The Monkees – The Monkees Present
Micky, Peter, Michael and
Davy
(soniclovenoize reconstruction)
Micky Side:
1. Through The
Looking Glass
2. Mommy and Daddy
3. Rosemarie
4. Just a Game
5. Shake ‘Em Up and
Let ‘Em Roll
6. Shorty Blackwell
Peter Side:
7. (I Prithee) Do Not
Ask For Love
8. Lady’s Baby
9. Seeger’s Theme
10. Tear The Top
Right Off My Head
11. Merry Go Round
12. Come On In
Michael Side:
13. Listen To The
Band
14. The Crippled Lion
15. Nine Times Blue
16. St. Mathew
17. Carlisle Wheeling
and The Effervescent Popsicle
18. Hollywood
Davy Side:
19. My Share of The
Sidewalk
20. Me Without You
21. Laurel and Hardy
22. Smile
23. You and I
24. The Girl I Left
Behind Me
Happy holidays! This
reconstruction is a little ‘present’ for you…
Four presents actually! This is a
reconstruction of the unfinished 1969 Monkees double album entitled The Monkees
Present Micky, Peter, Michael and David.
Intended as a four-part solo album in which each Monkee wrote and
produced their own side of the double album, the project was scrapped after
Peter Tork quit the group at the conclusion of 1968. The completed tracks were all either shelved
or trickled out on subsequent Monkees releases, with the title itself
reappropriated for an unrelated album.
This reconstruction attempts to gather the best of the material intended
for the project and present the double album The Monkees could have released,
had Tork not left. Attempts were made to
use vintage mixes as well as the best masters when available, and unique mixes
and edits were created to present the album as a complete, cohesive whole, true
to what it would have sounded like in 1968.
The battle for creative control—and respect—had been the
undertone of The Monkees chaotic existence; it was also their
own undoing. Micky Dolenz, Davy Jones, Michael Nesmith and Davy Jones were initially cast as a band of characters (or rather, characters who were in a band) but
Colgems producer and Monkees creator Bob Rafelson didn’t care that of those
four young men who could sing and act, one was already a locally-known
Greenwich Village guitarist and the other a promising Los Angeles singer/songwriter
himself. Rafelson and Screen Gems
musical director Don Kirchner insisted chose not only to use their own slew of
Brill Building professional songwriters (including Neil Sedaka, Neil Diamond,
Carol King and the pair who wrote many of The Monkee’s classics, Tommy Boyce
and Bobby Hart) but session musicians to actually play on the recordings (often
The Wrecking Crew), leaving the four Monkees to act in the show and to drift into the recording studio to add lead vocals to already finished backing tracks.
Dismayed they were not even allowed to perform on albums
credited to themselves, Tork and Nesmith spent the early years of
The Monkees attempting to gain some sort of musical control over their career,
even if the remaining Monkees Jones and Dolenz were simply actors
who could sing, mostly ambivalent to the quest for musical independence. Rafelson and Kirshner eventually acquiesced
and allowed The Monkees to tour as a live band.
The tour proved financially successful (and musically adequate) and the producers allowed The
Monkees to write and record as an actual band, albeit under the supervision
of The Turtles’ Chip Douglas as acting producer. The results were a pair of 1967 albums—the
charming Headquarters and the ambitious Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones
Ltd—and the chart-topping singles “Daydream Believer” and “Pleasant Valley
Sunday.”
The celebration was short lived, as this musical
independence took its toll on The Monkees.
While it was relished by Tork, Dolenz and Jones learned that being in a
real band was hard work and it was easier to operate with session musicians;
Nesmith learned that it was just easier to do it all himself! By February 1968, The Monkees television show
was cancelled; this was not a big problem for Rafelson and Kirshner, as The
Monkees made more money from record sales anyways, and their solution was to
give the band unlimited studio time to continue making product: this time
records instead of television programs. The
result was a staggering amount of material recorded by all four members acting as
essentially four solo artists with their own set of backing session musicians, although still under The Monkees’ unified banner. By April 1968, Kirshner handpicked twelve out
of the sea of over 40 songs recorded since November 1967 to constitute their
fifth album The Birds, The Bees & The Monkees. All of Tork's tracks were passed over (aside from a short spoken word piece), being mostly unfinished and obviously in need of help from his bandmates.
If never-ending recording sessions for each individual
Monkee was not enough, they also commenced a larger project in February 1968
that overlapped with the recording sessions: a full-length motion picture co-written
by Jack Nicholson, intended to not only destroy the mythos of The Monkees, but
end their career as they knew it.
