For most people, mentioning The Monkees brings with it a certain cheekiness. Everyone remembers the famous bit from The Simpsons where a young Marge is told by a fellow student that they’re not a real band and that it wasn’t Mike Nesmith’s real hat. As the flashback returns to the present, Marge confronts her therapist who tells her that The Monkees were about rebellion.
It’s honestly one of the most misunderstood things about the group. Many could just read it as a joke, of weaponizing something that’s meek and silly for the sake of an absurd punchline. Yes, it works as a punchline for a variety of reasons. For one, The Monkees were proverbially created in a lab, made by a TV studio by who they felt could sell their fake-band TV show. They didn’t play their own instruments on the show and eventually had to learn following their success leading to live performances. If you watch the show, it’s hard to not think of it as this goofy piece of entertainment. Most episodes were just excuses to watch wacky music videos set to Scooby-Doo/Benny Hill-esque gags.
In that way, The Monkees were a silly band. They never had the artistic integrity of The Beatles. They didn’t even write their own songs. How could this artificial group be about anything significant?
I can’t say that the later Monkees, following their departure from the series, was necessarily about rebellion. They weren’t on par with Creedence Clearwater Revival for these towering, timeless anthems. You can argue that at best they had songs like “Daydream Believer” that was fun, but more of a feel-good flower child vibe. They were more likely to rock back and forth with smiles on their face, at least based on how you’d imagine them from the TV show.
But, if I’m being totally honest, there’s something secretly brilliant about The Monkees. The show eventually went from conventional slapstick comedy into something more avant-garde, turning into tour documentaries and splicing in messages that eventually got the show canceled. Sure they weren’t the most confrontational, but it’s important to notice who was working on the show at the time.
Among the many impressive credits is Bob Rafelson and Paul Mazursky. While they’re not household names, they are essential names in the 1970s New Hollywood Movement, presenting these politically-charged stories that have become essential in the years since. Rafelson’s filmography includes Five Easy Pieces (1970) and The King of Marvin Gardens (1972). Mazursky did even better with Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (1969) and Moscow on the Hudson (1984). These are all character dramas that find some displacement in society and explore how there’s a need to connect to each other.
Anyone who knows those credits will also notice that they collaborated with some of the most significant actors of the era. However, I bring this up because there is something that’s wonderfully backdoor about Rafelson’s debut Head (1968). It’s ostensibly a Monkees revue, reflective of the counterculture with abstract bits about consumerism and absurdism. It’s like Laugh-In, but if it was at times funny, darker, and more provocative. This was their introduction to the world as a legitimate band and I honestly think it’s a masterful experience. The idea that Rafelson named it such so that the next film could be advertised as “From the filmmakers who gave you Head” should tell you what kind of man he was.
But anyone who questions the idea of The Monkees being about rebellion should try watching it. They have conversations with Frank Zappa on a studio lot, and there are even cameos from Peter Fonda and Jack Nicholson. I guarantee that it’s a “blink and you’ll miss it” moment at its finest. I had to pause and search through a scene just to notice because of how unassuming the moment was. In a film full of defied odds, somehow that cameo resonates for how abruptly it comes and goes, teasing the audience expecting something greater from the future Easy Rider (1969) duo. Head is a breeding ground for Hollywood’s early rebellion, though it arguably started even earlier than this.
By now you can guess that I really like The Monkees. While I’ve seen enough of the series to recognize the dip in quality, I know that I have been personally charmed by the fact that they’re still releasing music, touring, and finding these small ways to stay true to themselves. If they were just a fabrication, this would’ve been closed up decades ago. Instead, there’s a pride in their work that eventually lead me to meet Mickey Dolenz at Anaheim Comic Con in 2010. He signed a picture for me that said “Cool.” He seemed like a nice guy.
Which brings me to my point. I knew that deep down The Monkees were much more subversive than their reputation precedes. I understand that some of Peter Tork’s solo work gets even stranger. However, I found myself looking for an anti-war song to write about this week. I was just in the mood to explore the subject, and suddenly I discovered, listed among the most misunderstood protest songs in history, was “Last Train to Clarksville.”
