Here
they come, walkin' down the street. The
Gang Of Four Long-Haired Weirdos. When
you're a Monkee you're one all the way,
from your first romping punk 'till your
dyin' day. Catch 'em if you can.
Davy,
Micky, Mike, Peter. Four entertainers
whose real names were used but whose
lives were changed on the small screen to
protect the innocent. Four individuals
fictionalized as psychedelectrified
folkies for your entertainment.
Before
America was punk'd - we were Monk'd. And
loving every minute of it.
Forever
the Young Generation - behold the far-out
fashions! Forever outwitting The Man and
His Establishment - behold the power of
the romp as the uptight and
down-and-dirty fall to pieces! Forever
the Four Mod Magi with an off-beat,
inexplicable Midas touch - behold the
slick red customized muscle car and
groovy Malibu beach pad without the
benefit of regular jobs or even regular
gigs!
I
can't remember when I didn't know
"The Monkees", both television
show and the act that eventually
developed from the Pop Culture Pressure
Cooker that created the television show.
I can't recall a time when I wasn't
a fan. To me, they represented a breed of
brash and brazen big brothers we in the
younger set would've adored having in our
midst; to the older boys, they
represented a rebellion couched in humor;
to the older girls...well, who doesn't
know about that?
The
former members of "The Monkees"
to this day declare they don't savvy what
all the screaming hoopla from the females
was all about. But as always, the little
girls understand, and the teen magazines
understood enough to know that feeding
the need was a mutually beneficial
relationship between the publishers and
the fans. Almost every issue of these
teenybop mags of the swingin' sixties era
all over the world touted photos and
revealing articles on the first corporate
boy-band.
Worldwide
nubie adulation of the television
stars-cum-pop band was lost on the
cynical wags of the "real" rock
music world who dubbed the quartet
"The Pre-Fab Four" and heaped
them with abuse due to their promotion
and eventual presentation as a real live
working band without the popular
backstory of requisite hip artistic
suffering by them as a long-struggling
group entity.
The
irony of pop purists constructing a box
of criteria into which they could stuff
artists during an experimental era as
effectively as the Monkee Corporate
Masters they decried would've made a
pretty good episode had "The
Monkees" survived as a show into the
twenty-first century.
The
concept: Four seasoned entertainers and
former bandmates getting together to
champion individualism. The antagonists:
Artistic elitists, business greedheads
and the demon of Nostalgia Merchandising.
("Each time I try to get out,
they keep pulling me back in,"
says Micky Corleone, whose Pacino would
sound strangely like Cagney.)
It
would make as entertaining a serving of
reductio ad absurdum as any of the
classic Monkees episodes while perhaps
even getting closer to the truth of the
whole phenomenon by reaching beyond the
realm of "The Monkees" as
Unreality T.V. Heck, it would be more
honest than what passes for Reality
T.V. these days.
Alas,
this may only be possible in the realm of
my whimsy, since time and tide await no
man nor Monkee. And the gentlemen who
fronted the phenomenon known as "The
Monkees" seem happy enough doing
their own thing these days - which,
thankfully, includes entertaining their
fans. Yet with the release of
biographies, detailed info books, fan
links galore, and the entire series on
DVD, forty years worth of fans - young
then and young now - can be transported
back in time to the exploits of
television's most magic boys in the
wackiest offering of the counterculture
sixties: the live-action cosmic trip
comic strip starring those clown princes
of pop..."THE MONKEES"!
So
mod, so madcap, so magic...you WILL
believe a struggling and starving wannabe
pop band of the 1960s can afford an
awesome signature auto and rent a far-out
Malibu beachhouse!
