How a ’60s Sitcom Made a Monkee Out of Me

This critic entered the world just as The Monkees phenomenon was leaving.

NBC’s “The Monkees” debuted in September of 1966, but two years later found the pre-Fab Four on its last creative legs.

It didn’t help that the quartet had just starred in one of that year’s biggest duds.

The 1968 music satire “Head” left audiences scratching theirs while the band’s teenybopper base moved on to other pop stars. (Time has been very kind to the film and its soundtrack, but the initial reaction proved brutal)

Peter Tork left the band in short order, to be followed by Michael Nesmith. Davy Jones and Micky Dolenz carried on for one last album, the 1970’s contractual obligation known as “Changes.”

The Monkees called it a career (at least for a spell).

It took the show’s ubiquitous reruns to hook me a decade later. Silly, sophomoric, groundbreaking and sly, those two seasons (58 episodes) introduced me to the band’s slapstick style and enduring pop gems.

Except I couldn’t find a Monkees album at my local record store or anywhere else.

It wasn’t easy being a Monkees fan in the late 1970s-early 1980s. The band’s records were out of print, forcing me to visit as many garage sales and flea markets as my parents could stand to find used LPs.

I was obsessed, and failure after failure didn’t stop me. I eventually cobbled together the complete LP collection, even snagging some Monkees’ 45s along the way.

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That wasn’t enough. I needed to watch “The Monkees” TV show, too. Except the stations in my New York market decided they had had enough of the wacky series.

No more reruns.

So I’d scan each week’s new TV Guide magazine to see if a station, any station, would be bringing back the show. My search came up empty, month after month.

After a while, I gave up hope.

Then, magically, MTV got a case of MonkeeMania in 1986, the show’s 20th anniversary. The music channel brought the reruns back from the TV graveyard, starting with a marathon of back-to-back-back episodes.

I knew what I had to do.

I bought a bunch of blank VHS tapes and recorded every episode. I set the VHS to the four-hour mode, and I programmed my alarm clock so I’d insert a new blank tape after every eight-episode block. That meant I had to wake up in the middle of the night to keep on recording.

Why?

I’d never be held hostage by the TV gods again. 

It wasn’t just me who caught Monkees fever anew. The band, sans Nesmith, toured that year and even snagged a fresh spot on the Billboard charts.

In a way, The Monkees never officially broke up. They kept splitting and reassembling, with Nesmith rejoining the quartet for the 1996 album “Justus.”

The TV band didn’t play their own instruments on the first two Monkees releases, and that never sat well with them. The media at the time wouldn’t let them forget it, either.

So this reunion let them create music on their terms. They wrote, performed and produced every track.

Revenge!

I eventually became a features reporter at The Washington Times, a gig that gave me unique access to the band. And, over the span of several years, I interviewed three of the four members (not Jones). I’ll never forget Tork telling me at the end of our chat that he “enjoyed” this one.

Real praise? Kissing up to the media? I didn’t care.

Snagging the mercurial Nesmith, who was promoting his 2006 album “Rays” at the time, remains a career highlight.

I saw the band several times over the years, including the group’s 2011 visit to The Paramount Theater in Denver. The Monkees reunited for 2016’s “Good Times,” a shockingly good album co-written by pop heavyweights like Andy Patridge, Rivers Cuomo, Ben Gibbard and Adam Schlesinger.

Jones had died a few years earlier, but they used a lesser-known song from the Brit (“Love to Love” by Neil Diamond) to round out the album.

Now, sadly, three-fourths of the group’s members have passed on.

Dolenz, at 81, remains the last Monkee standing, and he’s spent the year criss-crossing the country to keep the Monkees’ music alive.

For me, it all began with a TV show that didn’t play by the rules, broke the fourth wall and introduced me to the band’s perfect pop canon. Think:

• “Last Train to Clarksville”
• “Pleasant Valley Sunday”
• “I’m a Believer”
• “She”
• “Valleri”
• “Sweet Young Thing”
• The Girl I Knew Somewhere”
• “The Door into Summer”
• “Shades of Gray”
• “Sometime in the Morning”

The band may have been manufactured, but the music remains timeless. And, now, we can watch the classic series again thanks to Tubi.

The free streaming service just added “The Monkees” to its content roster. Parade says it’s the first major streaming service to feature the ’60s series.

What took them so long?

Here’s betting young viewers will stumble onto the show, watch a few episodes and add some “new” songs to their playlists.

I know the feeling.