Of course, I had to look. Suddenly it was like discovering that my life was a life. I had heard the song so many times. I just assumed it was about a man running away from home to start anew. He’s inviting his girlfriend along. It’s cheeky, but to me, it made sense as one of your goofy love songs. There wasn’t much more to the substance because, after all, they sang songs like “I’m a Believer.” They weren’t room for subtext, right?
This all comes down to how you interpret the line “And I don’t know if I’m ever coming home.” If you’re like me, you took it as a song about being a runaway. However, I’ve read interviews where Dolenz claims that
“It's about a guy going off to war. Frankly, it's an anti-war song. It's about a guy going to Clarksville, Tennessee, which is an Army base if I'm not mistaken. He's obviously been drafted and he says to his girlfriend, 'I don't know if I'm ever coming home.'”
That’s quite a bold statement given how little of the song alludes to mortality or any war tension. Even the guitar-playing would suggest something more upbeat and positive. There are vocal harmonies doing a skittering pattern at one point. It’s silly and upbeat in such a way that I don’t immediately think of the war. I don’t even know where Clarksville is. To me, it just felt like an arbitrary city chosen because, as you’ll quickly realize, it has a nice ring to it.
From here, it actually becomes a bit of a conspiracy theory. As mentioned, a lot of the early Monkees songs weren’t written by the band themselves. In this case, “Last Train to Clarksville” was written by Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart. Hart claims that he always intended it as an anti-war song.
However, that’s to suggest that the name Clarksville holds any deeper significance. In the interview, Hart claimed that:
"There's a little town in northern Arizona I used to go through in the summer on the way to Oak Creek Canyon called Clarksdale. We were throwing out names, and when we got to 'Clarksdale,' we thought 'Clarksville' sounded even better.”
At this point, you have to wonder if Boyce or Hart actually knew about Clarksville, TN. He claims that he thought The Army’s Fort Campbell post was actually an Air Force base. It becomes a bit confusing from there. There was no intention to suggest that Clarksville was an intentional reference, and yet it was perfectly symbolic of some subtext that people caught on to. Suddenly it became more than a random name, but who realized it first?
To be totally honest, it makes the song much more interesting even if I think it fails to be the most powerful anti-war song I’ve ever heard. I think by being subversive and hiding your deeper intentions requires audience participation. Then again, when you’re working on a TV series lead by some of the wildest minds of 70s cinema, it makes sense that they would try to get messages past the censors, presenting something more provocative. That’s The Monkees in a nutshell. Their best work had this ability to make you notice something more when you looked closer. It’s why Head is so revolutionary, feeling like an LSD version of a Beatles movie.
I don’t know that this changes my opinion of the song all that much otherwise. It’s just a fun detail that I learned when trying to find subjects for this week’s Single Awareness. While I am willing to accept that The Monkees won’t ever be considered the greatest rock group, I do believe that they’re underrated, capable of deserving more love than this goofy knock-off. After all, they once outsold The Beatles… and they were bigger than Jesus. What does that make Davy Jones? Considering that he caused David Jones to change his name to David Bowie, probably Dionysus.
My big takeaway from this is that I want to believe that there’s more reason to believe that The Monkees were always secretly about rebellion. For their TV show, it was sometimes a rebellion of format. For film, it was a rebellion to reason. For music, it was finding ways to make the brightest pop numbers into something dark and possibly depressing. I can only imagine that “Pleasant Valley Sunday” is their deepest song, again presented underneath a delightful polished sheen.
I will always love The Monkees for how fascinating they secretly were. They were undermined by the industry, and yet they had reason to keep moving forward, to try and evoke their own messages of hope with their upbeat sound. Sure they will always exist under the shadow of their show, but without it, so much of modern culture would look significantly different. I’m thankful that it exists, if just as this evidence that there’s so much more going on than we all think. It’s all about how you interpret it.
Comments
Post a Comment