CHAPTER 8

The Monkees

Bigger Than the Beatles

You and me, we’re odd ducks.

—Mike Nesmith to Harold Bronson, November 22, 1995

“This face! This face!” Davy Jones expressed his frustration as we sat in a booth at Canter’s Delicatessen in July 1999, waiting for our breakfast order to arrive. The second woman in less than ten minutes had approached our table to tell him how much of a fan she was. I got the impression that in exchange for the inconvenience of being recognized and approached in public thirty years after his popularity had peaked, Davy expected a fee. Davy was always under financial pressure. Once he left a long message on my voice mail. It was not pleasant listening to his anger intensify as he expressed the opinion that we should be paying the Monkees a higher royalty rate. As much as I was put off by his tone, I couldn’t help but be amused when he calmed himself at the end to tell me to “have a nice day.”

It’s not that he wasn’t making good money performing throughout the country. It’s that he had a poor grasp of business and the added burden of alimony. Davy had walked the few blocks to Canter’s. He was staying with his girlfriend, Gillian Holt, to whom I introduced him. She had been with comedian Bill Maher backstage after the Monkees’ performance at the Universal Amphitheater. I was talking to Bill when she pulled me aside and asked me to introduce her to the much older Davy. She ended up with a part as the Princess in the Monkees’ TV special Hey, Hey, It’s the Monkees.

I first met Davy in 1976, when he was promoting an album and tour as a member of Dolenz, Jones, Boyce & Hart. I was surprised to discover that even though he had made millions of dollars as a Monkee, a little more than five years after the group dissolved, he was driving a battered, yellow Volkswagen Bug.

In 1969 Warner Brothers mounted a campaign to reinvigorate the commercially anemic Kinks. The “God Save the Kinks” campaign, spearheaded by John Mendelsohn, was very successful in calling attention to the group and selling records. “Rhino Saves the Monkees,” in spirit if not in name, could describe the company-wide commitment in mining the group’s catalogue and helping to resurrect their career. It didn’t matter that the Monkees were never hip. It was as though watching the TV show caused a gene to mutate, making Gary Stewart, Bill Inglot, Andrew Sandoval, and me lifelong fans. Even blues hound Richard Foos watched most of the shows the first season. That passion resulted in remarkable products and a unique marketing strategy unequaled in the music industry.

The first anyone had heard of the Monkees was in September 1966, when there was a big marketing push promoting their new TV show. As a sixteen year old, I wasn’t enamored with their debut single, “Last Train to Clarksville,” and I was skeptical of a formal TV show about a rock group with a silly name like the Monkees. After real, legitimate rock groups like the Beatles, Byrds, and Turtles, how could you take the Monkees seriously?

The idea originated with Bob Rafelson, who came up with it in 1962 when the TV show would have been about a then-in-vogue folk group. The Beatles had successfully enhanced their persona in two feature films, A Hard Day’s Night and Help!, providing a template for The Monkees TV show.

Despite my reservations, when the show aired, I was immediately hooked and watched every week. The Beatles’ last tour ended two weeks before the show’s debut. Subsequently, the Beatles preferred to spend more time sequestered in their recording studio and were considerably less visible. Into this void stepped the Monkees, who provided an apt, and in many ways better, substitute. As much as the Beatles’ individual personalities distinguished them from other pop performers when they arrived on the scene, the Monkees were even more personable, charismatic, and funny. Of course, as actors on a TV show, they had writers. The Monkees benefitted from great songs, knowledgeable producers, unlimited recording studio time, and the best facilities and backup instrumentalists available. The whole combination produced great records—singles as well as album tracks—and that’s why interest in their music remains decades later.

At the time The Monkees TV show was being cast, Davy was already signed to Screen Gems, a subsidiary of Columbia Pictures TV. He was a true asset. In a period when British rock bands ruled the US charts, he was the only British member of the group. He looked a bit like Paul McCartney and oozed personality. Another British band, Herman’s Hermits, actually sold more singles than the Beatles in 1965, with hits like “Mrs. Brown You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter” and “I’m Henry VIII, I Am.” The members were from Manchester, as was Davy Jones, who replaced Hermits lead singer Peter Noone on the covers of the teen magazines. When Noone finally got around to viewing the TV show when it aired later in Britain, he said of Davy, “He does me better than me.”

Having appeared on Broadway in Oliver!, he projected very well and was physically adept, including dancing. He was the best looking of the four Monkees and quickly became the romantic heartthrob, his five foot three height notwithstanding. Because he embodied that role so well, Micky Dolenz became the comedian. Davy was actually funnier. Possessed of a warm, charming singing voice, one would be hard-pressed to come up with a more effective romantic singer for teenage girls at the time. Consequently, he appeared on the most covers of the teen magazines. His fame was so pervasive, that it caused an up-and-coming London singer, one who had already released a handful of flop singles, to abandon his birth name David Jones—becoming David Bowie.

