Monkee Mania

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: Hey, hey, did you like the Monkees? I NEVER missed a show—and back then (senior citizen voice) you had to watch it when it was on—or you missed it.   Remember?

Well, Monkee mania has changed the life of a dear friend of mine…and I cannot wait for him to tell you all about it.

“They Made a Monkee (Writer) Out Of Me”

By Scott C. Forrest-Allen

It took me nearly fifty years for me to score my first official writing assignment – and it came so easily!

A routine scroll through Facebook led me to a post from Rebeat Magazine  with whom I was unfamiliar at the time. They were honoring the Monkees’ 50^th Anniversary with a countdown of their Top 50 Songs. My love for both the Monkees and countdowns drew me in. 

Reading these song reviews brought me back to when I was in my single digits enjoying their TV program. I have vivid memories of watching them and seeing how much fun these boys were having challenging authority and society.

Initially impressed at how much research each individual Rebeat writer had contributed to the entries, I was hooked, especially since they were including several album tracks and not just the “hits.” There were even some tunes that I had forgotten.

HANK: So then what?

I reviewed the entire website and noticed how well written the articles were. Then I spotted the “Write For Rebeat” button. Deciding to be bold, (which is rare for me), I wrote an email expressing how much I enjoyed the countdown and asked if they would consider me to be on their staff. Included in my email were writing samples with links to my blog and theatre reviews. It is both humbling and rewarding for me to admit that several of my musical reviews have made it to the North Shore Music Theatre website.

  

HANK: Holding breath. And then what?

They responded to me, and I was thrilled to read that not only did they appreciate my writing, but they invited me to be a contributing writer to their upcoming weekly series that would recap the Monkees’ TV episodes fifty years after their premieres!

HANK: Oh, that is hilarious. What a job!

SCOTT: Yes, after I started breathing again, I accepted. Not long after that, my first assignment arrived – to review the episode “Your Friendly Neighborhood Kidnappers.”

And soon: there it was! My very first official article on-line! What made it more real was to see it as a post on Facebook! I did it! It was and is happening! It was okay to breathe again!

Here’s where you can read it:

http://www.rebeatmag.com/every-monkees-episode-your-friendly-neighborhood-kidnappers-s1e4/

The Monkees helped my dream come true!

(And there’s a villain named Trump! This was what, fifty years ago?)

Since then I’ve written eight more articles, including a recap of “Success Story,” my personal favorite episode. It was very early in the TV series and was unafraid to take a serious turn halfway through.

HANK: What happens?

SCOTT: In it, Davy’s uncle threatens to take him back to England because he is not a success. There is a very poignant scene during which his band mates say farewell to him before his flies back to England, complete with Peter handing Davy a parachute in case his uncle changes his mind. It was that sincerity that cemented my love for the Monkees, both TV show and music. This scene always made me cry when I was younger, and I loathe admitting that I choked up when I was writing about it! I’ve seen the episode numerous times, and I know how it all turns out!

HANK: Aw.  Has this assignment taught you anything?

SCOTT: Yes, absolutely. Reviewing these episodes and reading other articles by my fellow scribes has me refelcting on the band’s career and my never-ending attachment to them.

Although time has been kind to the Monkees, I will never understand the initial backlash from critics and fans alike. Remember?  People were outraged when they discovered that the Monkees weren’t playing their own instruments; at least not initially. They had never lied to their public – the TV show was about four actors portraying a struggling rock band. Mission accomplished.

To be fair, Mike Nesmith and Peter Tork were accomplished musicians in their own rights, and Micky Dolenz and Davy Jones both had musical theatre backgrounds. So, they had all approached the project with valid experience. Eventually, they became a “real” band and played all of their own instruments for their concerts and would eventually compose material for subsequent albums. Theirs are some of the most professional concerts I’ve every attended.

People are just now realizing how important they are to popular music. On one side, the show could be considered nothing more than an entertaining half-hour filled with great music; on the flip side it was and still is one of the most clever half-hour commercials to promote a band and sell albums, complete with an unofficial introduction to Music Videos.

The plan worked. If the TV show was an innocent salute to the madcap comedy of the Marx Brothers, the music was always approached seriously, being written by the top songwriters in the business and professionally produced.

HANK: There were some big names!

SCOTT:  Definitely. Carole King helped to catapult the Monkees’ success with “Sometime in the Morning” and “Take a Giant Step,” both co-written with Gerry Goffin.

