Davy Jones has been dead a week, but Smasher doesn't like the thread title

Re: Davy Jones is bound for Davy Jones' locker (RIP)

Best Monkees cover ever:

 

Re: Davy Jones is bound for Davy Jones' locker (RIP)

As unfunny a thread title as has ever been penned here. Hard to believe you're a writer.

 

Re: Davy Jones is bound for Davy Jones' locker (RIP)

You missed some of the underlying comedy in it, then. The Monkees played that on two levels.

 

Re: Davy Jones is bound for Davy Jones' locker (RIP)

"Green Acres" had a "Mad Magazine" subtext, in which they constantly took little needling shots at politicians.

 

Re: Davy Jones is bound for Davy Jones' locker (RIP)

Can you fill out this story for those of us who don't know it?

 

Re: Davy Jones is bound for Davy Jones' locker (RIP)

How much don't you know? The Kirshner connection? Or Nesmith and MTV?

 

Re: Davy Jones is bound for Davy Jones' locker (RIP)

Give me both, but the MTV part for sure.

 

Re: Davy Jones is bound for Davy Jones' locker (RIP)

My top-of-the-head recollection is that Mike pretty much invented the genre of music videos.

 

Re: Davy Jones is bound for Davy Jones' locker (RIP)

The Kirshner part I'm fairly well-versed in. The MTV part, I'm clueless about as well.

The producers of the Monkees hired Kirshner to provide hit songs for the TV show ... and remember, there were no Monkees before the TV show. They were specifically hired to play a rock band.

Now, all four had enough vocal talent to hold up that end of it. But Kirshner decided early on that instrumentally, they weren't polished enough to turn out these new songs for every episode. So he decreed that studio musicians would handle the playing of the instruments, and the Monkees would fake it.

This worked for a while, although Mike Nesmith particularly didn't like the idea. But they began to build pressure on Kirshner in the second season, and then fans who heard that the Monkees weren't playing on their albums began to press the issue. Kirshner was dismissed in that second season because he released the Monkees doing Neil Diamond's "A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You," without Columbia Records' consent.

And the Monkees began performing on their own instruments. Their sales also dropped dramatically when that happened.

The next time Kirshner dealt with a TV-show rock band, it was The Archies. He said in an interview that it was like the Monkees, except he didn't have a bunch of real-life pseudo-musicians bothering him about playing on the album.

 

Re: Davy Jones is bound for Davy Jones' locker (RIP)

Today Davy Jones died but this weekend he gets baptized into the Mormon Church.

So he's got that going for him.

 

Re: Davy Jones is bound for Davy Jones' locker (RIP)

Mike Nesmith developed a show for Nickolodeon called "PopClips" that was a half-hour block of music videos with a host. Nickolodeon's corporate owners Time Warner/AMEX took the idea and developed it in MTV. If I remember from reading "I Want My MTV" recently, Nesmith had a chance to be a lead executive at MTV when it started but turned it down and got a small stake instead.

I also seem to remember that Davy Jones was actually a trained drummer, but Kirshner decided that he didn't want him stuck behind the drums in the "band" so Mickey Dolenz wound up doing it while Jones played tambourine and looked cute.

 

Re: Davy Jones is bound for Davy Jones' locker (RIP)

Banana Splits. Just sayin.