Head: More of the Monkees

After their spectacular, media-orchestrated rise to fame in 1966, with a top-rated tv show and several #1 hit songs, the Monkees were on top of the world.

 But not for long. They chafed at their "boy band" restrictions; they wanted be known as serious artists, to move beyond teeny-bopper love songs,  to tackle serious issues. They wanted to be free. Their handlers disapproved.

In the spring of 1968, they wrote and produced a movie, Head.  It premiered with great anticipation; fans thought that it would be a comedic documentary, like the Beatles' Hard Day's Night.

It wasn't.

You say we're manufactured -- to that we all agree.
So make your choice and we'll rejoice in never being free!

It consists of a series of sketches, most about the difference between reality and the manufactured plotlines of their tv series: Davy becomes a boxer; Micky is lost in the desert; they visit a haunted house and the Old West.  They constantly disrupt the stories, changing their lines, dropping character, or just saying "We don't want to do this anymore" and walking off the set.

But every set leads to a new story.

They think they have escaped, and settle down to throw a birthday party for Mike.  But he starts yelling that this is not his apartment, these are actors, not his real friends, it's all a fake.

They escape from a box only to find themselves in a bigger box.

They try to commit suicide, only to find that that, too, isn't real; there is no escape.

The constraint of modern life, the inability to ever be free, is a common thread in 1960s media, and resonated strongly for gay kids growing up in a constant drone of "What girl do you like?  What girl do you like?  What girl do you like?"

We've seen it in Easy Rider and Alice's Restaurant, in the Tripods series of dystopian mind-control novels, in Richard Schaal trapped in The Cube; in Number 6 trapped in The Village, even in the Castaways trapped on Gilligan's Island.

Still, this version is worth a look for:
1. The clever "box inside a box" concept
2. The frequent beefcake.  You see more of Micky and Davy than ever before, constant shirtless and semi-nude scenes, and all of the guys gets close-ups of their very, very tight pants.
3. The homoerotic buddy bonding that shines through, in spite of the frequent girl-kissing.  These guys are into guys.

In a way, Head represented the suicide of the group.  Teen fans hated it, and the psychedelic generation stayed away.  Their tv series was cancelled, and their songs stopped charting.

But, 50 years later, the memory remains.

Head is streaming on Amazon Prime.

Davy Jones and the Monkees

One of my first crushes was on Davy Jones, singer for the pre-fab boy band The Monkees.  In fact, the first album I ever bought (or rather, asked Mom and Dad for) was  The Monkees (1966), because it showed Davy Jones seated in the foreground, dirty from working outdoors, with Peter Tork's arm around him.  I figured they were boyfriends.

Some of the tracks were gender-explicit, with lots of “girls” and “babes," but many were not, including the famous “Last Train to Clarksville", written by the famous duo Boyce and Hart: the singer, talking on the telephone, asks a loved one for a final rendezvous in a train station before he goes away forever.

Quite a change from the girl-crazy Beatles and Herman's Hermits.

More of the Monkees (1967) again had an evocative cover, with the boys in blue shirts and tight jeans gazing down suggestively at the camera. But every track was about desperate longing for some girl or another, with a single exception. In “Laugh,” which didn’t chart as a single, Davy Jones suggests that those boys who are interested in boys should transform their "secret" into humor:

Laugh, when you're keepin' a secret
And it seems to be known by the rest of the world.
Laugh, when you go to a party
And you can't tell the boys from the girls.

The tv series (1966-68, then on Saturday morning 1968-70) seemed to concur. The nonsensical plots, filled with blackout gags, self-referential humor, and spoofs of every movie cliché from superheroes to Westerns, were surprisingly gay-friendly.  And shirtless shots were quite common.

Although Micky Dolenz was ostensibly the leader of the group, Davy Jones, only 5’3”, with dark eyes and a sensual pout, quickly became the standout star. He was prominently displayed on every album cover, and almost every episode required him to wear a swimsuit or revealing prizefighter’s trunks, or get his clothes ripped off by fans, or otherwise display his slight but firm physique. 

Unfortunately, he also got the most girl-chasing plotlines. Of 58 episodes, Davy went ape over a girl in six, Peter Tork in two, Micky in only one, and Mike Nesmith not at all.  

Micky is the one that I figured liked boys, not girls.  My evidence: the voice-over introduction to “Monkees on the Wheel” (December 1967) notes that Las Vegas is the

Pleasure capital of the world, where each man seeks the things he loves most. [Shot of Peter following a girl.]
The things he loves most. [Shot of Mike following a girl.]
The things he loves most.[Shot of Davy following a girl.]

And then the story begins. Why is Micky omitted? Because the joke has run its course, or because girls are not the things he loves most?

Also, in “Monkees Mind their Manors” (February 1968), the group travels to England. At the airport, the boys realize that the customs agent is being portrayed by Jack Williams, the show’s prop master, but Williams protests that he is actually a famous singer.  Then he sings the Dean Martin standby “Everybody Loves Somebody Sometime”, and Micky, overcome with passion, leaps into his arms.