Neil Diamond contributed “A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You,” to the group’s catalog. The song peaked at #2 on the Billboard Singles Chart, but his “I’m A Believer” peaked at #1.

The band enjoyed two more #1 singles – “Last Train To Clarksville” and “Daydream Believer.”

As a matter of fact, their first four albums (The Monkees, More of the Monkees, Headquarters, and Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn, and Jones, Ltd.) all peaked at #1.

HANK: What if you run out of Monkee episodes?

SCOTT: No problem!  Since then, Rebeat Magazine has asked me to contribute to their “Deep Tracks” Section with an article reviewing 10 underrated songs and one album by Fleetwood Mac, who is also celebrating fifty years!

This has been such a rewarding experience for me because not only am I discussing subjects that I love, but I am learning how to expand my writing style. I’ve always written with a very compact approach, but Rebeat Magazine has taught me how to write and express more. Instead of expressing my thoughts in a few sentences, I am now writing several paragraphs.

This experience has done wonders for my self-confidence when it comes to my writing. I have since then dug out drafts that had been otherwise abandoned; I’m co-writing the Book for a full-length musical; I’ve contributed an article to a charity organization’s newsletter; and an author has asked me to write reviews for his books. My Dad is happy for me, and my Mom would be proud too.

So, Fifty looks pretty good for the Monkees, Fleetwood Mac, and me!

They made a believer out of me!

HANK:  A daydream believer, right?  SO happy for you!  And now I’m singing.  So Reds, did you love the Monkees? Any Monkee memories?

Words and Music

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: One of our regular backbloggers, Karen from Ohio, mentioned Tuesday that she could read almost anything while writing, but had to be very careful about what music she listened to, since she had a penchant for earworms, those snatches of melody and lyric that embed themselves in your conscious and Will. Not. Leave. (I once had a dear friend who would sing Karma Chameleon to me for the sole purpose of implanting the worm.)

Karen got me thinking about music and writers. We have a long history of being inspired by songs - in fanfiction, there's a whole form known as "songfic." When I was working on my sixth book, I SHALL NOT WANT, I was deeply entrenched in Bill Deasy's music, especially his Good Day No Rain, which felt like a soundtrack to the story I was writing. I actually changed a pivotal scene in that novel because one of his songs created such a powerful sense of place and mood--I wanted to explore that further.

Like many authors, I make up playlists for my characters, usually with songs particular to the individual book. It's a way of intertwining fiction with music that's only been available since the advent of digital music and easy-to-use playlists (there may have been some determined authors back in the day recording mix tapes on cassette for their characters, but that strikes me as the same obsessive attention to detail that leads to map-drawing and cutting out costumes from magazines, i.e., thankfully uncommon.)

I also insert songs into the work itself, all of which have meaning and deliver an extra message to the reader ("Let him who has ears, listen..") For instance, in my second mystery, A FOUNTAIN FILLED WITH BLOOD, Clare is snooping around a guest bedroom and has to hide in the en-suite bath. During the whole scene she is listening to the Dave Matthews Band on the suspect's CD player. The name of the album is Crash, which is exactly what's going to happen about a hundred pages on. The first song she registers is So Much to Say, which begins, "I say my hell is the closet/ I'm stuck inside/ Can't see the light/ And my heaven is a nice house/ In the sky..." It's a bit of a poke at the fact she's literally stuck in a [water] closet, but it's meant to echo her own constraints- she's in the closet as to her feelings for the town's chief of police, and she will continue to have to "Keep it locked inside/ Don't talk about it."

Yeah, as soon as we get ebooks with add-in soundtracks, I will be all over that. How about you, Reds? Music: inspiration, while working, in the story, out of the story? What's your preference?

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN:  Thank you, not, for Karma Chameleon.  Which is now in my head. I was also, for a time, a sad victim to Let It Go--let it GO!--and now it's going to happen again,  I fear.


JULIA: I know, right? All you have to do is see the title and it's 1984 again and Boy George is hanging out in your head.

HANK: I am so suggestible, I cannot have one bit of music when I write. Not even without words. It's too distracting, WITH words, completely impossible, as the words take over my brain. Without words, is...okay. But I'd rather have quiet.

Music while reading? Nope. (I've seen Jonathan, though, read and hum along to classical. Even--read and conduct. No way could I do that.)

LUCY BURDETTE: I'm with Hank, can not, absolutely not listen to music while writing. My characters don't have playlists and neither do the books, for better or worse. The only time I've really gotten hooked on using a bit of song is for the forthcoming FATAL RESERVATIONS. I was in the Miami airport and saw these words tattooed on a young man's arm: I used to disregard regret, but there are some things I can't forget.

