David Bowie, Gunslinger

Gunslinger’s Revenge is an Italian western released in 1998, a good thirty years after the genre was made fashionable by director Sergio Leone whose epics, 1968's The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly and 1969's Once Upon a Time in the West, are now widely regarded as classics after being reviled by most critics at the time of their release. Leone’s films starred Clint Eastwood for whom they resulted in big-screen stardom. Gunslinger’s Revenge stars David Bowie.

David Bowie! In an Italian western?

In the mid-70s, when he was still known as the gender-bending, self-professed bisexual queen of “glitter rock,” Bowie was reportedly being courted for an Italian western which the Star tabloid suggested would make Tom Mix spin in his grave. Back then, only a western starring Elton John, whose image was even more gay than Bowie’s, or a remake of Patton with Liberace in George C. Scott’s role, would have been more preposterous. Bowie butched up in the ‘80s, however, got married, and began to distance himself from the sexually ambivalent image he had projected in his early days. By the ‘90s, hell, he was almost macho.

The star of Gunslinger’s Revenge is actually Harvey Keitel who plays Johnny Lowen, the fastest gun in the West, who returns home in the hope of making amends with his son, a doctor married to an Indian maiden. Their half-breed son narrates the story in which Bowie is Jack Sikora, a notorious killer eager for a showdown with Lowen. Since it’s Lowen’s reputation Sikora wants to acquire, he needs an audience to witness the duel, so he passes up several opportunities to kill his prey. In an example of an actor’s off-screen persona influencing his character, Bowie’s outlaw has the kind of entourage typical of a media-savvy celebrity. They include a female photographer who dresses in all black and captures Sikora’s dramatic entrances and nasty behavior on film.

Gunslinger’s Revenge, directed by Giovanni Veronesi, isn’t too concerned with historical accuracy. In addition to the dominatrix-style garb worn by the girl shutterbug and the interest in celebrity that was probably not quite as pronounced in the old West as it became in the media-saturated 20th century, Keitel identifies the Bowie character as a psychopath, a diagnosis that wouldn’t have been likely until the emergence of Sigmund Freud, who probably introduced the term to the public. Another bow to modern times occurs when Bowie’s photographer kidnaps the schoolmarm, a nasty old woman whose greeting of “hello” sounds accusatory, so Bowie can snatch Keitel’s grandson to use as bait to lure him into a showdown. Sitting behind the teacher’s desk, he explains to the class that their teacher has a sore throat. “I’m your substitute teacher,” he says, but back when a school was a one room in a small cabin, I doubt there was such a thing as a substitute teacher.

Gunslinger’s Revenge moves at a brisk pace with a running time of only 87 minutes. It’s well-done and enjoyable, certainly worthy of the theatrical release it was denied in the United States.

© 2012 Brian W. Fairbanks

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William Shatner at Playhouse Square, Cleveland, Ohio

The guy in a Cleveland Indians jacket standing a foot or so away from the curb on Playhouse Square seemed like he might have tickets to Saturday evening's events, so my companion shouted out to him from our car. "Do you have tickets?" He sure did. "What for?" The answer we wanted to hear was also the one we expected. "Shatner!"

William Shatner's one man show came to Cleveland, Ohio and I considered getting some cheap tickets, the 10 dollar back row leftovers that are usually available at the last minute. When that was not an option, I considered spending as much as $30. "I've got two tickets for the tenth row," the man said. "You can have them for 100 bucks." That was too much, and when we talked him down to 80, he had a deal. There's only one Captain Kirk, after all, at least to those of us who grew up on the original Star Trek that aired on NBC from 1966-69, and there wasn't anything else to do, anyway.

For two hours, Shatner strode across the State Theater’s stage, reminiscing about his most unusual career. A Shakespearean trained stage actor, he got his first break as an understudy for Christopher Plummer in a production of Henry V staged in their native Canada. Plenty of stage work followed, and also film roles in The Brothers Karamazov and Judgment at Nuremberg, but it was in television that he flourished. Among dozens of guest shots, at least one would become a classic: "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet," the Twilight Zone episode in which Shatner's nervous passenger spots a gremlin on the wing of an airplane. He didn't achieve stardom until Star Trek, a series that struggled through its three season run, but became a cult phenomenon in the next decade, inspiring a series of big-screen movies beginning in 1979, and, later, several successful spin-offs.