The TV show didn’t have a big budget, but worked because of the scripted humor, the actors’ personalities, and the music, which was featured in each show. It wasn’t because of the story lines. Many of the episodes mined genres that had been used many times before in TV and movies. The stories included hillbillies, private detectives, spies, ghosts, cowboys, pirates, society snobs, boxers, and a mad scientist. So did the Bowery Boys, in their low-budget comedies in the 1940s and 1950s.

The high quality of the records is the primary reason for the continued interest in the Monkees as a group. They benefited from Don Kirshner’s stable of top writers who were signed to Screen Gems, including Gerry Goffin and Carole King (“Pleasant Valley Sunday”), Neil Diamond (“I’m a Believer”), and Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart (“Valleri”). The production was perfect, and at times, inspired. And the Monkees successfully conveyed their personalities in their vocals, an asset not lost on producer Jeff Barry. “When I produced Micky singing ‘I’m a Believer,’ I was struck by how differently he sang from anybody I had worked with before,” he said. “With most singers the words are vehicles for the notes, but Micky, being an actor, added an extra, dramatic quality.”

The problem that developed was an issue of musical integrity as rock musicians strived for more artistry and for more respect. Although hired to act on a TV show, the Monkees were chosen for their musical ability. The demands of filming a weekly series made it difficult for the Monkees to provide the instrumentation for their records, and resentment brewed. Similar to other shows on the air at the time, The Monkees totaled fifty-eight episodes over two seasons. Currently, network shows are only required to produce twenty-two shows to satisfy a season’s schedule.

Their first two albums sold five million apiece, featuring only the Monkees’ voices and not their instrumental performances. Originally the producers hadn’t expected them to play, but as the first season progressed, the Monkees asserted their desire to play as they had originally intended. However, the project’s music supervisor, Don Kirshner, didn’t feel the need to revise his successful formula. Nesmith and Tork, who considered themselves musicians primarily, were frustrated and alienated by the recording process. However, they were naively unaware that many top rock bands of the day—Paul Revere & the Raiders, Herman’s Hermits, the Association, and the Beach Boys, among them—invariably used studio musicians to record their instrumental backing tracks. Those groups might have played on their first few albums, but by 1966 it was studio players. Although a group like the Turtles played on all of their recordings, there was no distinction, because the fans didn’t know. Peter Noone provided a perspective: “For us, it was primarily a financial decision. We made most of our money on the road. So it cost us money to be in the studio learning and recording the songs. We were fortunate to have the talents of Jimmy Page, John Paul Jones and other studio musicians to record our backing tracks.”

Mike Nesmith expressed his frustration that the Monkees were prevented from playing on their records to the Saturday Evening Post magazine, which ran the story in January 1967. As I wasn’t a reader of that magazine, the controversy escaped me. I saw the Monkees playing instruments on the show and on the cover of their first album. It never occurred to me that they didn’t provide the backing for their records.

Having outsold the Beatles on their first two albums, the producers didn’t want to jeopardize their franchise. When Kirshner refused to alter his production mode, he was fired. He sued and received a settlement. The Monkees were permitted to play on their records and had more input in the song selection. Did the records suffer musically? No. Sales of the subsequent albums declined by half, and who’s to say that wouldn’t have happened anyway?

Of equal importance to the music was the TV show. Producer/director Bob Rafelson, influenced by France’s new wave cinematic style, bettered his Beatles model in creating a TV series that ran circles around other shows airing at the time. Its quality and innovation didn’t go unnoticed. The show garnered two Emmy awards in its first season.

When the Beatles emerged in March, they seemed to have aged forty years. In the promo films for “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “Penny Lane,” they looked like sedated granddads in turn-of-the-century clothes. George sprouted a beard, the others, mustaches. As potent as the record was, it was also strange, and the Turtles’ “Happy Together” knocked the Beatles out of the top slot after only one week. The popularity of the vibrant and youthful Monkees was uncontested: four of their albums made it to number one in 1967. The TV show continued until it ran its natural course and came to an end after two seasons.

Davy loved horses and fantasized that he could have been a professional jockey. But there was no indication from his teen years as a rider that he could have been successful. In his teens Davy had become a star acting in London’s West End production of Oliver! playing the Artful Dodger. The production moved to Broadway where he was nominated for a Tony Award. As a consequence, Davy always felt more at ease with theater people, with the socializing after the shows, than he did later with the rock scene. As the sixties evolved, drugs held more prominence in the culture and more influence in the creative process, but Davy never felt comfortable with the emerging hippie and drug culture, or psychedelic music.