Many minor characters were gay-vague, such as the flamboyant Sir Twiggly Toppin Middle Bottom (Bernard Fox) and beach movie star Frankie Catalina (Bobby Sherman), who hates the beach and is “allergic to girls” (i.e., gay). 

And the Monkees themselves obviously preferred buddy-bonding over girl-chasing.  I couldn't wait to see their constant caressing of faces, hands, and chests, their cuddling together, their panicked hugging in moments of danger.  Regardless of what the actors thought they were conveying, for gay kids they produced a powerful evocation of same-sex love.    

See also my review of Head, the Monkees' swan song.

Herman's Hermits: Noone Likes Girls

Sometime in the fall of 1968, when I was in the third grade, we had a talent show at Denkmann Elementary School, and a shaggy-haired sixth grader named Mark played the guitar and sang "Mrs. Brown, You've Got a Lovely Daughter."

I thought Mark was cute, but as the words flowed about girls and girls and girls, a  lot of the boys became bored and fidgety, until my friend Bill got the idea of sailing a paper airplane into his guitar.  It landed a little short, but the idea spread, until a dozen paper airplanes were soaring across the auditorium.  Some hit Mark's guitar, but he kept playing doggedly, insisting that the meaning of life lay in girls and girls and girls.

We weren't impressed by heterosexist lyrics, not even from Herman's Hermits, a British invasion group named obliquely after the Mr. Peabody and Sherman cartoon.  There was no Herman, just Peter Noone (on top), who was 15 when he became the lead singer (that's his real name). Their single "I'm into Something Good" (1964) hit the top of the British charts, propelling Herman and his Hermits to fame.  They appeared on the cover of Time Magazine in 1965 with the logo: "Rock and roll: Everybody's turned on."

Their biggest hit in the U.S. was "Mrs. Brown" (1965) " but there were others.
"I'm Henry the Eighth" (1965)
"Listen People" (1966)
"Leaning on the Lamp Post" (1966)
"Dandy " (1966)
"There's a Kind of Hush" (1967)

Not a one about friendship, or home and country, or social injustice (they hated hippies).  Every single one of them was about getting or losing a girl.

Even "Henry the Eight" is not about the Tudor king, but a boast about the fecundity of the widow next door, who has married seven blokes named Henry before.

"Listen, People" is not about fighting racism or protesting the Vietnam war, but about how to avoid getting burned by a bad heterosexual relationship.

Besides, they weren't dreamy, like Micky Dolenz and Davy Jones of the Monkees (top photo), and there weren't any shirtless pictures in teen magazines.

By the time Bill and I started listening to his older sister's teen idol records, their star had faded, replaced by the more hippie-oriented Beatles

Boyce and Hart

Boyce and Hart barely rated a "wow!" in Tiger Beat.  Maybe they were too old, over 30 by 1968.

But they made a splash with gay kids, and not just because of the eye-appeal of their exceptionally tight white slacks.  While other musical duos like Simon & Garfunkel gazed at each other and occasionally placed a hand on shoulder, Boyce and Hart seemed to relish physical contact, always touching: hugging, arms around shoulders, legs draped over thighs.

Both had wives and talked about girls, but still, it wasn't hard to imagine them as boyfriends.

Arizona native Bobby Hart (bottom) and Virginia boy Tommy Boyce  (top) met in Los Angeles in 1958, when they were 19 and 20 years old.  Soon they were writing songs for Chubby Checker, Paul Revere and the Raiders, Del Shannon, and Dean Martin.  

But their biggest fame came in 1965, when they began writing the songs for The Monkees. They left  in 1966, after a dispute with producer Don Kirshner, but they remained close to the Monkees, who graciously gave them credit for writing such hits as "Last Train to Clarksville" and "I Wanna Be Free."

Boyce and Hart also performed, with three albums and five charting singles.  They appeared as themselves on three 1960s sitcoms: I Dream of Jeannie (1967), The Flying Nun (1970), and Bewitched (1970), and wrote the soundtracks of a dozen other programs, including Days of Our Lives, The Ambushers, and Where Angels Go, Trouble Follows.

The songs they wrote for others were often heterosexist, to meet the requirements of the music machiine of the era.  But some, deliberately or not, omitted pronouns:

It's so neat to meet you "Where the Action Is"
Say you'll always be my friend, because "I Wanna Be Free."

And some were about friends:

Just exactly what does trust mean?
Is it about being down with the scene?
Or is it about following your own true heart
And being true to your friends to the end from the start

They wrote over 300 songs together before breaking up in the early 1970s.  They reunited briefly in the 1975-77 to perform with Micky Dolenz and Davy Jones of The Monkees (calling themselves David, Micky, Tommy & Bobby).  But then each pursued his own projects.  They lived on opposite sides of the country, Boyce in Nashville, Hart in Los Angeles.

Tommy Boyce committed suicide in 1994.   Bobby Hart is currently working on a musical about their partnership; Sunshine Pop: Stories from the Boyce and Hart Music Machine.