But that was still in the future. After Star Trek's cancellation in 1969, Shatner admits he was broke, owing as much to the end of those Desilu paychecks as to a divorce. He was living in a camper and doing dinner theater for the money. He remembered watching the moon landing on a four-inch black and white TV set while lying outside, his eyes taking in the stars above when not glued to the TV. One of Shatner's most memorable stories relate to this rather dismal period. One day, there was a knock on the door of his camper. "Are you Captain Kirk," the little boy in the doorway asked. "Yes, I am," a game Shatner replied. "Is this your spaceship?" the boy inquired. Shatner invited the kid in, showed him the shower where he "beamed up," and the dials on the stove he used to guide his spacecraft.

Even the most charitable fan would have to agree that if not for Star Trek, this very talented actor might not have had much of a career to build a one man show around. Before Star Trek: The Motion Picture revived his career, Shatner was most frequently cast in TV movies (Go Ask Alice being among the better ones) and kept busy in guest shots of popular shows like Columbo and Hawaii Five-O. In 1975, he bombed in a series of his own called Barbary Coast, while the best he was offered for the big screen was grade Z shit like 1977's Kingdom of the Spiders.

Captain Kirk cast a long shadow, but thanks to David E. Kelley, creator of The Practice and its spinoff, Boston Legal, Shatner may be as well-known for his role as Denny Crane, the pompous attorney for which he won an Emmy. The mere mention of the name brought the loudest cheers of the night, so Shatner may not go to his grave, as he admits he once feared he might, known only as Captain Kirk.

But Kirk and Crane probably take a backseat to the even more intriguing character known as William Shatner. Following Star Trek's cancellation, the man was becoming a bit of a joke, owing as much to several bad toupees, a general air of pomposity (comparing T.J. Hooker, his TV cop, to Hamlet), and the "singing" career highlighted by side-splitting versions of Bob Dylan's "Mr. Tambourine Man" and the Beatles' "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds." Everyone seemed to be in on the joke except him, but then, in a classic example of reinvention, Shatner embraced his image as a pretentious boob and emerged triumphant. The "singing" career was revived thanks to Ben Folds who produced Shatner's Has Been album, and now, of course, there's this highly entertaining one man show. Shatner closed the show by encouraging the audience to say "yes," as he has done so many times in his life. His life and career demonstrate the advantages of taking risks.

© 2012 Brian W. Fairbanks

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Intimate Reading: The Journals of John Cheever

When The Journals of John Cheever were published by Knopf in the fall of 1991, I had been keeping my own journal for a little less than two years, starting it in January 1990 as an assignment in a college English course. It became a habit that I continued after the course concluded, and in time it grew into an essential part of my daily life. As someone once said, the unexamined life is not worth living. Of course, the life examined in detail may amount to a life lacking anything to examine except for one’s own thoughts, but so be it. When Cheever’s journals appeared, I checked them out of the local public library and continually renewed them for a year until another patron’s request meant I had to give them up.

What is the attraction of reading a journal?

Is it because a journal or diary is generally thought to be private, writing hidden from eyes other than those of the author and, therefore, appealing because to read them is to discover secrets, to come in closer contact with another’s soul than is possible in a work of fiction?

I don’t know, but Cheever’s fiction - all those acclaimed short stories and well-regarded novels - interest me less than these journals. In re-reading reviews of the book from when it first appeared, it’s interesting how shallow some critics can be. The book is not worth reading, some claimed, and should not have been published. Why? Well, by golly, it’s depressing. A similar charge was made against Kenneth Tynan’s diaries when they were published a decade after Cheever’s journal reached the shelves. What kind of lives do such people lead that they want only sunshine and smiles, and are repelled by cloudy skies and frowns? Life is life. It is what it is, and how dreary the lives must be of those who seek only laughter.