After the Monkees, Davy worked where he could: solo dates, TV guest appearances, and theater, but to little acclaim. He signed a record contract with Bell Records, but charted no higher than fifty-two with “Rainy Jane” in June 1971.

I think all the members were shocked at how their extreme popularity dwindled when the TV series was no more. Rather than the Monkees appreciating what they accomplished as an ensemble, and the fortune they reaped, and how that residual good will had bolstered their earning power in subsequent decades, they looked upon that experience as having prevented them from being taken seriously in their subsequent ventures. In the two years of the show’s first run, the Monkees were so popular, it’s easy to see how the members were blindsided into thinking there would be a demand for them after the series was off the air.

When the Monkees were allowed to play their own instruments and function as a band for the recording of their third album, Headquarters, Peter was in his element. He played bass, guitar, banjo, and keyboards. Davy and Micky, being less instrumentally adept, were less inclined to commit the time and effort in subsequent recordings. With filming TV shows and playing concert dates, the time devoted to recording Headquarters was an additional burden to be avoided in the future. Peter wanted to be in a band, recording and touring. When he realized that wasn’t going to happen again with the Monkees, he became disenchanted and left.

Peter did form a band, Peter Tork and/or Release, and recorded, but nothing was finished. As with the Monkees, he suffered from a lack of confidence, and enough focus to complete his songs. While in the Monkees, his songs did get occasional recognition. He co-composed a song the TV producers selected to accompany the end credits during the second season. The two songs he wrote for Head fit the movie perfectly. Peter preferred a drug-infused hippie lifestyle, which meant that others used his house as a crash pad and took advantage of his generosity. It was a fourteen-room house previously owned by TV star Wally Cox. When Peter’s Monkees money was spent, he sold the house to Stephen Stills, who had recommended Peter for the role.

Mike Nesmith was the second among the Monkees to leave the project. Although he gave up the guarantee of a salary as being a member of the group, his songwriting royalties from Monkees recordings meant that he made substantially more money than any of the others. The show’s producers didn’t believe in Mike’s songs—didn’t think they could become hits—but included them on the albums to placate him. They didn’t know what they had.

One song they rejected, “Different Drum,” became the first big hit for Linda Ronstadt, as a member of the Stone Poneys in late 1967. The first hit album for the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, Uncle Charlie & His Dog Teddy, leads off with Mike’s song “Some of Shelley’s Blues,” with another, “Propinquity,” later in the lineup. A couple of months after the last Monkees single (just Davy and Micky) barely made it into Billboard’s Hot 100, Mike graced the top twenty with “Joanne,” the debut release of his new ensemble, the First National Band. That was to be his only Top 40 hit performing a song he had composed.

Mike was the first Monkee I met, in May 1971. I started contributing to a local arts magazine, Coast, that appealed primarily to those interested in listening to music on their upscale stereo systems. Although reruns of The Monkees were relegated to Saturday mornings, editor Jim Martin—who, atypically for Los Angeles, wore a cowboy hat—learned that the network was receiving over a thousand fan letters a week. He assigned me to write a feature on the group for the magazine’s upcoming rock music issue.

I interviewed Mike at the Screen Gems Publishing office on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood. Mike was smart and surprisingly candid. He complimented Peter Tork on his musical chops and intelligence, but made it clear that he never liked him. Putting his comment in perspective, he then revealed that he didn’t like his mother, even though he considered her a “nice lady.” He estimated that there were forty Monkees recordings that had never been released.

Mike’s TV character was more mature, more of the adult. As a tall Texan, he could have been President Lyndon B. Johnson’s errant son. With the Monkees he played guitar, sang the occasional lead vocal, and quickly established himself as the group’s best songwriter. He was such a fan of country and western music that he, inappropriately, infused this style into the recordings, unintentionally creating the country-rock hybrid.

I saw him play a few times, and visited him backstage when he appeared at a free noontime concert at UCLA’s Ackerman Union Grand Ballroom in February 1972. Bob Chorush, a likeable eccentric who headed Rolling Stone’s Los Angeles office, invited me to join him on a visit to Mike’s home. Mike was disaffected by how little the success of the Monkees’ records had to do with the integrity of the music, and he considered his earnings tainted money he didn’t deserve. As a consequence, he squandered most of it. He had to vacate his large house off of Mulholland Drive, and relocated his family to a San Fernando Valley tract house he originally bought for his chauffeur. Mike’s wife, Phyllis, was a proponent for the legislation to legalize marijuana.

