an entirely too deep look into the monkees

July 8th, 2008 • posts i've written

Last Train to Clarksville — The Monkees’ first number one hit in August 1966. It actually preceded the airing of the hit television series by a few weeks.

You might remember that yesterday I was mulling over what seems like a cultural shift from the copycat to the remix, and I asked Mike Arauz his thoughts on the subject. He asked a good question, ‘What made the Monkees so successful? Was it just the tv show?’

My immediate answer, was that while there were a glut of bands trying to ride the wave of the british invasion and the beatles’ sound, ‘The Monkees’ was an incredibly self-aware and self-deprecating clone. And that’s true, the tv show itself employed a variety of self-aware techniques like breaking the fourth wall and talking to the camera well before it was an established technique in episodic television (not to mention music videos before music videos existed). I also think it shouldn’t be taken for granted that The Monkees was a ground breaking show in premise alone: it was a tv sitcom about a fake band, composed of real musicians (as their later albums demonstrated), using their real identities (mostly), that launched the real band. American Idol, America’s Got Talent, et al, eat your heart out.

But I’ve been thinking it over some more, and that immediate answer isn’t enough to account for the popularity of the group. And I think the real answer lies somewhere still in the discussion between copycats and remixes.

In the 60′s, TV was hitting the height of its power as a persuasion medium. And it definitely functioned as the tastemaker for popular music during that time. Following the ‘pre-fab four’ around on their totally random adventures sold records. Furthermore, the powers that be were running the show. Bob Rafelson (director and co-writer of Five Easy Pieces*) and Bert Schneider (son of a Columbia Pictures President) were the producers — and at their disposal was the entire writing team at Columbia Records’ Brill Building. Hence the ability to drop a single BEFORE the show ever ran and see it hit number one. The Monkees are an example of supreme copycatting, launched at a time when the copycat was also an incredibly powerful model. (has this model worked for P. Diddy in the last decade with his groups? And he has a powerful brand to launch these groups, which are more like brand extensions than The Monkees ever were)

So, why were The Monkees so successful? So far we’ve got 1) the rise of tv’s power to persuade and 2) it was an excellent copycat, produced by heavy weights in both tv and music. But there’s a third ingredient missing-scarcity.

These days, copycats abound. Any hit has copycat products following close behind like the tail of a comet, especially in music. Its just gotten easier to produce almost anything these days, and with social networks, copycat bands have a hell of lot easier time reaching fans of the hits. Not so in the 1960′s, however. Copycats had a hard time getting noticed at all, siphoning off much less of the hit’s fanbase. The Monkees were different though, they had an incredibly visible platform to launch from and again, an amazingly powerful vehicle of persuasion. This put them leaps and bounds ahead of their copycat competitors.

Ok, I’m satisfied for now. Off to non-Monkees thoughts…

*Weirdest trivia I uncovered during this research: Jack Nicholson co-write The Monkees film, Head.

Related posts:

1. the remix versus the copycat
2. to have and to hoard
3. the value of music

Tags: Strategy, the monkees copycats remix columbia records

Trackback URI.