30 December: The Monkees

Two members of the 60s boyband the Monkees, Michael Nesmith and Davy Jones were born on this date. Here are some things you might not know, or remember, about the band.

1. While the members of the group were all musicians who could play instruments and write songs, they were originally brought together as actors for a TV series about a fictional rock and roll group. The creators of the show were Bob Rafelson and Bert Schneider, and they'd been inspired by The Beatles' film A Hard Day's Night.
2. The recruitment ad for the show read “Madness!! Auditions. Folk & Roll Musicians-Singers for acting roles in new TV series. Running Parts for 4 insane boys, age 17-21. Want spirited Ben Frank's types. Have courage to work. Must come down for interview.” Rafelson later revealed that “Must come down for interview” actually meant that candidates shouldn't turn up high on drugs.
3. 437 young men applied. Contrary to a persistent rumour, Charles Manson was not one of them. He was in prison at the time. The final four chosen were Micky Dolenz, Davy Jones, Michael Nesmith and Peter Tork. Of those four, only Nesmith had actually seen the advert. The rest were told about the opportunity by their agents or friends. In Tork's case, the musician Stephen Stills. Nesmith showed up at the audition with his laundry. He wore a woollen hat to keep his hair out of his eyes when he rode his motorcycle, which became part of his screen attire, although his early nickname of "Wool Hat" was soon dropped.
4. Mike Nesmith's mother Bette Nesmith Graham invented Liquid Paper, a kind of correction fluid.
5. Englishman Davy Jones was a former jockey who had turned to musical theatre. He'd played the Artful Dodger in the stage show Oliver! and as such, had appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show on the same night as the Beatles debut on American TV. Despite being British, Jones had no idea at that time who the Beatles even were and had never even heard any of their songs. The main reason he watched them with interest was so he could learn how to make girls scream the way they did. In the Monkees, he was cast as “the cute one”, loosely based on Paul McCartney.
6. It's no coincidence that the character Chekov in Star Trek looks a bit like Davy Jones. Gene Roddenberry, having noticed how popular Jones had become, based the appearance of that character on him so Star Trek would appeal to a younger audience. Another consequence of Davy Jones's popularity was that another British musician whose name was David Robert Jones, decided he would have to change his name in order to differentiate himself from Davy Jones in the Monkees. So he called himself David Bowie.
7. Being real musicians and more than capable of performing, the band released a string of best selling records and went on tour. On one of their tours, their opening act was Jimi Hendrix, who Micky and Peter had seen at the Monterey Pop Festival and been impressed by. However, their audience of teenage girls weren't quite ready for an act like Hendrix and actually booed him, so Hendrix quit after seven shows.
8. As well as acting and performing, two of the band, Peter and Micky also directed episodes. Peter used his full name in the director’s credit: Peter H. Thorkelson. Mike was a songwriter too. He'd already released an album under the name Michael Blessing. One of his songs, which appeared on the album, became Linda Ronstadt's first hit, Different Drum.
9. The TV show ran for two seasons. The first was a big hit but by the second, people had figured out the Monkees were a manufactured band, resulting in some serious criticism. NBC tried to re-invent the show by making the band less clean-cut looking and more like hippies, but that backfired as their young fans stopped watching. The series was cancelled in 1968. The Monkees released more records after that, but they didn't sell as well. They made a film, entitled Head, in 1968 but it was a box office flop. That said, both the Beatles and The Rolling Stones asked for private screenings of the movie.
10. Many sources say that the Monkees sold more records than the Rolling Stones and the Beatles in 1967. However, according to Wikipedia, that wasn't true – Mike Nesmith later admitted he made that factoid up for an interview with an Australian reporter. Nor was it true that Mike punched the wall next to musical director Don Kirshner's face because he didn't want to perform the song Sugar Sugar (later a hit for the Archies). While the band and Kirshner didn't get on and had some serious arguments, and the wall punching incident did happen, with Mike saying, “That could have been your face,” the argument was not about Sugar Sugar.