In 1973 Mike made a deal with Elektra Records for a new country label. He signed and produced artists with the intention of using local talent to create an identifiable scene, similar to Nashville or Bakersfield. I liked the concept and visited Countryside Studios, a house that Mike had partly converted into a recording studio. As Mike and I sat talking in the kitchen, a large plate of hot, greasy bacon was placed on the table. As he was eating, I thought it inhospitable that he didn’t offer me any—which I would have declined—or even something to drink. He was touting Countryside’s new artist, Garland Frady. Garland was a regular performer at Los Angeles’ top country music club, The Palomino. I thought Countryside was a noble attempt, but the few records that were released didn’t sell well enough to sustain the label.

I met Micky shortly after Mike, when I interviewed him for the same Coast magazine article. He had been a child star with the popular Circus Boy TV series, which I watched as a kid. In subsequent years—before being cast in The Monkees—he suffered the indignity of being sent on auditions for kid roles even though he was well into his teens. With few acting jobs coming his way, Micky studied to be an architect at Trade Tech College.

Micky was a much better actor than he ever got credit for, and an exceptionally versatile singer. He’s smart, like an absent-minded professor, and his hobby is quantum physics. With the Monkees he was attracted to the potential of the Moog synthesizer, and had the third one in the country. An underachiever as a songwriter, he scored the Monkees’ second biggest hit in Britain with “Randy Scouse Git” (aka “Alternate Title”), which was not released as a single in the United States. Micky has been prone to toss off The Monkees as a mere TV show about a rock band, equating his role as a drummer to that of Spock on another well-known TV series: “Leonard Nimoy wasn’t really a Vulcan, but he played one on Star Trek.”

To put the impact of the music in perspective, he recounted a story of a fan who approached him after a Monkees concert. The young girl was bewildered by the seriousness of Micky’s new protest song, “Mommy and Daddy,” which dealt with the plight of the American Indian. “She had tears in her eyes as she walked up to me and asked why we didn’t record any of the good old songs you can dance to,” he recollected. “I realized what had happened and what the Monkees were all about. They were what a first-grade teacher is to a child learning math. You can’t teach a kid to multiply until you teach him to add. The reason the Monkees were so successful was because we filled a gap. The Beatles and all the other groups were trying to appeal to a sophisticated audience. Nobody was playing to the kids. We gave them something to listen to.”

Micky also realized that the Monkees had a larger social significance because they brought long hair into the living room: “Up until then anyone with long hair was thought to be a doper or hippie hoodlum. Even though the Beatles wore long hair, their comments about acid and politics gave it a negative connotation. The kids said, ‘See the Monkees, they just wanna laugh and have fun and play.’ It then became difficult for the parents to deny them: ‘Well, alright, if the Monkees do it, it’s okay.’”

TV show, rock band, cultural phenomenon—the Monkees were all of these, but much more, and therein lies the confusion about how they are considered. In the first place, The Monkees was a TV show. Although they were acting in fictitious stories, Micky Dolenz, Davy Jones, Michael Nesmith, and Peter Tork were essentially playing themselves and using their own names in the series. They were chosen, in part, because they had musical ability. Hired to play a rock band, they actually became a rock band. They toured and even recorded a couple of albums, performing as a self-contained unit.

After the Monkees, Micky recorded some singles, but never made the charts. He showed a flair for directing, but only managed a few low-budget commercials for local merchants, like Jeans West. It was years later, when he was living in England with his second wife, that he was able to work as a director. Unlike the others, he still had his money. His mother had invested it wisely, buying properties along the Sunset Strip, which sustained his life style for many years.

When I met Peter Tork in the mid-1970s, it was because we were both team representatives in the Hollywood Showbiz Softball League. At the time he was teaching music at a small private school. I was representing the Rhinos. He was representing the Hollywood Vampires, which in prior years had included Alice Cooper and Mark Volman. The Rhinos and the Happy Days team were the nice guys of the league, compared to the overly competitive other teams that were composed of aggressive New Yorkers.

Around the time Rhino formed, the only Monkees album in stores was a hits compilation. With so little of their music available, it was a personal goal to reissue their recordings. In 1980 Capitol Records released the Beatles’ album Rarities. Bill Inglot, Gary Stewart, and I felt there were enough tracks to compose a similar album from the Monkees’ catalogue, and I made a licensing deal with Artista Records. In 1974 Columbia Pictures hired Clive Davis to consolidate their recorded labels—the Monkees recorded for Colgems Records—into a company he named Arista, after a high school honor society of which he’d been a member. Quite often in business a company with the same name won’t necessarily be an affiliate of another; in many cases ownership is different. Columbia Pictures was not affiliated with Columbia Records. The record label was part of CBS (Columbia Broadcasting System). EMI Records owned the British label Columbia Records, for whom the Yardbirds recorded.

