In 1965, Micky Dolenz was an architecture student and jobbing actor in Los Angeles, doing the rounds of auditions for TV pilots. As a 10-year-old he had played the lead in a TV series called Circus Boy, but the former child star began to notice something odd about the jobs his agent was now sending him to: every one was for a series “about kids in a band”. He says: “One was called The Happeners, about a little folk trio like Peter, Paul and Mary. One was about a surfing band like the Beach Boys. Another was about a big family folk ensemble. Something was in the air, obviously, because of the Beatles, the Beach Boys, the Four Seasons, Motown. Young people, who had disposable income, were being targeted.”
None of those shows got made but a fourth audition proved more fruitful: it called for “folk’n’roll musician/singers … four insane boys” who looked as if they might hang around a hip Sunset Strip coffee shop called Ben Frank’s. Dolenz got a leading role, happily acquiescing to learn to play drums. “It was kind of the same as when I was in Circus Boy and they told me I had to learn to ride an elephant – ‘Great! When do I start?’”
The series was green-lit and the Monkees proved so successful at parting young people from their disposable income that, within a year, Dolenz was unable to visit the shopping mall near his parents’ home in San Jose without causing pandemonium. “I go through the big glass doors and all of a sudden there are people running, screaming. I thought it was a fire. I hold open the big door and I’m going, ‘Slow down! Don’t run! Don’t panic! It’s all right!’ And suddenly I realised they were running at me. I was like, ‘Oh God!’”
It was, he concedes, a very strange kind of fame. He was playing a character clearly based on himself and also called Micky – the drummer in a luckless fictional band called the Monkees. “We lived in a Malibu beach house,” he wryly notes, “and every episode had us trying to get a record deal or trying to get a gig and never making it – which does beg the question of how we could afford a Malibu beach house.”
But in real life, the band became one of the biggest in the world, at one juncture selling 6m albums and 5m singles in four months. Or rather, they were actors pretending to be a band, in order to front a succession of records that they hadn’t actually played on. Initially at least, everything but the vocals was handled by crack session musicians. When their second album, 1967’s More of the Monkees, was released, the first they knew about it was when it appeared in the shops.
It seems a deeply peculiar blurring of fantasy and reality, guaranteed to mess with an early twentysomething’s head. “Oh boy, oh boy!” chuckles Dolenz, tapping the side of his skull. “You don’t want to be in here sometimes! I think because of my upbringing in the business, I always attempted to separate the person from the persona. I wasn’t always successful, but that’s incredibly important if you want to survive. To some degree, I’ve always known that Micky the wacky drummer on television was who the girls were in love with – not me, Micky Dolenz, who grew up in the Valley. Now that’s easy to say, but sometimes very, very difficult to do. But if you don’t keep that separation, it can be disastrous. We see that happen all the time. An interesting, weird place to be.”
It’s even weirder that Dolenz is still talking about the Monkees nearly 60 years later. They weren’t supposed to have such staying power. The TV show was cancelled in 1968 after two seasons. The big hits dried up around the same time. But here Dolenz is, Zooming from his holiday home on the Delaware River a few days after his 80th birthday, the last surviving Monkee, looking jaunty in orange-tinted sunglasses and a rakishly angled trilby. (Davy Jones, Peter Tork and Mike Nesmith have all died.) Rewind TV is now repeating the show in the UK for the first time in years, although in truth, some channel somewhere in the world seems to have been re-running the series almost constantly since it was cancelled. It was a mainstay of children’s TV in the 70s, while MTV’s repeats in 1986 proved so popular, they triggered the first in a series of Monkees reunions.
There is one sense in which the show’s longevity is surprising. You might have expected the music to last: from I’m a Believer to Daydream Believer, the big hits were exquisitely turned examples of the songwriter-for-hire’s craft. But the show is a kind of period piece, a last transmission from a more innocent era of 60s pop that was about to be overwhelmed by psychedelia and more serious-minded artistic ambition.
Dolenz, however, stopped being surprised at the show’s durability decades ago. “It was about a fictitious band that wanted to be the Beatles, or the Stones, or whoever. That struggle for success is a classic theme in Hollywood movies and Broadway shows. It was more like a little Marx Brothers musical on television than a band – a little romp, laughing, singing, music, shtick. John Lennon first made that comment, ‘The Monkees are like the Marx Brothers.’ He was absolutely right. And the comedy wasn’t topical, nor was it satirical. So it stands up, it has legs.”
He chafes a little at the suggestion that the Monkees were effectively a manufactured boyband, saying: “It was not a boyband. It was the cast of a television show, like when the cast of Glee made albums.” But Dolenz admits he was the member most comfortable with whatever the Monkees were: a showbiz pro, unbothered when albums appeared without their knowledge, or when the producers showed so little confidence in their ability to play live that they booked their first gig in Hawaii, “because back then Honolulu was like another planet, so they figured if we really sucked no one would hear what happened”.
This was not a view shared by all his bandmates. When More of the Monkees appeared, a disgruntled Nesmith broke ranks, publicly describing it as “probably the worst album in the history of the world” and bluntly telling a reporter: “I don’t care if we never sell another record … tell the world we don’t record our own music.”