Cheever’s journals are no more “depressing” than The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is racist. Just as Mark Twain depicted racism in his novel, Cheever describes his despair, his anxieties, and disappointments in his journals. It’s a downer, for sure, but like anything deemed “depressing,” such as a Leonard Cohen ballad, it has about it a healing quality. As C. S. Lewis was quoted as saying in Shadowlands, “We read to know we’re not alone.”

Maybe those who can’t appreciate Cheever’s frequently grim accounts of life have never been alone, or felt alone, and have never felt sad, or, if they have, flee from that feeling, suppressing it because they fear the vulnerability that usually results. How many people tell others to cheer up, look at the bright side, or in some way recommend masking or avoiding the grief, tears, and depression that are the natural and completely sane reaction to tragedy? After 9/11, some callers to radio talk shows complained about the round-the-clock television coverage of the tragedy’s aftermath - the search for survivors and the sight of the rubble that had once been the World Trade Center. They did not want to face it, and complained that sporting events had been cancelled because a basketball game might cheer them up. As the Bible says, “The mind of the wise is in the house of mourning. The mind of fools is in the house of pleasure.”

The wise mind is likely to respond positively to Cheever’s journals. The mostly downbeat content is only part of their allure. It’s the writing - Cheever’s gift for making sentences - that the reader will treasure. That those sentences describe an often sad and sometimes bitter life is, I suppose, beside the point, or maybe it isn’t. I don’t know, but The Journals of John Cheever is one of a handful of books I return to again and again.

From 1966: “I cut the grass, hoping to improve my spirits, but then I hit the bottle with such vehemence that nothing is gained, much is lost, and this morning I feel sick. I read a biography of Dylan Thomas thinking that I am like Dylan, alcoholic, hopelessly married to a destructive woman, etc. The resemblance stops with alcohol.”

It’s not always despairing.

Also from 1966: “Someone had written something in the fresh snow. Who could it have been - the milkman, a boy, some stranger? And what would he have written - an obscenity, a calumny? What the stranger had written was ‘Hello World!’”

© 2012 Brian W. Fairbanks

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Goodbye CD

The compact disc, otherwise known as a CD, may have three years before it disappears into oblivion, according to a recent issue of Rolling Stone. The magazine didn't mention its own life expectancy, but that would appear to be brief, as well. If the young folk who download music and have no use for an object they can look at and hold in their hand, how likely are they to read magazines?

Last month, Rolling Stone had semi-retired, 65-year-old David Bowie on its cover. The story inside was a nostalgic journey to Bowie's Ziggy Stardust heyday in the early 1970s. The latest issue gives us 69-year-old Paul McCartney. It would appear that the music periodical, once a voice of youth, now skews old and relies on middle-aged rock 'n' roll fans for its livelihood. As for the CD, it was introduced in 1982 and began to push the vinyl long-playing record into the cutout bins by end of the decade.Vinyl seems to have been around longer than the CD, but they also had a run of about 30 years.

Someday we may be downloading food directly into our stomachs with no need to use our mouths. The future, as portrayed in science-fiction of the past, is finally here. I must say it does not please me. The other day I read an article about technology in development that can read our minds.

Brave New World? Sounds like a hopeless one to me.

© 2012 Brian W. Fairbanks

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Limbaugh's Fluke

A Georgetown University law student named Sandra Fluke testified before Congress recently about the difficulty that women have paying for contraceptives that are not covered by health insurance plans. In her estimation, the average woman spends $3,000 a year to ensure their sexual encounters do not produce unwanted children. Someone who did the math concluded that a woman who needs $3,000 worth of contraceptives a year would have sex a minimum of three times a day. What kind of woman is that?