In 1982 we released a compilation of rarities titled Monkee Business—after a Marx Brothers movie—in a picture disc format. (Queen had named two of their albums after Marx Brothers titles.) It sold well enough to justify the release of a subsequent album, Monkee Flips (a wrestling term), two years later. By the end of the 1980s, those two albums had sold about 50,000 each. I had forged a good relationship with Roy Lott, head of business affairs at Arista, and had licensed subsequent, non-Monkees product, a Best of the Box Tops and rereleases of the three albums by Nazz, Todd Rundgren’s first recorded group.

Bert Schneider, coproducer of The Monkees, took note. He came to see me and we made a deal to license two albums of tracks that had never before been released, the tracks Mike Nesmith had mentioned to me in 1971. He claimed that neither Columbia Pictures nor Arista owned the unreleased tracks. Arista had done extremely well with their Monkees best of, to the point where they issued a subsequent volume, but they had no interest in rereleasing the original albums, which I arranged for us to do.

In February 1986, MTV programmed a twenty-two-and-a-half-hour marathon of all The Monkees TV episodes. It was so well received that MTV did it again, and then scheduled the shows as part of its daily programming, thus sparking a revival of interest in the Monkees. David Fishof, primarily an agent for NFL players, had staged revival tours of sixties acts in the previous two years, which gave him the experience needed to launch The Monkees Twentieth Anniversary Reunion Tour later that year. The initial dates were well in line with Fishof’s previous Happy Together tours, but the demand became so great that some later concerts had the group drawing well in stadiums. In order to do it again the following year, he needed an extra element: a newly recorded album by the Monkees.

On March 23, 1987, Richard and I met Micky Dolenz and David Fishof for dinner at Nick’s Fish Market in West Hollywood to discuss Rhino’s interest in recording a new Monkees album. Fishof had baited us for many months and then disappeared to see if he could make a deal with one of the majors. It didn’t happen, and time was rapidly approaching to prepare for the Monkees’ tour. So he and Dolenz sat with the heads of the label that had been responsible for reissuing the entire Monkees catalog, resulting in six of those original albums recharting on Billboard the previous fall. At that meeting, Micky explained that the Monkees should be viewed more like the Marx Brothers than a rock group. Given their 1986 success, he envisioned a yearly tour, film, and record for the Monkees.

There was not much time to deliberate. We had to negotiate a deal, select a producer, choose a recording studio, and hire musicians. Close to a hundred songs had to be sifted through. Although Mike Nesmith was not part of the tour, I had solicited his participation in recording the album. I didn’t think he’d be interested, and he declined. Considering Rhino’s success with the catalog, and a desire to make Monkees fans everywhere happy with a new album, Richard and I plunged ahead, knowing full well it would be Rhino’s biggest financial commitment up to that time.

The Monkees hadn’t recorded an album of new material since Dolenz and Jones joined their ex-producers/songwriters Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart for a tour and poor-selling album in the mid-1970s. It sold only 17,000 copies. Although the Monkees’ best records embraced many styles, their sound was that of a rock band playing great songs. In the mid-1980s, most successful rock producers busied themselves with heavy metal and synthesized rock. I thought the Monkees needed someone who combined great pop sensibilities with a natural feel for the appealing rawness of rock ’n’ roll.

I considered a broad range of producers, including Mitchell Froom (Crowded House), David Kahne (Bangles), and Jim Valence (Bryan Adams’ lyricist). Some weren’t available, like our first choice, Nick Lowe, who had distinguished himself not only as a producer of Elvis Costello and Graham Parker, but also as a solo artist (“Cruel To Be Kind”) and as a member of Rockpile (“Teacher Teacher”). Some, like Lowe’s Rockpile cohort Dave Edmunds, weren’t interested. Others, like Jimmy Iovine (Tom Petty), were too expensive. The best available choice seemed to be Roger Bechirian, whose producer credits included Nick Lowe, Elvis Costello, and Squeeze. Davy disagreed with the choice, preferring a bigger name. He requested Quincy Jones.

Everybody pitched in the best songs they could find, and a consensus was achieved. The Monkees interact like brothers. There is affection toward one another, some competition, and occasional arguments. Add in the women—Davy’s then-wife told me that he was going to be bigger than Bruce Springsteen, while Micky ignored his own impeccable taste in songs and deferred to his then-wife’s preferences—and you had constantly changing opinions. At one point, Peter was going to play on the entire album and Micky on part of it. In the end Peter only managed to provide the guitar on one track. There was one song that Roger and I didn’t think was worthwhile: Davy was so insistent that we record “(I’ll) Love You Forever,” which he wrote, he would not fly over to record his vocals until we had recorded the backing track. Lou Naktin produced the basic track, and the song turned out okay.