I was so taken by the words, I had to ask him about it. Turns out this is a line from a song by MAKE DO AND MEND, a band I'd never heard of. So it's not the music that became an important part of the book, it was the words.

It's always all about the words, one by one. Sigh.

And it's kind of interesting, because in my reporter job, it's constant chaos and noise ,and it doesn't bother me at all. And thinking about it, I can write in a coffee shop, or on a plane or train. So conversation around me, I can tune out. Music, I can't.  Wonder why that is?


HALLIE EPHRON: Music while writing? Me neither. Nope. Never.

And right now Taylor Swift's Shake It Off has wormed its way into my head, along with Carole King's PIERRE from her songs for Really Rosie. DO NOT listen to it. You will never shake it off.

HANK: Players gonna play play play play play play....  Sigh. ALL DAY.



SUSAN ELIA MACNEAL: It's so funny that all of us are the same — can't work with music on! Like Hank, I can work anywhere — airport, train station, cafe, and conversation is no big deal. But music? No, absolutely not.

Funny side note — we live near and know Robert Lopez and Kristin Anderson Lopez, who wrote "Let It Go," and Kiddo used to play with their daughter, who sang the first few lines of "Do You Want to Build a Snowman?" in the film/soundtrack. (OK, great, now I'll be singing that all day...)


RHYS BOWEN: I'm with the other Reds. I have to have silence when I write. But my grandson did an interesting experiment at school last year. He gave a math test to students with silence, with music in the background that they knew or with music that they didn't know. Turns out they scored highest when music that they knew was played. If it was music they weren't familiar with they paid attention to it.

I am a huge victim of earworms. If I get a song in my head it won't go away, haunting me day and night. Yes, I wake up singing it. Right now I've been so focused on tax that there hasn't been a square inch of brain for even an earworm song.

DEBORAH CROMBIE: I've been very inspired by different kinds of music when writing specific books--several books revolve around music (opera, Gregorian chant, and rock. Go figure.) --but I CANNOT actually listen to music when I write. Not even Bach or Mozart, the things that are supposed to trigger creative centers in your brain. Sigh. So frustrating. (And so interesting about the studies, Julia.)

But I love the whole play list idea, and actually made one for The Sound of Broken Glass. My favorite song for that book was Good Riddance by Green Day. Now I have to go play it so that I can dislodge the latest earworm--Wherever You Will Go by The Calling. Rick is learning it on the guitar and now I hear it in my sleep... Maybe it will go in the NEXT book.

JULIA: You know, Rhys, there is that song about the Taxman by George Harrison...

How about you, dear readers? How do you combine - or separate - words and music?

On "Girls Like Us" The Music

HALLIE: Almost exactly a year ago Jungle Red hosted Sheila Weller, author of Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon -- and the Journey of a Generation. It's the inside stories of the three singer/songwriters who shaped and shaded a generation of women and beyond.

Now we get this update from Sheila:

SHEILA: A lovely thing has happened: Jodie Wright, who was formerly Carly's manager and is currently her archivist, took it upon herself (!) to painstakingly create this amazing website, GIRLS LIKE US THE MUSIC. No, no, it's not what you think -- it goes beyond the music these iconic artists created and gets at (and digs up, and lets you listen to) all the music that actually affected and influenced them, in their childhoods, on their journeys...and on ours. She did it because...she's terrific and generous...and also is perfecting her already-ample website-building chops. Mainly the former reason. Take a look and see how cool it is: http://www.girlslikeusthemusic.com/

HALLIE: I just spent some time grazing the site. It's still a work in progress, but such fun. Did you know Joni Mitchell's favorite song from high school (and for decades to come) was the Shirelles hit Will You Love Me Tomorrow. (This song was written by Carole King and Gerry Goffin.) Or that The Anderson family (Joni Mitchell's real last name) entertained itself by listening to the Andrews Sisters' and the McGuire Sisters' mellifluous close-harmonies piped through the console radio in the mid-40's. (The site has the clips of the Andrews Sisters singing "Sleepy Serenade" and "Begin the Beguine" and more.)

What a great way to take a break and take walk back through memory lane...