“Frankly,” says Dolenz, “I didn’t give a shit one way or the other. I don’t mean I didn’t give a shit about Mike. I did – and I knew what he was going through. He was frustrated because he was misled. He was not an actor, he was a singer-songwriter, and they told him he was going to write and record his own music. And basically, he was not allowed to do that. In the very early days of the show, he went to the producers with his guitar and played them a song he’d written that he wanted the Monkees to record. According to him, they said, ‘Thank you, but no thank you – it’s not a Monkees song.’ He said, ‘Wait a minute, I am one of the fucking Monkees. What are you talking about?’ But they blew him off.
“So Mike, in his inimitable manner, gave it to an unknown girl singer kicking around town, Linda Ronstadt. The song was called Different Drum. It was a Top 20 hit. So he was terribly frustrated and I felt for him, and I backed him. He’s the one that told me not to go to New York to record the new Monkees single – and I didn’t. I went to England, where I met Paul McCartney for the first time. He invited me to a Beatles session for Sgt Pepper. So – no regrets.”
For all that he viewed himself as an actor first, Dolenz seems to have rather enjoyed the life of a rock star. Some of the 60s pop aristocracy were a little snippy about the Monkees (the Byrds wrote the sarcastic So You Want to Be a Rock’n’Roll Star? about them) but most were not. Neil Young played on their albums. At one bizarre juncture, Frank Zappa asked Dolenz to become his drummer, but the Monkees’ record label wouldn’t give him permission. “I was sort of relieved,” says Dolenz. “I mean, you listen to his stuff and it’s like 7/13 time, you know, these ridiculous time signatures.”
Dolenz took full advantage, knocking around with the Beatles, hanging out backstage at the Monterey festival and inviting its star turn, the Jimi Hendrix Experience, to support the Monkees on tour – on the grounds that “he was very theatrical and the Monkees was a theatrical act”. This had disastrous consequences: Hendrix swiftly quit, dispirited by the experience of performing Purple Haze to nonplussed teens screaming for Davy Jones.
When Nesmith’s gambit paid off and the Monkees were allowed to write and perform their own material, Dolenz jumped in with both feet. He wrote their fabulous 1967 hit Randy Scouse Git, was the first pop artist to take delivery of a Moog synthesiser, and says his happiest memories of the band were recording their third album, Headquarters. They were finally permitted to have a say: “Pinocchio became a real boy.”
Dolenz has “absolutely no pains, no regrets, no pangs” that the series was cancelled. You could tell he was tiring of it from the final episode, which he wrote and directed. The plot involved TV controlling people’s minds via a symbol that looked remarkably like the logo of the CBS network. The episode was laced with references to marijuana, anti-war songs, and featured a guest appearance from Tim Buckley, debuting his exquisite Song to the Siren. None of it seemed designed to part young people from their disposable income.
Nor did Head, the 1968 Monkees film with a screenplay by Jack Nicholson - allegedly written under the influence of LSD - and Bob Rafelson. “We were looking to move on: we didn’t want to make a film that was a feature-length Monkees episode where Davy falls in love and the girl’s uncle is a crook and we have to save him and we sing her some songs. So Head was a little bit stream-of-consciousness. When they first screened the movie, it was not a typical screening. They had ‘movieolas’, with one of the five reels of the film in each and the idea was you could start watching the movie from any point on any reel.” He laughs. “It was a very, very 60s idea.”
Dolenz sees Head as a film about breaking the traditional rules of Hollywood, which its producers and Nicholson would go on to do with Easy Rider the following year. “There’s a lot of breaking the fourth wall, a scene where I start talking to the director and say, ‘I can’t take this any more’ and walk off through the back of the set, through the typical Hollywood backdrop painting.”
But it was also very obviously about the Monkees and their discomfort with being, as one song from the soundtrack puts it, “a manufactured image with no philosophies”. It ends with the band trapped in a glass tank, being stored away in a studio warehouse. “It did terribly at the box office,” says Dolenz. “Nobody seemed to care. I certainly didn’t. But of course now it’s this incredible cult film. Every once in a while, someone comes up to me and tells me it’s great. Quentin Tarantino did, so did Edgar Wright, a wonderful director. It’s a very interesting little film.”
It more or less ended the Monkees’ commercial career. Tork left, then Nesmith. Dolenz and Jones soldiered on, then split in 1970. Dolenz says he never really had any further ambitions in music. He eventually moved to England and reinvented himself as a producer and director, famously directing the 80s kids’ show Metal Mickey. “No Monkee business,” he nods. “I remember that feeling, that moment when someone interviewed me and the article didn’t say, ‘Micky Dolenz, ex-Monkee.’ It said, ‘Michael Dolenz, producer/director.’ Not that I ever tried to escape the Monkees, but I carved out this different career, so when the Monkees first reunited in 1986 I was fine. I had no problem going back and recreating that character.”
He toured, on and off, with various iterations of the Monkees until all the other members died. He still plays live occasionally, describing it as his “day job”, and seems as content with the Monkees’ legacy as he could possibly be. But then, he always was. He thought they were quietly groundbreaking. “Nothing like that had ever happened before,” he says. “We were on our own. We were long-haired weirdos on television. Back then, the only time you saw long-haired weirdos on television, they were usually being arrested.”
• Micky Dolenz: Live at the Troubadour is out now. The Monkees is on Rewind TV, Freeview 95 and Sky 182, Mondays to Fridays at 10am and 6.30pm
