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Wow, NBC ran a piece on 1968

I’m really going to go out on a limb here and suggest that you listen to Muskrat Love done by Willis Alan Ramsey. It is a jazz influenced, wry, whimsical song that is really good. Ramsey also wrote Spider John that Buffett did.
 
I was among the millions of young guys who were in love with Linda Ronstadt...such a pretty girl with such a pretty voice.

I always wondered what kind of beautiful, talented kids would have resulted had she married Jackson Browne.

#metoo

It's Different Drum, not Drummer, btw...
 
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Nice work Lou. I have a few things that fire me up as well every now and again...
One more thing about Different Drummer. You know who wrote that song, which is undeniably great? Mike Nesmith.

You know, Mike Nesmith of the fraudulent, no talent, not real musicians Monkees?

What happened to the Monkees is a huge injustice, although it was probably offset by the odd 1980s Monkees revival, which got them a deserved renewal of exposure, if not respect.

The Monkees as a band, and their music, was no less legitimate than what nearly every other band of the era was doing. The "don't play their instruments" charge was especially galling, considering that the same musicians that played on the Monkees' tracks also played on everything from Beach Boys and Tijuana Brass records to the Byrds and Simon and Garfunkel tracks. You know...plenty of bands that never had the charge thrown at them of being "fake bands."

Obviously, their origin was particularly high profile, but unique only really in exposure, as bands had been assembled by puppet masters for years (and boy bands still are). And their origin as a TV band was perfectly well known long before the "fake musician" thing came up.

The idea that they got hammered for something like that, when it was 100% not in any way secret, nor different from most things on the radio, is really galling. That music, like much of the era, had the best players in the world laying down the work of some of the greatest songwriters. The music totally stands up today. The band themselves was roughly as talented as probably 100 other bands of the time...in other words...moderately. But you can't deny the vocals of Dolenz or Jones just because they didn't play drums (or tambourine, LOL) on the recording. Nesmith was a pretty talented musician and writer (see above), and Tork could play.

But there is nothing "fake" about that music of the Monkees, and the songs hold up today as well as nearly any of the era.

The fact that they got singled out and publicly tarred and feathered is a travesty. Before he died, I heard a town hall on Sirius with Tom Petty. They were talking about which covers he chooses for any given tour, and he mentioned that he likes to look for the really great songs he grew up with and were influential to him, and mentioned the Monkees. The interviewer, and the audience, burst out laughing at the mention of the Monkees like it was some joke, and he had to defend himself that he was serious, that those really are great songs. I think people still assumed he was joking...that's ridiculous. Incidentally, his station on Sirius occasionally plays his live cover of "Not My Stepping Stone" which is an excellent rendition of a truly great song, and a great example of how well many of those Monkees songs hold up.

(This is probably the third or fourth time over the years I've gotten on this particular soapbox on this board. It's one of a handful of things that means nothing to anybody, but burns my ass enough for me to put on my Don Quixote helmet when I see the opportunity to charge).
Way to step up Lou, nice work. I have a few things that will cause me to speak up for them every now and again as well..
 
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Nesmith is also credited with helping to start MTV. BTW, nothing to be ashamed of being grouped in the Monkees, their early songs were written by the likes of Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart as well as Neil Diamond. The studio musician thing was a good point but when they went on the road, they played their own instruments for the concerts.

Another, 'did you know', Jimi Hendrix opened some of their shows before he hit it big.
 
Nesmith went on to form the First National Band, which was a really tight rock n roll band. Their albums are well worth searching for.

Funny, I never heard that complaint about Three Dog Puke, though.
 
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1968 woke me up to the bigger world. I began high school, hung out with the SDS crowd and read Abby Hoffman.

Then we moved back to Florida and it became Castro sucks let's party.
 
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Monkees! Brings back memories. I remember sleeping late on Saturday mornings in the sorority house and waking up in time for my room to fill up with girls piling in to watch their show on my old black and white TV.

We'd all be laughing and saying "this show is sooo silly" but we watched it without fail. Good times.
 
But you can't deny the vocals of Jones just because he didn't play tambourine on the recording.

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Nesmith is also credited with helping to start MTV. BTW, nothing to be ashamed of being grouped in the Monkees, their early songs were written by the likes of Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart as well as Neil Diamond. The studio musician thing was a good point but when they went on the road, they played their own instruments for the concerts.

Another, 'did you know', Jimi Hendrix opened some of their shows before he hit it big.

Yep, and while we're on Mike Nesmith trivia, his mother invented whiteout, and left him $25M. I don't think he made a dime from basically inventing MTV. Incredibly interesting guy.