Meandering, nonsensical and decidingly psychedelic, HEAD made zero sense
to their teeny-bopper audience and Screen Gems failed to market it properly to
the counter-culture scene who might have understood it. While the
movie was a complete bomb, the soundtrack album has recently been reevaluated
as a psychedelic masterpiece, including Frank Zappa-esque dialog collages
assembled by Jack Nicholson, interspersed between seven of the remaining
30-or-so songs recorded during The Birds, The Bees & The Monkees
sessions, as well as a few months beyond.
Even after eating up the riches of The Monkees’ 1968
recording sessions on both The Birds, The Bees & The Monkees and HEAD,
there was still an abundance of quality music remaining. That summer during the press junkets for
HEAD, The Monkees hinted at their next project: a double album consisting of 24
tracks, with each Monkee writing, producing and featured on 6 of the
songs. That November, in the final group
interview with all four Monkees, Micky confirmed the plan for a double album
with each Monkee given their own side of the LP and further elaborating that
each side would have its own unique sound due to each Monkee’s own musical
interest (noting that Michael’s side would by Country/Western, Davy’s as
Broadway-Rock and Micky describing his own side as, oddly enough, weird and electronic). This comment was all but verified by Nesmith’s
move to record nine of his own compositions in Nashville that May (with the
studio musicians who would eventually be called Area Code 615), effectively
completing his side of the intended 2LP ahead of schedule.
Unfortunately Nesmith’s side—which predated Bob Dylan’s
attempts at Nashville country-rock by a year—would be the only Monkees Present side
completed. November 1968 saw The Monkees
returning in-front of a camera, filming 33 1/3 Revolutions per Monkee, a television-special equivalent of HEAD that would further cement the band’s demise. During the first day of filming, Tork announced
he was quitting The Monkees, and the 2LP Monkees Present project was
effectively shelved indefinitely. 1969
saw attempts to commercially revive the Monkees, now a trio, at first with an
updated sound courtesy of newly-drafted The Association and The 5th
Dimension producer Bones Howe (who oversaw musical production on 33 1/13 Revolutions per Monkee). The
decision was also made to resurrect some unused Monkees songs from 1966 in order
to exploit the initial Monkeemania. Both
accrued dismal results, with Instant Replay released in February (featuring
only 8 of The Monkees Present 2LP songs) and the official incarnation of The
Monkees Present Micky, David, Michael released in October (featuring only three of the original 1968
Monkees Present 2LP songs). Nesmith
officially quit the group in early 1970, choosing to focus on his own music
with his newly-formed First National Band.
By this point The Monkees had completely devolved from their spur of creativity in
1968... but is there a way to find their 2LP missing link?
For my reconstruction of The Monkees Present we will assume that
any song recorded between November 1967 (the start of The Birds, The Bees &
The Monkees sessions) to November 1968 (when Tork quit The Monkees) which hadn’t
already been released on either The Birds, The Bees & The Monkees or HEAD
is fair game. That amounts to 44
possible songs throughout twelve months (8 Micky songs, 7 Peter songs, 13
Michael songs and 16 Davy songs) to choose from for this 24-song album, allowing each
Monkee their best six, for optimal quality. We will also attempt
to exclusively use mixes prepared in 1968 (when possible), rather than later
mixes that could feature new overdubs and revisionism. This
reconstruction is also all in stereo since this was the time period that mono
was beginning to be phased out, since The Monkees Present would have been
release in early 1969.
Micky’s side is quite easy to assemble; dropping the weakest
track (“Don’t Say Nothin’ Bad”) and excluding the single "D. W. Washburn" released in June, we are left with six strong songs from the
voice that defined the band, creating a side that is quite the psychedelic-fueled
Sunshine Pop--an excellent successor to HEAD.
We open Micky’s Side with the original 1968 mix of “Through The Looking
Glass” from the The Birds, The Bees & The Monkees Delux 3CD. This is followed by his own composition, the politically
charged “Mommy and Daddy” to which Colgems highly objected, using a vintage 1969
mix with its uncensored lyrics but the intro taken from the album version, both
found on the Monkees Presents remaster.
Next is a 1968 mix of Dolenz’s own funky “Rosemarie” taken from TBTBTM 3CD,
followed by the rollicking Leiber/Stoller-penned “Shake ‘Em Up and Let ‘Em Roll”,
an alternate mix also from TBTBTM 3CD. Dolenz’s
own stream-of-conscious track “Just A Game” is taken from Instant Replay, and
his side ends with his truly bizarre but wonderful psychedelic-pop of “Shorty
Blackwell”, this being it’s original 1968 stereo mix found on the Instant
Replay Delux 3CD.