"Girls Like Us" -- Carole, Joni, and Carly

Sheila Weller is an unabashed feminist and her book, “Girls Like Us”, tells the stories of three singer/songwriters who shaped and shaded a generation of women and beyond. Sheila wrote for MS magazine when it was in its infancy, and has since authored six books including two New York Times bestsellers, won of numerous awards for journalism, and is a writer for Vanity Fair, Senior Contributing Editor at Glamour, and she blogs for the Huffington Post.

Welcome to Jungle Red, Sheila! I loved your book...it really sings to my generation of women who stormed the bastions of academe, frolicked at Woodstock, and wore flowers in the Haight. Joni and Carole and Carly...and Joan Baez and Judy Collins and Ronnie Gilbert and Holly Near and Buffy Sainte Marie...were our role models. We could not have made it through college without those women, and most of us can still sing every lyric of every song.

JRW: How did you pick Joni, Carole, and Carly?

SHEILA WELLER: For years I had been wanting to write a history of the women of my generation -- those of us middle class girls who were born in the 1940s and came of age in the late 1960s. It's almost worth getting older to have lived through such exciting times -- we were little girls when the image of American women was more stultifying and repressive and corny than it had been in decades (I mean: women in petticoated shirtwaists kissing refrigerators in TV commercials; the song "How Much Is That Doggie in the Window?" as a hit??) and we had no choice but to break the mold and transform the very idea of what a young American woman was.

We made young women into adventurers. In our childhood we acquired the first tools -- rock 'n' roll and r&b music; the civil rights movement. Then, coming into adolescence, the next tool -- the birth control pill. And finally, when we were becoming college-aged, the psychedelic movement, radical politics,the antiwar movement, and all the rest.

Then, as the '60s turned to the '70s, as both an extension and a corrective of all the exquisite madness, we came up with feminism, which changed everything. I could never think of that journey of ours without thinking of three singer-songwriters who wrote the soundtrack and lived it with us -- Carole King, Joni Mitchell, and Carly Simon.

Carole's "Will You Love Me Tomorrow?" was the first pop song in which a young woman contemplates sex, risks and all; her "Up On The Roof," "Natural Woman" and others were part of the love affair with urban life and soulfulness that was a pop-music ride-along to the Civil Rights Movement; and "Tapestry" defined a whole era -- the early '70s -- in which young adults lived in families-of-friends and prized authenticity, loyalty, a new kind of hominess.

Joni's long-thrift-shop-gowned bohemian artiste embodied the new kind of single woman of the (gentle) psychedelic era -- a mysterious, winsome, independent spirit who made a magical home ("Chelsea Morning") and took lovers at will but kept the upper hand with them ("Cactus Tree") and who had a "deep," wistful belief in the power of life experience ("Both Sides Now," "Circle Game") and who had a charismatic earthiness and spirituality ("Ladies of The Canyon"). She was who we were -- or desperately wanted to be -- from 1966 to 1969. And Carly?

Carly was the New Woman of the Early '70s: witty, urban, intellectual, Seven Sisters-educated (like fellow influential women Erica Jong, Jane Fonda, Ali MacGraw, etc.), analytic, and so "classy" she could be wildly sexy without feeling it brought her down a peg or compromised her or gave her "a reputation." She was the embodiment of early-Ms.-era, "sell-it-to-America" feminism. Her "That's The Way I've Always Heard It Should Be" was the first ballad in which a woman thought marriage would hem in her adventures; and "You're So Vain" was a jubilant feminist kick-ass rock song -- full of self-confident wit and mockery. We wanted to be her -- and many were indeed very close to that archetype she embodied.

JRW: Were they really "girls like us"?

SHEILA WELLER: Yes. They went through what we went through -- Carole, as a pregnant teenager in love at the cusp of the '60s, had a panicked shotgun wedding. Joni, in a fiercely proprietary place (central Canada) in the proprietary early-mid-'60 (where birth control was not widely used and abortion, illegal) was afraid to tell her proper parents that she was pregnant and unmarried -- she hid her pregnancy from them and was treated to contempt by moralistic nurses and nuns at the hospital where she gave birth, before giving up her baby for adoption. Carly fell in love with a sexy, brooding, soulful, educated drug addict (James Taylor) and struggled to try to get him off drugs through the ten years of their marriage during a time (the '70s) just before the concepts of "co-dependency" and "enabling" -- and a whole repertoire of family help -- taught families and loved ones how to deal with drug abuse.

