight Show – even if the guest host is McLean Stevenson.

1 AM: It’s a Friday night in 1977 and when you get home from hanging out, there’s only The Midnight Special to keep you company. The show is kind of like listening to AM radio around the same time: a couple of jewels here and there, but mostly wading through acres of knee-high mud. Helen Reddy is hosting tonight's “best of” fourth anniversary show, so while there’s David Bowie and Linda Ronstadt, there’s also Neil Sedaka, the Captain & Tennille, the Bee Gees and Ms. Reddy herself. That’s a lot of mud.

 

 

 

 

January 1974: My raccoon had hepatitis 

The era of modern rock concerts kicked off on January 3, 1974 when Bob Dylan, backed by the Band, hit the road. 

First, there was the hype. Dylan’s first major concert tour since 1966, 40 concerts in 30 days (some weekend shows offered a matinee and evening performance) in 21 cities. Every show a sellout, with total gross receipts of $5 million ($27 million today), enough to entice Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young to reform and tour later that year. (Which is to say that summer – native Minnesotan Dylan and the mostly Canadian Band seemed okay with being in Chicago, Montreal and Toronto in January).

 

The Dylan tour played out entirely in sports arenas with a top dollar ticket of $9.50 – roughly $53 today – purchased through mail order only. It also marked one of the first times the stage lighting was scripted to sync lighting effects with certain lyrics or musical passages. 

At the end of the first show in Chicago, people held lit matches and lighters aloft. “The Band and I looked for the nearest stage exit as none of us wanted to go down in flames,” Dylan said later. “If we thought the response was extreme on the earlier tours we played, this was positively apocalyptic. Obviously, we were wrong. We misinterpreted and misunderstood the reaction of the crowd. What we believed to be disapproval was actually a grand appreciative gesture.” Today it’s done mostly with cell phone flashlights.  

Star-struck Rolling Stone magazine conducted an exit interview of celebrities leaving the final show of the tour in Los Angeles and breathlessly reported on the reactions of Cher, Warren Beatty and Cheech Marin (yeah, he was a celebrity back then). Not in attendance, and no doubt unimpressed, was noted rock-hater Woody Allen. In Annie Hall, when Rolling Stone reporter Shelly Duvall asks Allen if he caught Dylan at the Garden, his stammering reply is “No, I couldn’t make it. My raccoon had hepatitis.” 

On January 16 Dylan played the Charlotte (NC) Coliseum, ending the show just as Johnny Carson began his monologue – each night a self-contained time capsule – which covered the rising prices of meat, Euell Gibbons (a Carson punchline for years) and the continuing unwinding of the 18-minute stretch of erased silence on the White House tapes. Carson, and by extension all America, understands that the Nixon presidency is clearly on the ropes. When Dylan sings, “Even the president of the United States must have to stand naked sometimes” from “It’s Alright Ma,” it gets the biggest cheer of the night.

 

One of Carson’s guests is William Peter Blatty, author of The Exorcist, who solemnly tells us the “elitist New York” critics don’t understand the movie and pumps the box office even more – the film came out a few weeks ago and most theatres still have long ticket lines – claiming that between 5 and 10 people faint at every showing and “we have smelling salts handy all the time.” Blatty plays an audio tape of a reportedly real exorcism, which sounds a lot like the demon in the movie. “That’s a bad case of the croup,” says Carson. 

In another few years, AM radio would be badly in need of an exorcism as it drifted more towards disco and soft rock. The top ten records of January 1974 are a still relatively eclectic group. 

THE JOKER –•– The Steve Miller Band

SHOW AND TELL –•– Al Wilson

TIME IN A BOTTLE –•– Jim Croce (ABC)    

SMOKIN’ IN THE BOY’S ROOM –•– Brownsville Station

I’VE GOT TO USE MY IMAGINATION –•– Gladys Knight and the Pips

YOU’RE SIXTEEN –•– Ringo Starr

THE WAY WE WERE –•– Barbra Streisand

NEVER, NEVER GONNA GIVE YA UP –•– Barry White

LIVING FOR THE CITY –•– Stevie Wonder

LEAVE ME ALONE –•– Helen Reddy 

Steve Miller was an FM heavyweight in the late 60s; “The Joker” was a transitional record that introduced him to a new audience and opened the door for his riff-heavy, production-polished rock-pop songs like “Take the Money and Run” and “Jet Airliner” that ruled the AM airwaves from 1976 to 1978. Ringo was 33 when he recorded “You’re Sixteen,” a cover of a 1960 hit by Johnny Burnette, and we’ll assume his intention was an innocent cash-in on the growing nostalgia for 50s rock. In 2017, a Breitbart editor used the song during a CNN interview to defend Roy Moore, who was running for the Senate in Alabama even after several women came forward with stories about him dating underage girls as an adult. For many reasons, you’ll probably never hear “You’re Sixteen” on the radio again, but the biggest may be that it’s just an awful song with no musical merit.

