No matter how long you chew it, some bubblegum just refuses to lose flavor.
At this point, mania over the Monkees has rightfully subsided, despite the group’s attempts every five years or so to keep its zany spirit alive. Even this year’s 30th anniversary tour and new album — “Justus,” featuring all four members (Davy, Micky, Michael and Peter) for a change — couldn’t sustain much interest in the nostalgia act.
In fact, the group’s crowning achievement this year was likely Davy Jones’ surprise appearance at U2’s Dodger Stadium show, not any of the Monkees’ innumerable performances.
So it’s fitting that by stepping around the retro hoopla that accompanied, say, the Prefab Four’s 20th anniversary resurgence, a documentary such as “Hey, Hey, We’re the Monkees” (Rhino, $19.95) would be able to put the phenomenon in proper perspective — and, in so doing, make a strong argument for the band’s slight but significant role in pop history.
As Micky Dolenz smartly points out, the Monkees were a TV show first, then a band, which now seems both its boon and its bane. For 90 minutes, the Monkees’ kid gloves come off; all those acidic barbs launched at them over the years — that they were nothing but lip-synching stooges, that they didn’t play their own instruments, that they sanitized “serious” rock — are boldly addressed here with little disguise.
For instance, they freely admit they didn’t play their own instruments (at first). “But then, neither did the Mamas and the Papas and a lot of other groups,” reminds Peter Tork. “We weren’t the only ones.”
But the Monkees’ lack of control over their music is the core of the story. When the group fired original music producer, impressario Don Kirshner, to attempt to make it with their own material, well, that’s when everything fell to ruin. The show was canceled.
The albums, starting with “Headquarters,” became schizophrenic, with each member wanting to make his personality known. And, of course, it was 1967, the height of psychedelia. Drugs and mind-altering experimentation were pushing them further away from “Last Train to Clarksville” and “Daydream Believer” and deeper into twisted spaciness such as the soundtrack to their ill-fated film, “Head” (1968).
All of that is well captured here via new interviews with the band and other key participants (including Kirshner, manager Ward Sylvester and songwriter Bobby Hart), lots of archival footage and TV clips, and plenty of previously unreleased moments. What comes across most, then, is how much more than a teeny-boppin’ bubble-gum act the Monkees were. There are important footnotes to their story — they’re next after Richard Lester and The Beatles in the evolution toward music video, for instance, and also contributed (in an inadvertent way) to the rise of Jimi Hendrix — but what still stands out after all this time are those undeniably catchy songs.
So what if they only sang “(I’m Not Your) Stepping Stone”? So what if they didn’t write “Pleasant Valley Sunday,” their best single? So what if that might be the Byrds singing those sweet harmonies on “What Am I Doing Hanging ‘Round”? What does it matter? Those tunes, plus the madcap, sometimes surreal and often hilarious TV episodes, make up the Monkees legend — a lightweight story that has grown in stature with each revisit.