Peter seemed to be the only Monkee who had problems
finishing a side of an album; by the time he left The Monkees in late 1968, he
only had a handful of finished songs and a laundry list of unrealized ideas. He infamously spent a lot of work on “Lady’s
Baby”, recording four different versions, each with multiple revisions. Unfortunately for this reconstruction, the
most final versions of the seven songs he cut only total twelve and a half
minutes, so we must essentially use all of it just to complete Peter’s side of
the album! In effect Peter’s
side seems a bit minimal, meandering and frankly unfinished, but appropriately reflects
his folky roots. Beginning with the
fantastic “(I Prithee) Do Not Ask For Love”, presented here as an exclusive
stereo mix created when the mono vocal acetate mix is synced with the stereo
backing track, both found on the Instant Replay 3CD. Following is one of many versions of his own “Lady’s
Baby” he cut throughout 1968, this being the overdubbed acoustic Second Version
from TBTBTM 3CD. Following with Peter’s standard
spoken-word interlude of “Alvin”, uncredited here but taken from TBTBTM 3CD, flowing
directly into the Third Version of “Seeger’s Theme” from TBTBTM 3CD. Next is “Tear The Top Right Off My Head”, the
acetate mono mix from Missing Links Vol 2 is speed-corrected, with stereo
spectrum processing by my friend Skyfinity.
Following is the admittedly unrealized Version Two of “Merry Go Round”
from TBTBTM 3CD and Pete’s scant side concludes with “Come On In”, taken from
Music Box and speed-corrected.
Michael’s side becomes a bit more tricky, since we have a
wealth of material to choose from: “Propinquity”, “Some of Shelly’s Blues”, “Don’t
Wait For Me”, “The Crippled Lion”, “Hollywood”, “How Insensitive”, “Good Clean
Fun”, “Listen To The Band” and “St. Mathew” were all recorded in late in Nashville specifically for the album, not to mention Michael had the TBTBTM
outtakes “While I Cry” from January and “If I Ever Get To Saginaw Again” from
March, and the HEAD outtakes “Carlisle Wheeling” and “Nine Times Blue” from April already in the can. Here we will pick the cream of the crop and
open with his own tribute to The Monkees, “Listen To The Band”, using the original
1968 mix found on The Monkees Present remaster.
Following are the vintage 1968 mixes of “The Crippled Lion” and “Nine
Times Blue”, both found on the Instant Replay 3CD. The
alternate 1968 mixes of the psychedelic-country rocker “St. Mathew” and the
Dylanesque “Carlisle Wheeling” from Instant Replay 3CD follows, with the side
ending with a ride out in the sunset of “Hollywood” from the Instant Replay
3CD, but with the channels swapped in order to match the rest of the
songs.
Davy’s side is even trickier, as he recorded a vast amount
of songs in 1968: TBTBTM outtakes "The Girl I Left Behind Me", "Ceiling In My Room", "Me Without You", "Laurel and Hardy", "Don't Listen To Linda" and "My Share of the Sidewalk" (note we are excluding the "It's Nice To Be With You", which appeared as the b-side to "D.W. Washburn" in June); HEAD outtakes "Changes", "War Games", "Look Down", "Smile", "You and I", "I'm Gonna Try" and "The Party"; and the Bones Howe-produced "A Man Without a Dream" and "Someday Man" from November 1968. Just as the previous LP side, we will take
the six best songs from these 15 to make the strongest album possible (or at
least the least obnoxious; I will admit a significant amount of bias against
this batch of songs!). The side opens
with “My Share of The Sidewalk” found on TBTBTM 3CD, followed by the cream of
Davy’s crop, the vintage 1968 mix of “Me Without You” from the Instant Replay
3CD. Although a bit cheesy, “Laurel and
Hardy” from the TBTBTM 3CD is next, purely because of the sitar and my own
nostalgic love of the comedy duo! Of all
the original compositions Jones offered during this time period, the least
terrible would be the sappy “Smile” and followed by the relentless rocker “You and I” featuring a Neil Young guitar solo, both taken from the
Instant Replay 3CD. The Monkees Present 2LP concludes
with the Second Version of “The Girl I Left Behind Me”, the very first song
recorded during these sessions. This
version is sourced from the Music Box set, but includes a reprise of the
unfinished tag of “A Girl Named Love” sourced from TBTBTM 3CD and remixed to
match the panning of the Music Box mix.
Sources used:
The Birds, The Bees & The Monkees (3CD Delux Edition, 2010
Rhino Records)
Instant Replay (3CD Delux Edition, 2011 Rhino Records)
Missing Links Vol 2 (1990 Rhino Records)
The Monkees Present (1994 remaster Rhino Records)
Music Box (2001 Rhino Records)
flac --> wav --> editing in SONAR and Goldwave --> flac
encoding via TLH lv8
* md5 files, track notes and artwork included