His record company/management also didn't do him any favors by pushing back on letting him write. The instrument thing was super common for good reason, there's no shame in the band not playing on the records in that era, but he was a good enough writer they should have included him, and arguably would have had more longevity as the times and tastes changed away from the hit machine era, had they let him assume more creative control. There's not much difference between the Monkees and the Beach Boys...literally the same musicians on the record, same unorganic creation of a band...but their reputation is different thanks to the fact that Brian Wilson was a genius. Could Nesmith have been the Monkees' Brian Wilson without the mental issues? It's very plausible.

That said, while I think the reputation assassination on the Monkees is one of the greatest popular music injustices, the fact is that thanks to the 80s Monkees revival, they're arguably one of the top 2-3 most well known American bands of the 1960s. They sold a ton of albums in the 80s, and their tour (minus Nesmith) was a huge success, and made the guys way more money than they made the first time around. So it all worked out. I guess it's Karma.

And that TV show is funnier than it had any right to be. Really pretty decent.
 
The studio musician thing was a good point but when they went on the road, they played their own instruments for the concerts.

Mickey Dolenz was the only one that was kind of a "fraud" as a musician...he didn't know how to play drums when he joined...they made him learn enough to barely play in concert, but he was a great vocalist. Nesmith and Tork were legit musicians. Jones was just a singer, so no fraud there.
 
I'm going to use this opportunity to again plug the documentary The Wrecking Crew for anyone remotely interested in this era of music. Absolutely fascinating insight into how the industry worked at that time. Sick talented musicians that basically played on the soundtrack of the decade. I'll listen to oldies radio and here 3-4 songs in a row that I know the Wrecking Crew played on, and 8 out of 10.

They were sick talented musicians, and creative in their own way. Producers like Brian Wilson and Phil Spector played those people like instruments themselves, they were so good.

Every major U.S. music hub had an uber-talented session community...Motown had the Funk Brothers, Memphis had Booker T and the MGs, Nashville had the Nashville Cats. It gets a wrap as "inauthentic" but it's clearly responsible for the tremendous output of phenomenal music in the 1960s. That setup, and the talent of those players compared to the player in most bands, allowed entire awesome albums to be cut in even a day or two, versus a decade later when bands were going into the studio for months and months trying to get 10 tracks down.
 
I'm going to use this opportunity to again plug the documentary The Wrecking Crew for anyone remotely interested in this era of music. Absolutely fascinating insight into how the industry worked at that time. Sick talented musicians that basically played on the soundtrack of the decade. I'll listen to oldies radio and here 3-4 songs in a row that I know the Wrecking Crew played on, and 8 out of 10.

They were sick talented musicians, and creative in their own way. Producers like Brian Wilson and Phil Spector played those people like instruments themselves, they were so good.

Every major U.S. music hub had an uber-talented session community...Motown had the Funk Brothers, Memphis had Booker T and the MGs, Nashville had the Nashville Cats. It gets a wrap as "inauthentic" but it's clearly responsible for the tremendous output of phenomenal music in the 1960s. That setup, and the talent of those players compared to the player in most bands, allowed entire awesome albums to be cut in even a day or two, versus a decade later when bands were going into the studio for months and months trying to get 10 tracks down.

Is that on Netflix?
 
Is that on Netflix?

It has been, I'm assuming it still is. It's really amazing, it's got tons of music in it, it's like a greatest hits of American music (well, mostly white music outside of Spector) of the 1960s.

If you really know the songs like I do, it gave me a much greater appreciation for it. Not just for the wrecking crew singles, but all of the music of that era. It was a big eye opener to listen more consciously to just exactly what is going on in the background instrumentation on songs that were otherwise pretty bubble gum. There's really, really sophisticated compositions backing the "I love my baby" lyrics, and near virtuoso playing. I was always aware of it in the Spector stuff of course because it's known for that, but I didn't really focus enough to appreciate how damn good some of the musical work under stuff from The Monkees, Grass Roots, Mamas and the Papas, etc. I just knew I loved the songs. I am not someone with a natural ear for music, I don't easily recognize and separate instruments, etc, so seeing visually what was going on behind these singles dramatically helped me recognize and appreciate it more.

If you're not familiar with the songs so much (everyone will recognize some), it's an excellent introduction to the music and exactly what kind of quality went into it, even when the lyrical narratives were fairly limited and cliche (which they weren't always).
 
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It has been, I'm assuming it still is. It's really amazing, it's got tons of music in it, it's like a greatest hits of American music (well, mostly white music outside of Spector) of the 1960s.