That kind of woman is a slut, said Rush Limbaugh. The loud-mouthed conservative radio star often makes statements that ignite controversy. It’s not often that he apologizes, but he did issue one for his remarks about Fluke after several sponsors pulled their advertising from his show. He regrets his “choice of words,” he says, but in this instance an apology isn't warranted. An unmarried woman whose contraceptive needs total $3,000 a year is, very likely, a whore. That's her business. Let her be a whore, but why should anyone be expected to pick up the bill for her sexual adventures?

There are plenty of people, male and female, who are not considered attractive enough to find sexual partners. What do they do to satisfy their sexual urges?

They masturbate. Those who have been deemed attractive enough to have their choice of partners can do the same if they choose. Women who do not choose the option of self-gratification or simply learn to do without can pay for their own birth control.

Society foots the bill too often for those who won’t take responsibility for their own actions. How many single mothers on welfare were promiscuous, refusing to live responsibly? A woman gets laid, gets pregnant, and sometimes she gets married. If the marriage was entered reluctantly, a divorce usually follows. While papa hits the road, or goes to jail, or simply can’t afford to care for the child that grew from his seed, mama and baby live on the dole. If mama goes back to school to try to rectify her earlier mistakes, she gets financial aid from the government which gets it from you and me. While she’s working toward a perfectly useless degree in Communications or Sports Management, the baby is in a taxpayer-funded day care center.

Of course, some women choose abortion to correct their failure of judgment. The slaughter isn’t free, of course, and we pay for that, too. It may be time to legalize prostitution. Let those women who simply must get laid pay for their contraceptives while they’re using them.

© 2012 Brian W. Fairbanks

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They Were Young, They Were Critics, and They Praised Mediocre Movies

Oscar night. It’s been years since I took more than a passing interest in Hollywood’s annual back-slapping ritual, partly due to the preponderance of Oscar groupies on the web for whom the award matters more than the films. There are also too damn many awards these days. Instead of adding my two cents to the already crowded field, I’m going back almost half a century to look at one of 1967's most significant films (an Oscar nominee) that, alas, I have never been able to appreciate. I know that I'm probably in the minority on Bonnie & Clyde, but this is how I felt in 2006 (when I wrote the following in my journal) and how I feel now:

Roger Ebert praised Bonnie & Clyde upon its 1967 release, and in his essay on the film in The Great Movies proudly takes some credit for the phenomenon that the film became since the only “ecstatic opening-day newspaper review” for the film was his own. A song inspired by the film, Georgie Fame’s “The Ballad of Bonnie and Clyde,” became a major hit, and the film’s 1920s fashion was all the rage for a time. The flick was a huge box-office hit, in almost constant release (often double-billed with Bullitt) through 1969, and it picked up a whopping 10 Oscar nominations, winning best supporting actress for Estelle Parsons, and the best cinematography prize for Burnett Guffrey. It also became a lightning rod of controversy for its then taboo-shattering depictions of violence.

But the phenomenon was a while in coming. When first released in August 1967, Bonnie & Clyde, advertised with the tagline, “They’re young, they’re in love, and they kill people,” was a bomb, sunk in part by negative reviews in Time (“grisly”), Newsweek (“gross and demeaning”), and, most significantly, The New York Times whose chief critic, Bosley Crowther, dismissed it as “cheap, baldfaced slapstick comedy. . . reddened with blotches of violence of the most grisly sort,” being pawned off as art by a “raw and unmitigated campaign of sheer press agentry . . . ”

Pauline Kael, a critic whose influence was just beginning to be felt, made her name when coming to the film’s defense, saying “Bonnie & Clyde needs violence. Violence is its meaning.” Ebert, then less than six months into his gig as film critic for The Chicago Sun-Times, and an admirer and protege of Kael, hailed the Arthur Penn directed film as “a milestone in the history of American movies, a work of truth and brilliance.”

Legend has it that Warren Beatty, who produced the film as well as starred, got down on his hands and knees and begged Jack L. Warner, then still calling the shots at the studio that practically invented the gangster film with 1931's Little Caesar and Public Enemy, to re-release Bonnie & Clyde to take advantage of those rapturous reviews.

