THE MONKEES SHOW: BALLADS AND BULLETS
There they were, David Thomas Jones, Michael Dolenz, Robert Michael Nesmith, and Peter Halsten Torkelson, mesmerizing 10,000 adolescents at Baltimore’s Civic Center last week. Why? Because they’re a relatively new musical phenomenon known as the Monkees.
They played to an almost packed house, and their popularity was reflected in the faces of the thousands of predominantly female ten-to sixteen-year-olds in the audience. As a result of a massive promotion campaign in the District, a big chunk of the audience was from the Washington area.
The Monkees were preceded on the show by a new Decca recording group called the Sundowners and a girl singer from Australia, Lynn Randell. When the Monkees finally came on stage, a deafening roar enveloped the auditorium to the delight of the foursome, but to the chagrin of the many policemen who were on duty to keep some semblance of order.
It was that first roar that proved too great for one officer, who plugged each of his ears with a .38-caliber cartridge. When asked what he thought of the Monkees, the officer removed his ear-plugs and replied: “I don’t mind duty at the Civic Center, except for these (censored) rock-and-roll shows.”
The Monkees went through all of their popular tunes, including their current release, “Pleasant Valley Sunday.” Toward the end of their act, the Monkees went off stage and got out of their red velvet suits. Peter soon strutted back dressed in a white sweater and white pants and sang folk songs, accompanying himself on a banjo.
Then each of the other Monkees made a solo performance. Mike did a rousing job on “Can’t Judge a Book by Looking at the Cover,” Davy sang a tune from the play Stop the World, I Want to Get Off, and Mickey did a weak imitation of James Brown singing “I’ve Got a Woman.”
As a show-stopping finale, the Monkees grouped together and sang “Stepping Stone” as pictures of themselves flashed on a giant screen above their heads and the dark auditorium was filled with searching spotlights and green “stars” reflected from a cut-glass ball suspended from the ceiling.
By the end of the show, the Monkees had finally disproved the rumor that had been circulating before they came on stage . . . that they couldn’t play their own instruments. As a matter of fact, the sound the Monkees put out at the Civic Center that night was almost identical to the Monkees records put out by RCA.
The Monkees’ rise to stardom began in the final months of 1965 with an advertisement in the show business trade weeklies. The ad read: “Madness. Wanted . . . a quartet of hip, insane, folk-oriented rock ’n’ rollers, 17 to 21, with courage to work.”
At the time, Peter Tork and Mike Nesmith didn’t meet the age requirements, since Mike was twenty-two and Peter was twenty-three. But that was overlooked, and the quartet of Jones, Dolenz, Nesmith, and Tork inherited a new television series that was to begin the following Fall.
The rest of their rise to fame resulted from their popular television series and a number of hit records that followed their initial smash, “Last Train to Clarksville.”
Several Monkees fans in the audience said they didn’t mind the charge that the group had been put together by adults in a premeditated effort to challenge the Beatles.
“The Beatles are too old,” frowned one thirteen-year-old. “Besides, they take drugs and they aren’t clean-cut anymore.”
Others in the audience said they liked both groups. One teenager pointed out that, “Although there are many different opinions about the musical ability of the Monkees, nobody can doubt the genius of the Beatles.”
The Monkees themselves say they are the “greatest fans of the Beatles. After a recent visit to England and a meeting of the two groups, Mickey Dolenz said, “They dig our records too.”