In these and dozens of other ways, they were "like us": leaving marriages and love affairs that were unsatisfying and risking falling into subsequent ones which, while solving one interpersonal or romantic problem, only presented another. We were the first generation of serial-relationship-having women, and the risks and joys and conundrums of that life are written all over their songs, from Joni's "River" and "All I Want" to Carole's "Only Love Is Real" to Carly's "Coming Around Again" and "The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of."

I chose middle-class women to write about because the identifiability was so strong. Janis Joplin and Grace Slick were too edgy and out there, each in her own different way. Carole, Joni and Carly were women you could run into in a department store fitting room.

JRW: How much harder did rock 'n' rolling women have it in the liberated ‘60s ‘70s?

SHEILA WELLER: Harder than their counterpart men? Or harder than now? I'll answer both. Harder than their counterpart men in every way.

Joni example: While Bob Dylan was forgiven for being much less interesting and edgy and "romantic" than he pretended to be (he was a middle-class fraternity boy who got his -- wonderful - folk songs from sitting in the NY Public Library and looking at old newspapers), Joni so had to hide her secret dramatic, heroically brave past (being a pregnant, unmarried, penniless fledgling folk singer in a rooming house), she was virtually blackmailed over it.

Carole example: There was no day care, there were no lightweight strollers, there were no "working mothers" -- no maternity leave, no work-life balance, no ANY of that -- in the very early '60s; so Carole shlepped her newborn baby (in a heavy, made-to-not-go-up-stairs pram) on the subway to the hit-factory where she cranked out # 1 songs. Carole's best friend and fellow songwriter, with whom she competed for hits, was delighted when Carole gave birth to her second child because during labor and delivery -- and ONLY then -- Carole COULDN'T sit down at the piano.

Carly example: After desultory years of being scoffed at as a "rich little girl" (male songwriters from wealthy homes didn't get that disdain), Carly finally got a break: Bob Dylan's manager had Dylan write a song for her and she recorded with the (just under the radar) new Dylan-championed group The Band. But the album was never mixed and released because the sound engineer told Carly: "I won't mix your album unless you sleep with me," and she refused to. None of these things would or could happen to guy rockers.

And harder than young women singer-songwriters today? Much harder. Today these women are businesswomen -- Alicia, Beyonce, Alannis, et al -- they have assistants, they have support teams, they have manages and publicists and stylists (Carole, Joni and Carly dressed themselves -- and each of them pioneered a distinct fashion look, with no outside help), they know how to produce and hold onto the rights to their music and parlay their careers. The natural, innocent, funky, anti-commercial '60s and '70s had an innocence and anti-careerism that could hurt both male and female artists, but, especially, females.

JRW: Were these women happy? Did they love their lives at the time? Did they know how much we all listened to their music and loved it, how pivotal it was?

SHEILA WELLER: Good questions. I happen to think they lived (and are still living such rich, big lives, why wouldn't they look back on those years and happily think, No regrets! But an amazing amount of people who read the book thought they were unhappy because, for one thing, they had so many different relationships. Well, stable monogamy does not a great rock-love-song-writer; and, at the risk of being '60s-babe-centric, I think to err on the side of "more" life experience than less is a happy choice.

Still, I don't want to be too rosy-glasses about it. They did feel pain in their time. Joni's masterpiece BLUE is all about pain. And though Carole -- the most tuneful (and gospel-y) but the least self-revealing writer of the three -- always wrote optimistic songs with sometimes slightly sappy lyrics (her early '70s collaborator-lyricist Toni Stern -- their masterpiece was "It's Too Late" -- beautifully de-sap'd her, she did suffer pain. She was married four times and her third husband, whom she deeply loved at the time, died of a heroin overdose; she spent a winter living ascetically and reflectively in the snowbound deep wilderness, mourning him. And Carly's emotions were all over her skin, and her music. She loved very deeply -- James and others. And she never made a secret of her bouts of melancholy and depression.

Finally, did they know much we loved them? All three but Joni know. Joni seems to be bitter that some of her fans abandoned her when she -- courageously, in a very Joni way -- switched from her very winning confessionalism to inaccessible, risky jazz in the mid '70s and she seems to feel she has been underappreciated. Tragically, this couldn't be further from the truth. Joni is widely regarded as one of THE best songwriters and musical artists of the era, right up there with Dylan.

Hopefully, in their heart of hearts, all three of them know not only how much their music is beloved, but how HEALING and resonant it has been for so many women and men of many generations.

JRW: Find Sheila Weller's "Girls Like Us" at your local bookstore or library and take it to the beach one of these last fine summer days.

Please, join our conversation -- what does their music mean to you?