If you really know the songs like I do, it gave me a much greater appreciation for it. Not just for the wrecking crew singles, but all of the music of that era. It was a big eye opener to listen more consciously to just exactly what is going on in the background instrumentation on songs that were otherwise pretty bubble gum. There's really, really sophisticated compositions backing the "I love my baby" lyrics, and near virtuoso playing. I was always aware of it in the Spector stuff of course because it's known for that, but I didn't really focus enough to appreciate how damn good some of the musical work under stuff from The Monkees, Grass Roots, Mamas and the Papas, etc. I just knew I loved the songs. I am not someone with a natural ear for music, I don't easily recognize and separate instruments, etc, so seeing visually what was going on behind these singles dramatically helped me recognize and appreciate it more.

If you're not familiar with the songs so much (everyone will recognize some), it's an excellent introduction to the music and exactly what kind of quality went into it, even when the lyrical narratives were fairly limited and cliche (which they weren't always).
Blaine and Knechtel were incredible musicians. They played on so many great albums. Joe Osborn, so many others. I once sat next to Jack Nitzsche on a cross country flight and talked with him about his experiences with those musicians as well as his days with Crazy Horse. I later got to meet Barney Kessel at the Lake Buena Vista Jazz Lounge at Disney. Hearing some of his stories was great too. My comments earlier about the Monkees wasn’t to discredit them as much as to say that Nesmith’s association with the campiness of the show wrongfully deligitimised him in the eyes of many.
 
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Blaine and Knechtel were incredible musicians. They played on so many great albums. Joe Osborn, so many others. I once sat next to Jack Nitzsche on a cross country flight and talked with him about his experiences with those musicians as well as his days with Crazy Horse. I later got to meet Barney Kessel at the Lake Buena Vista Jazz Lounge at Disney. Hearing some of his stories was great too. My comments earlier about the Monkees wasn’t to discredit them as much as to say that Nesmith’s association with the campiness of the show wrongfully deligitimised him in the eyes of many.

Nice. Ever since I saw the documentary, I've had quite an interest in studio musician community of the era. I already had great affinity for the music and was in awe of Brian Wilson and Phil Spector's work, but that really opened my eyes to what was behind it. I always thought of studio musicians as just cheap guns for hire, I hadn't realized that they were immensely talented, and talented in such a way (sight reading, versatility of styles, "problem solving", etc) that made the entire operation possible.

When I visited Nashville for the first time a few years ago, we visited the Country Music Hall of Fame, just kind of to do it, even though my interest in country music is very minimal, and limited to pretty much where it crosses with Rock and Roll, like Johnny Cash, etc. But lo and behold, they had a massive exhibit on the "Nashville Cats", which was essentially the country music version of the Wrecking Crew, and eventually morphed beyond country to the studio musicians of choice for albums by the likes of Dylan, Neil Young, Paul McCartney etc. I had no idea that was an exhibit, we just went in for kicks, and it turned out to have something incredibly interesting about a subject I really liked. As a bonus, they had a Sam Phillips exhibition too, which is also right up my alley of interest. Really glad we did it, when I was expecting to just see like Barbra Mandrell gowns and Dolly wigs (no disrespect to Dolly).

Talking about this reminds me that I have been meaning to watch "Standing in the Shadows of Motown" about the Funk Brothers. If I'm not too tired after the basketball game, I'm going to fire that up.
 
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Great work on the music end guys. Y’all are working deep into the back stories.
Some of us more aged ones will remember how hectic those years were and cannot really disconnect from how society was rended by catastrophic events...
Just want to interject that the 1968 piece I watched was up close with Tommie Smith and John Carlos amongst others during the 1968 Olympics. Please keep further posts civil, but realize that we are basically reliving that time as a society....
The music was front and center as a way to spread the word, but other events worldwide were unstoppable.
 
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What did you guys think of The Defiant Ones?
 
So I watched "Standing in the Shadows of Motown" about the Motown session band "The Funk Brothers." Interesting stuff, amazingly talented guys. Tracks pretty much along the same lines as the Wrecking Crew. Based on the docs, I'd say the Funk Brothers were even asked to add more of their own creativity into the songs than the Wrecking Crew. No doubt the Wrecking Crew added their own flavors and suggestions and elements to their recordings, especially with someone like Brian Wilson who was a musical genius, but not classically educated in music in terms of writing it out, resulting in a whole lot of trying to communicated what he was looking for. But they also worked with a lot of ultra-professional writers and producers who were able to highly dictate what they wanted, sometimes limiting the creative contributions to a few key bits and problem-solvers here and there.

It sounds like that Brian Wilson type experience was more the norm than the exception with Motown writers and producers, even a guy like Smokey Robinson, arguably one of the 2-3 greatest American songwriters in pop music history. Sounds like that band was pretty much coming up with their own parts on a great majority of those great Motown tracks. I definitely agree that Smokey Robinson + the Funk Brothers is the reason Motown is Motown, not to take anything away from many talented vocalists and acts.
 
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