Bonnie & Clyde was reissued and was now a hit, especially with young people. Time ran a second, now favorable, review by another critic, Newsweek ran a second, now favorable, review by the same critic who panned it initially, and Bosley Crowther stuck to his guns in The New York Times, still negating the film that he argued was “as pointless as it is lacking in taste.” Soon thereafter, Crowther was replaced by Vincent Canby as the paper’s principal film critic.

I think Crowther was right.

Bonnie & Clyde is an example of the publicity machine triumphing over art. Bonnie & Clyde is no more profound than The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, Roger Corman’s bloody depiction of the battle between Al Capone and Bugs Moran that was released the same month, but neither Corman nor 20th Century Fox thought to market it as anything more than popcorn entertainment.

Beatty and company were shrewder, more media savvy, and as producer, Beatty stood to make millions, which he did while gaining a foothold in Hollywood as one of the town’s most powerful players. Bonnie & Clyde was such a pop culture phenomenon that it mattered little that its star remained off-screen for three years, an inordinately long sabbatical for a film star in those days, not headlining another feature until 1970's The Only Game in Town, a dud co-starring Elizabeth Taylor and directed by George Stevens.

Bonnie & Clyde turned up on the cover of Time for the week of December 8, 1967 where it was the centerpiece for a story on “The New Cinema: Violence . . . Sex . . . Art.” That same week, the cover of The New York Review of Books caricatured President Johnson as Clyde, with Secretary of State Dean Rusk as Bonnie. Faye Dunaway, who won the role of Bonnie after Jane Fonda turned it down, was Life’s cover girl for January 12, 1968 (“Bonnie: Fashion’s New Darling”) and was called the “with-it girl of the ‘60s” in another cover story in Newsweek.

A phenomenon?

Yes.

A great movie?

I’ve seen Bonnie & Clyde many times through the years, and since I am consistently unimpressed, my habit is to read as much critical analysis of the film as I can to determine if I’m missing something. Roger Ebert, in his original 1967 review and again in a more recent essay, and Richard Schickel, in a retrospective piece for a National Society of Film Critics book called The A Movies, both failed to convince me that the film is a masterpiece, though they succeed somewhat in hailing the film as a defining moment in cinema.

Yes, it clearly inspired such films as Badlands, Thelma and Louise, and Natural Born Killers, and its portrayal of violence was trendsetting, but the parallels that Schickel - or was it Ebert? - drew to the student protestors of the ‘60s and the war in Vietnam sound like so much pretentious posturing.

“The fact that the story is set 35 years ago doesn’t mean a thing,” Ebert wrote in 1967. “It had to be set sometime. But it was made now and it’s about us.”

Schickel includes an attack on Bosley Crowther in his piece, dismissing him as a “fud” and “clueless.” I would argue that Schickel was clueless about the merits of this thoroughly routine gangster film. From here it looks like many of the critics who praised the film were following the pack, imitating Bonnie and Clyde and those student radicals, by thumbing their nose at the Establishment, the old guard like Crowther who they needed to displace before establishing themselves as the “new breed of critic,” rogues who were seduced by the French and their “auteur” theories, and by Pauline Kael.

Crowther, despite a long tenure as film critic for The New York Times, is now probably best-known for panning Bonnie & Clyde. He’s ridiculed right along with the spokesman for the Grand Old Opry who told Elvis Presley that he should stick to driving a truck, and the record company executive who explained that “groups were out” when deciding against signing the Beatles to a recording contract.

But alas, even Crowther came around, or at least conceded that he believed he was wrong about the impact that Bonnie & Clyde had on cinema.

“I still hold that (my major criticisms) were valid in the broader context of a moral point of view,” he wrote in 1978, but now he agreed that Bonnie & Clyde was “a cinematic trailblazer.”

I can’t argue with that. Bonnie & Clyde blazed a trail, all right, but that doesn’t make it a great film. I would have to agree with Variety, whose critic Dave Kaufman reviewed the film after it premiered at the Montreal Film Festival, and found it “erratic” with uneven direction and inconsistent performances. Beatty is never convincing as the psychotic Clyde, and the film’s explanation for his love of big guns and violence (he’s impotent) wouldn’t seem so silly if his potency wasn’t miraculously restored after Bonnie praises his prowess in a poem. It is, as Crowther said, “ludicrous” and “crude.”

