100 Best Albums Of All Time

01 You Told Me

02 I’ll Spend My Life with You

03 Forget That Girl

04 Band 6

05 You Just May Be the One

06 Shades of Gray

07 I Can’t Get Her off of My Mind

08 For Pete’s Sake

09 Mr. Webster

10 Sunny Girlfriend

11 Zilch

12 No Time

13 Early Morning Blues and Greens

14 Randy Scouse Git (aka ‘Alternate Title’)

Once loudly decried as the Pre-Fab Four, the Monkees now appear in a completely different light. The Beatles rewrote pop music by being not only fab but also able to write and play their own material. Using songwriting genius from Tin Pan Alley and virtuoso session players was suddenly no longer authentic. In 1966 show business struck back, taking the image the Beatles created in Help! and creating a TV show with four mop tops singing songs written by the best writers and played by the best players. A series of perfect pop records ensued but they were tainted as not being ‘credible’ or ‘authentic’. Now, four decades on, the workings of show business have been laid bare and creditability is more laughable than any episode of The Monkees. Now we know that Carole King is a genius and that the people playing on records by the Byrds and other righteous combos were the same people doing the Monkees’ sessions. Now that the tents have all been struck and the caravan has moved on all we have is the music.

No-one felt the stigma more acutely than the Monkees – Peter Tork, Davy Jones, Mike Nesmith and Micky Dolenz. And so it was that Nesmith scorned a $250,000 cheque from music director Don Kirshner and smashed his fist through a Beverly Hills Hotel wall as the Monkees demanded to be allowed to be a real group. Kirshner was fired and then he went on to create the Archies – a band that, being cartoons, couldn’t talk back.

‘Headquarters was our record. At that point we behaved like a musical group,’ said Tork. Producer Chip Douglas was enlisted to help fulfil the band’s vision and to play a bit of bass. Otherwise the instruments are almost entirely played by the Monkees.

Two tunes came from Boyce and Hart – the team behind The Monkees theme song. Mann and Weil provided ‘Shades of Grey’ and Hildebrand and Keller offered ‘Early Morning Blues and Greens’. The latter two songs ventured towards country and it’s been suggested that with Headquarters the Monkees prefigured the explosion of country that was to occur in coming years.

While not always to the standard of their early material, the Monkees proved themselves capable composers. Mike Nesmith’s ‘You Just May Be the One’ is a fine piece of writing. His ‘Sunny Girlfriend’ is a gem that would have been a hit on the country charts. Peter Tork’s ‘For Pete’s Sake’ is a wonderful Aquarian song and although the lyric now seems a little dated, the tight arrangement and playing are not. ‘Zilch’ features random lines run together, prefiguring the music concrete that the Beatles would soon explore on ‘Revolution #9’. Then there is the band-composed rave up of ‘No Time’, which is as good as any garage rock from the period. The best is kept for last. ‘Randy Scouse Git’ was written by Dolenz after a visit to London where he met the Beatles (‘the four kings of EMI’). In the space of two minutes he encapsulates the turmoil of the ’60s; from pop royalty to the generation gap and it rocks.

‘The thing about the Monkees is we were a project, a TV show, a record-making machine,’ said Peter Tork, coincidentally describing how most pop music is made in the 21st century. ‘The four of us were just the front. At the same time, we were the Monkees. It was a unique phenomenon, to be a member of a group that wasn’t really a group and yet was a group.’