Recording commenced on May 20 at Cherokee Studios in Hollywood. Other artists who recorded at the complex during the sessions included Dolly Parton, Elton John, and the New Monkees. (New Monkees was a syndicated TV show spurred by the renewed popularity of the original group. The actors who starred in the new production, seemingly embarrassed by their close proximity to the genuine Monkees, placed a pseudonym on their door.) Louis Naktin was enlisted to provide a roster of crack local musicians to record the instrumental backing tracks.

With all the Monkees in town, Richard and I met them on June 9 at the house Micky and his family rented in Beverly Hills. After our discussion about the album, Peter casually sat at a keyboard and played part of a Bach concerto. During the evening I came to realize that Davy was naturally the funniest—not Micky, as he was portrayed in the show. The funniest moment came when Davy hid in the narrow storage space to the right of the fireplace, and then opened the door, jokingly trying to scare us.

I picked “(I’d Go The) Whole Wide World” as a vehicle for Davy’s English charm. The song, written and performed by Wreckless Eric, had been a stellar single in the early days of Stiff Records. Davy didn’t like the song and expressed his disinterest in recording previously released material. Micky did like it, however, and sang it, but it was less effective without Davy’s accent. “Heart And Soul,” the LP’s first single, was penned by a pair of British songwriters discovered by Bechirian. It was Micky’s favorite song on the album, and he sang it. David Fishof contributed “Don’t Bring Me Down,” which was written by Tommy James (the Shondells).

As they rode their tour bus back from rehearsal, Micky lashed out “POOL IT!” at his fellow Monkees to quell a heated exchange. He paused, and the others snickered. He had meant to say, “Cool it,” but the malapropism took hold, and the album had a title.

In trying to appeal to contemporary tastes, Bechirian produced a more polished album than we were anticipating. We were surprised that the Monkees didn’t care to sing backup on each other’s lead vocal tracks, and then realized that they hadn’t sung backup that often on their original recordings. Nonetheless, the Monkees made the album they wanted to make and were happy with Pool It!

With Fishof boasting of his MTV connections, we launched our most ambitious marketing plan to date. Preacher Ewing and Bill Fishman (the latter best known for the film Tape Heads, which was produced by Nesmith) produced a creative, funny video for “Heart And Soul.” We were counting on MTV to play the video, but as much as MTV were Monkees supporters the previous year, they abandoned the group in 1987. One issue was the Monkees cancelling their performance at an MTV Super Bowl party earlier in the year. Davy claimed he hadn’t agreed to do it. Fishof substituted the Turtles, but then charged MTV for their services. Even though Monkees fans made “Heart And Soul” one of the channel’s ten most-requested videos, MTV execs refused to air it.

Despite the quality of the single, most radio stations didn’t want to play a new record by any group perceived as 1960s has-beens. That same shortsighted mentality plagued the first Bee Gees single to be issued in four years. “You Win Again,” released around the same time, fared only slightly better than “Heart And Soul” in the States, even though it was a number one hit around the world. In addition, shortly before the release of the Monkees’ single, British group T’Pau scored on the American charts with a hit also titled “Heart And Soul.”

We scrambled and managed some airings and a highly successful promotion on the Nickelodeon channel. Although viewers of the Nick Rocks show voted “Heart And Soul” their favorite video of the year, the cable channel was considerably less influential in 1987 than in subsequent years.

Without the MTV support we were expecting, our hope for a gold record was dashed. “Heart And Soul” labored to 87 on Billboard ’s Hot 100, and Pool It! sold 125,000 copies. (In anticipation of a bigger selling album, we had shipped 200,000.) Although disappointing, it was Rhino’s biggest-selling original production. Compared to other Monkees’ albums, in its original release Pool It! out-sold all that came after 1968’s The Birds, The Bees & The Monkees.

I would have thought that our valiant effort would have further cemented our relationship with the Monkees. It may have, but that didn’t mean that they weren’t prone to act in their selfish best interests. As part of the new album deal, we were supposed to distribute the live album the group had produced to sell on their tour. Micky’s wife, Davy’s wife, and Peter’s girlfriend thought they could get a better deal from someone else and the three Monkees reneged. No other deal materialized.