I agree even more with The UK Critic, Ian Waldron-Mantgani, who revisited the film in 2003 and said “Every time I see the film, I want to resist it less, and end up resisting it more . . . It plays likes a glorification, and has immortalized its characters as figures to be admired rather than understood.” Influential and popular?

No question about it.

A work of art?

The fact is, you won’t find any works of art in the filmographies of the film’s two principal “auteurs.”

Director Arthur Penn’s name is still uttered with reverence by many film critics, but none of his films before or since Bonnie & Clyde approach greatness. In the 1995 edition of A Biographical Dictionary of the Film, critic David Thomson asks, “What has happened to Arthur Penn? In the last fifteen years, he has been nearly a nonentity. In the fifteen years before that, he was one of the best directors in America, and the filmmaker with the most acute sense of what the audiences dreamed and feared.”

Actually, Penn was something of a nonentity throughout his career. Before Bonnie & Clyde, he made a handful of good films, including 1962's The Miracle Worker, but following Bonnie & Clyde he made a handful of perfectly average, though sometimes overpraised, movies. There was 1969's Alice’s Restaurant, 1970's Little Big Man, and 1975's Night Moves, the latter described by Thomson as “a perplexing film noir, more unclear than disturbing, its allegory tangled with its anecdote.” Penn’s last major film was also his worst: 1976's The Missouri Breaks, which teamed Marlon Brando and Jack Nicholson, made more critic’s 10 worst lists than any other major film that year and was such a bomb that Penn never made another major film.

As for Warren Beatty . . . Shirley Maclaine’s younger brother may be a star, but it seems he’s always been more popular with the press than the public, and his career has been marked by pretension and mediocrity. His ambition has always overwhelmed his talent, and though he is, along with Orson Welles, the only person to be Oscar nominated for producing, directing, acting, and screenwriting in the same year, and inexplicably surpassed Welles by doing it twice, neither the featherweight comedy Heaven Can Wait nor the ambitious Reds (for which Beatty won his lone Oscar as best director) are equal to Welles’ muddled but interesting Lady from Shanghai, let alone a threat to Citizen Kane. His worst film, which he took credit for co-writing, is 1975's Shampoo, a smug sex farce masquerading as a commentary on political apathy. (You see, all the characters are too busy screwing to vote against Richard Nixon in the 1968 presidential election. Deep, deep stuff.)

Bonnie & Clyde is a masquerade of sorts, too: a shallow farce given an illusion of depth simply because it was released in such perilous times.

© 2012 Brian W. Fairbanks

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The hits keep coming on Antenna TV

One of the results of the recent switch from analog to digital broadcasting is the glut of channels now available even to viewers like me who continue to resist cable and other pay TV options. I now have two channel 3s, one of which shows nothing but a weather map 24 hours a day. There are two and sometimes three of most channels now. Fans of Ernest Angley can get their fill of his sermons on channel 55.2 which presents repeat broadcasts of The Ernest Angley Hour and The Ninety and Nine Club, both of which also air on 55.1. Devotees of public television have benefited the most. In addition to the PBS programming on channel 25, there’s coverage of the Ohio Senate on 25.2, repeats of PBS shows on 25.3 and 25.4 and audio programs, some from the local NPR station, on 25.9.

Then there’s 43.2 which presents old movies and TV series from the MGM library courtesy of the This network which specifically caters to the substations that have popped up in the last year or so. Antenna TV, a similar network that premiered in my area on New Year’s Eve 2010, is a feast of nostalgia for lovers of TV’s past. In addition to airing genuine classics like All in the Family and Maude, they are digging deep into the Sony-owned archives of Screen Gems, the name given to the television subsidiary of Columbia Pictures, for such two-season wonders as The Flying Nun and The Monkees, both of which could provide a wake-up call to those who think current television is not up the standards of previous decades.