 

In appreciation of the one with the wool hat 

We were Beatle fans and the idea of an upstart band, name deliberately misspelled to ape (sorry) the Beatles and starring in a weekly TV series seemed exploitative, even if nobody in the show’s pre-teen demographic range knew what that meant. But we watched anyway because there was nothing else on television Monday nights (Gunsmoke? Really?) and their first album had an awful lot of good songs. 

As things worked out, Micky was the most comfortable on camera and a lead singer with some R&B flair. You had to look a little harder to find something good to say about Davy and Peter’s contributions. There was nothing rock & roll about maraca-shaking Davy, whose drippy ballads forced you to get up and place the needle on the next song, while Peter seemed to play a pretty mean banjo when called upon. Their TV personas, cute guy with the British accent and eternally bewildered bandmate willing to trade everything for a bag of magic beans, were reliable plot engines throughout the show’s run. 

Which leaves Mike. He was always the Monkee who didn’t seem to be in the middle, a reluctant actor but veteran songwriter and performer who wrote two songs right out of the gate for their first album.

Concerned about the amount of musical content needed for a weekly show about a rock band, Don Kirshner was hired as “musical supervisor,” allowing him to choose the songs the Monkees recorded and who got to play on the sessions. Known by music insiders as a guy with a golden ear for his ability to pick hit songs, he also seemed to have an iron fist, not allowing Nesmith to play guitar on the band’s albums and rejecting a song Nesmith wrote called “Different Drum.”

“Different Drum” instead got picked up by an LA band fronted by Linda Ronstadt, the Stone Poneys, and it rose up the charts in late 1967 in parallel with “I’m A Believer” (#1 for four weeks while “Drum” stalled out at #13). Nesmith’s legitimacy as a songwriter was growing: around this time the Paul Butterfield Blues Band did a groovy cover of his “Mary Mary.” 

With tensions rising between the band members, mostly Mike, and Kirshner over artistic control, Nesmith led a revolt and Kirshner, who’d overstepped his responsibilities one time too many, was dismissed for violating his contract.* Released from Kirshner’s constraints, the band chose the material for their next album, Headquarters, and played most of the instruments. And as they had more say in the TV show, some episodes grew trippier and the band earned the kind of hip prestige that allowed Nesmith to hang out with the Beatles during their party/recording session for “A Day In the Life” and Peter to introduce the Buffalo Springfield at the Monterey Pop Festival.

Without Kirshner holding him back, Nesmith’s contributions were all over the place stylistically: psychedelic-jazz (“Writing Wrongs”), folk-rock (“Door Into Summer”), heavy rock (“Circle Sky”) – at least heavier than anything Monkee fans came to expect from their heroes – and country rock, where Nesmith can rightfully be considered a pioneer as much as Gram Parsons, who usually gets the “father of country rock” title. After the Monkees, Nesmith recorded several Nashville-meets-LA albums that gave him a cultish status.

(Ironically, Parsons and Nesmith came from wealthy backgrounds: Parsons from old money as his parents were Florida citrus-orchard royalty, while Nesmith’s mother, divorced and trying to make ends meet as a typist in suburban Dallas, invented Liquid Paper typewriter correction fluid. From my days working in an office supply warehouse, I can tell you we sold a lot of Liquid Paper).

Nesmith’s lyrics were sometimes idiosyncratic and felt way too labored over (“Darkened rolling figures move through prisms of no color,” “phantasmagoric splendor,” “a world that glitters glibly,” all from “Daily Nightly” about the Sunset Strip youth riots; maybe it doesn’t handle the subject quite as directly as “For What It’s Worth”). But his singing, writing and production is all over the band’s last two hit albums, Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn and Jones, released in May 1967 (#1 for a week; Sgt. Pepper came out seven days later) and 1968’s The Birds, the Bees and the Monkees. To this day both records are more fun to listen to than those of many of their hipper contemporaries. All the Monkee albums were out of print through most of the 70s. When Rhino Records began re-releasing them in the mid-80s, and later on CD with bonus cuts, it was like welcoming back an old friend. 

After Peter died in 2019 (Davy died in 2012), Mike and Micky began touring as a duo borrowing the Brian Wilson model of playing plenty of deep cuts for the loyal fans along with the hits and backed by a group of likeminded musicians. I passed on buying tickets to see them locally several years ago but regret it now. You gotta see ‘em while you can. 

*In response to his experiences with the Monkees, Kirshner later declared “I want a band that won’t talk back” and he found one when he became the music director for the Archies, who only existed as a cartoon. Something else that possibly only I find interesting is that Kirshner and another vilified music executive, Allen Klein, the thuggish manager of the Beatles who drove a wedge into the band that eventually hastened its breakup, were both graduates of Upsala College.