I liked what Mike had recorded with the First National Band, but the project was not considered a success. He told me that the most he sold of any of the albums he released on RCA Records in the 1970s was 35,000. In 1989 I made a deal with him to release the best of his post-Monkees recordings on two compilation albums: The Older Stuff and The Newer Stuff (from his Pacific Arts albums).

Rafelson and Schneider settled a suit with Sony (who had bought Columbia Pictures), which gave them back most of the rights and catalogue of The Monkees. Sony only retained TV broadcast and syndication rights. Schneider and his partners wanted to sell those rights and approached Rhino. I was surprised he didn’t call me directly; I thought we had a bit of a relationship. I like to think it was because I was such a good negotiator that he had his lawyer contact Richard, but it could have been because Ira Herzog had previously dealt with Richard. They wanted $4 million, and the amount didn’t seem to be negotiable. I hadn’t experienced a deal that I couldn’t finesse and was in a lesser position because it hadn’t been presented to me first. That was more money than we had.

I met with Mike at his office in West LA. Because his company distributed home videos, I thought I could team up with him to buy the rights: Rhino would take the audio and Pacific Arts would take the video. I expressed to him that I thought a box set of all the shows would do well. This wasn’t the first time we had discussed collaborating. Towards the end of 1989 Mike approached me about merging our companies. Ultimately, he bowed out of the copurchase because he felt he didn’t want to have to deal with the other Monkees coming to him for royalties.

We made a deal whereby we took the rights for North America, with Warner Music International kicking in a third of the purchase price for the rest of the world. Bob and Bert signed the contract at our office in January 1994.

Being a fan of an artist and their music inspired me to come up with creative ideas and negotiate the deals to make the projects come to fruition, and the Monkees were the best example of that. As owners we could do what we wanted, rather than being limited as licensees on previous product. I informed the Monkees of our plans and involved them where it was appropriate.

The Monkees afforded a unique, cumulative marketing opportunity, whereby coordinated releases and events can generate more impact than isolated ones. I forged a plan to have a significant Monkees event every few months to sustain renewed interest in the group. The first was to make an event out of awarding them new multiplatinum awards for sales of their original albums. In the sixties the RIAA only certified gold awards: one million sales for a single and 500,000 for an album. As the industry grew, awards were created for platinum—one million albums—and multiplatinum.

Using songwriter/producer Bobby Hart’s royalty statements, I was able to get the RIAA to confirm sales of the group’s first five albums of fifteen million: five million for their first two, two million for their next two, and one million for their fifth album. On January 5, 1995, I presented framed awards to each of the Monkees at West Hollywood’s Hard Rock Cafe (the first one in the United States, and the third one overall). As a rare Monkees reunion of all four members, we got extensive media coverage.

In October 1995 we released our Deluxe Limited-Edition Box Set of their TV series and The Monkees Greatest Hits album, the latter of which benefitted from a TV advertised mail order campaign. I met with Mike towards the end of November at Santa Monica restaurant DC3 to discuss our plans to celebrate (market) the Monkees’ thirtieth anniversary. Mike had been receiving royalties from his mother’s invention of Liquid Paper, which had provided him with a nice lifestyle as well as financing his modestly-selling artistic pursuits, but those were running out. As a result, he was more financially motivated to consider recording a new album and touring with the others as part of the anniversary.

The concept for the new record was to revisit the spirit of the group’s 1967 album Headquarters, which was really the only one on which the four Monkees played. This time out it would be just the four of them—playing, composing, and producing—an arrangement that inspired the title Justus. Not only did it refer to just us, as the only credited musicians, but also to justice, from having been deprived from playing on their very first two albums.

The recording commenced in June 1996, prior to Micky, Davy, and Peter starting their summer tour. I thought the album, released in October 1996, turned out well. There wasn’t one bad song on it, but there wasn’t anything that sounded like a hit single. I would have liked to have heard more from Mike, who only contributed one new song as a composer. Coinciding with the album’s release was Hey, Hey, We’re the Monkees, a book I put together in order to have visibility in bookstores, as well as a CD-ROM (compact disc read-only memory).

I wanted to get exposure in the new area of computer programs. Other artists, such as the Rolling Stones and David Bowie, had been subjects of CD-ROMs, but development and production costs were too significant for Rhino. I made the deal with Paul Atkinson, the guitarist for the Zombies, who was working at a new company, nu.millennia. I became friendly with Paul after meeting him at Mike Chapman’s house when he was head of West Coast A&R for RCA Records. The Hey, Hey, We’re the Monkees CD-ROM also came out in October.

In January 1997 the Disney Channel premiered a documentary I coproduced, Hey, Hey, We’re the Monkees. The next month ABC aired Hey, Hey, It’s the Monkees, an hour-long TV special written and directed by Michael Nesmith. It was meant to be a new episode of the TV show, but failed to capture the spirit or humor of the original, and earned poor ratings.