Much of television was truly abysmal in the mid-1960s, the era for which The Flying Nun and The Monkees are fairly typical representatives. For Sally Field, The Flying Nun must be an embarrassment that can only be relieved by hugging those two Oscars she won for best actress for Norma Rae and Places in the Heart. In what kind of imagination could such a show originate? Set in Puerto Rico, The Flying Nun cast Field as Sister Bertrille whose small 90 pound frame just happens to take flight whenever a strong wind blows. Her ability to float through the air was not integral to the plots of the two episodes I saw recently. It’s simply some weird little gimmick to the story. Was it the sudden and quite unexpected popularity of the Batman TV show that made the producers give a sort of superpower to a nun? The Catholic church actually gave its blessing to the show which really should be buried somewhere in the vast catacombs where the Vatican stores its dead popes.

The Flying Nun had stories. The Monkees merely used bare-bones plots in which to insert musical numbers, many of which were repeated week after week, presumably to promote whatever single was currently riding high on the charts. If you can get into the spirit of the proceedings, the shows are pretty entertaining, owing much of their appeal to the charms of its lead players. In one episode, the Monkees devise bizarre ways to teach American History to a girl who can’t concentrate on her college exams because she’s in love with Davy Jones, the one English member of the American group. In another segment, comedy legend Stan Freberg appears as the employee of a toy company where the boys work to pay the rent on the apartment they all share.

The Monkees were created to capitalize on the success of the Beatles, and the show took the casual style of 1964's A Hard Day’s Night as its inspiration. It proved to be a winning formula commercially. Although the sitcom, which aired Monday nights on NBC in the 7:30 - 8:00 p.m. time slot from 1966-68, was never a top ten hit, the Monkees became a phenomenon of sorts, scoring hit singles and selling more albums than the Beatles during their brief time at the top. In 1967, the year in which the Fab Four’s groundbreaking Sgt. Pepper was the tenth biggest selling album according to Billboard, the Monkees’ debut album and its follow-up held down the top two spots. Within a year of that achievement, however, the Monkees were pretty much finished. Head, their oddball big-screen debut (with a script by Jack Nicholson) that met with audience indifference, was also their swan song, at least until their '80's comeback with the hit, "That Was Then, This Is Now," and the ongoing reunion tours.

Once the show was cancelled and the hit records stopped coming, the Monkees were regarded as a joke, a blatantly commercial enterprise whose records were created by session musicians from songs by the likes of Neil Diamond, Carole King, and the duo of Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart. It was a time when rock bands, following the example set by Bob Dylan and Lennon-McCartney, were expected to write their own songs, and certainly play their own instruments. The Monkees did neither. Two of its members, Michael Nesmith and Peter Tork, were musicians, folk artists who played the local clubs around L.A. before answering an ad to audition for the group. But Davy Jones and Mickey Dolenz, who alternated lead vocals on most of their hits, were actors who would continue to pop up on TV occasionally in the years to come.

I don’t know what became of Tork in the years that followed, but Nesmith scored a solo hit with a lovely self-penned country ballad, “Joanne,” in 1970 before becoming a pioneer of music video with the Grammy winning Elephant Parts. He hasn’t done too badly, and presumably can thank his mother for his financial independence. She invented Liquid Paper, the correction fluid particularly popular in the pre-computer age.

Despite their purely calculated success, the Monkees did produce two classic singles which, coincidentally, share a word in the title: “I’m a Believer,” written by Neil Diamond, was their biggest hit and a song that’s been revived several times, most recently by Diamond himself on an album titled Dreams. Then there’s “Daydream Believer,” a John Stewart composition that provided the Monkees with their last number one hit. It’s a great song and a just about perfect recording whose fans include actor Johnny Depp and punk-poetess Patti Smith.

It’s not a bad legacy for a pop group conceived for a dumb sitcom. If nothing else, the Monkees can boast of having flown higher than The Flying Nun.

© 2012 Brian W. Fairbanks

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