What made the Monkees’ anticipated anniversary tour special was Mike’s participation. But after the first leg in England, he couldn’t put up with Davy any longer and opted out of the American dates. As the group—minus Mike—had toured the previous year, the reunion lost luster, and sales of our new album suffered considerably. The 63,000 albums we sold was comparable to other older artists releasing albums around that time, like the Kinks and Cheap Trick, but it could have been so much more. In 1999 Mike’s Pacific Arts settled a suit with PBS, whose video his company had distributed, resulting in a large windfall, which meant that he wouldn’t have the financial need to work with the Monkees.

My ambitions included producing a feature film and a cartoon series. The Beatles’ animated series ran on ABC in the sixties. Many baby boomers also thought there had been one for the Monkees, but there hadn’t. Jeff DeGrandis was an enthusiastic Monkees (and Beatles) fan who directed and produced animation. I came up with a series of story lines, he created illustrations, and we made the rounds of the animation studios, but there was little interest. With the Monkees providing their own voices, their middle-aged looks would not be a factor. Film Roman, an animation production company that provided the visuals for The Simpsons, wanted to own its own show and made an initial offer, but our differences were not resolved. I was able to realize a docudrama, Daydream Believers’ The Monkees Story, which aired as a ninety-minute TV movie on VH1 in June 2000.

From having been a fan who looked up to these guys, to getting to meet and converse with them as an eager music journalist, it was great to be able to realize product that was creative and of a high quality. Once we got up to speed with our releases, their Rhino royalties markedly increased. Prior to Rhino’s ownership, they were each making about $8,000 a year. During my time at the label, it averaged $60,000. After we recouped our purchase price, we increased their royalty rate further. When Rhino’s The Monkees Greatest Hits turned gold—it sold over 650,000—the Monkees received another framed award from us.

But I was also relegated to an authority figure, more like that of a school principal in dealing with the Monkees. In that respect, I stepped into the position that Bob Rafelson and Bert Schneider had occupied. Even though our ownership was new, I felt as though the Monkees still carried nearly thirty years of residual resentment into our relationship. I had no illusions that I would hang out with them and be their best friend, but I was surprised how rarely they expressed their gratitude for all the good things we did.

At the time The Monkees was cast, most rock musicians were antiestablishment. They defied convention by growing their hair long, wearing outrageous outfits, and shunning routine employment, and many broke the law by consuming marijuana and other drugs. Likewise, the Monkees were not compliant individuals. Mike was the most defiant. He punched a hole into the wall of Don Kirshner’s suite at the Beverly Hills Hotel when Kirshner refused to let the Monkees play on their own records. Davy Jones marketed Davy Jones glasses until the producers told him to stop because they held those rights. On the first day of filming the Monkees’ feature film Head, all but Peter Tork struck by failing to report.

Such behavior could be identified even twenty years later. Arista wanted the (three) Monkees to record new tracks that they could add to their best of album to coincide with the 1986 tour. “That Was Then, This Is Now” became a top twenty hit, but Davy didn’t like the deal so he wasn’t on it. When it was performed as part of the tour, Davy preferred to leave the stage rather than sing backup vocals. On that tour Davy attacked a Coca-Cola machine backstage, angry that the Monkees had to pay Columbia Pictures a small percentage for using the Monkees name and trademark. The Coca-Cola Company owned Columbia Pictures at the time. Although Davy was the most responsive to the fans, when irritated he could also alienate them.

At the Monkees’ June 20, 1996, performance at the Universal Amphitheatre, Davy thanked me from the stage as I was sitting in the audience. I was touched by the gesture of appreciation. It was the first time I had been thanked in that manner. I developed a nice rapport with Micky, and he’s the only one that I see, socially, on occasion. But even he can feel resentful. He was the lead singer on most of the Monkees’ hits, and even on the ones that the others don’t play or sing on, he still only gets one-fourth of the royalty.

When I heard that Davy had died in February 2012, I was shocked and puzzled because he had always seemed so healthy. I had seen him only once since I left Rhino. It was mid-November 2008, and it was a curious exchange: I approached him outside the Egyptian Theater, where the American Cinematheque was presenting a program of original The Monkees episodes accompanied by rare commercials and outtakes (assembled by Andrew Sandoval) and a screening of Head. He looked good, fit, and tan, and I told him so. Rather than responding similarly, or even inquiring what I’d been up to, he rattled off his performing schedule the next few weeks, seeming to equate the demand for his services as a reflection of his self-worth at the age of sixty-two. Of course, I’d heard the routine before.