Episode 144: “Last Train to Clarksville” by the Monkees

A history of folk music and 500 songs

by Andrew Hickey.

Episode 144:

Last Train to Clarksville by The Monkees.

We've obviously talked in this podcast about several of the biggest hits of 1966 already, but we haven't mentioned the biggest hit of the year, one of the strangest records ever to make number one in the US, The Ballad of the Green Berets, by by Sergeant Barry Sadler.

Put silver wings

on my son's chest,

Barry Sadler was an altogether odd man, and just as a brief warning, his story, which will last a minute or so, involves gun violence.

At the time he wrote and recorded that song, he was on active duty in the military.

He was a combat medic who'd been fighting in the Vietnam War when he'd got a wound that had meant he had to be shipped back to the USA.

And while at Fort Bragg, he decided to write and record a song about his experiences, experiences, with the help of Robin Moore, a right-wing author of military books, both fiction and non-fiction, who wrote the books on which the films The Green Berets and The French Connection were based.

Sadler's record became one of those massive fluke hits, selling over 9 million copies and getting him appearances on the Ed Sullivan show.

But other than one top 30 hit, he never had another hit single.

Instead, he tried and failed to have a TV career, then became a writer of pulp fiction himself, writing a series of twenty-one novels about the centurion who thrust his spear into Jesus' side when Jesus was being crucified, and is thus cursed to be a soldier until the second coming.

He moved to Nashville, Tennessee, where he lived until he shot Lee Emerson, a country songwriter who had written songs for Marty Robbins, in the head, killing him, in an argument over a woman.

He was sentenced to thirty days in jail for this misdemeanor, of which he served twenty-eight.

Later, he moved to Guatemala City, where he was himself shot in the head.

The nearest army base to Nashville, where Sadler lived after his discharge, is Fort Campbell in Clarksville.

The Vietnam War was a long and complicated war, one which affected nearly everything we're going to see in the next year or so of this podcast, and we're going to talk about it quite a lot.

So it's worth giving a little bit of background here.

In doing so, I'm going to use quite a flippant tone, but I want to make it clear that I'm not mocking the very real horrors that people suffered in the wars I'm talking about.

It's just that to sum up multiple decades of unimaginable horrors in a few sentences requires glossing over so much that you have to either laugh or cry.

The origin of the Vietnam War, as in so many things in 20th century history, can be found in European colonialism.

France had invaded much of Southeast Asia in the mid to late 19th century, and created a territory known as French Indochina, which became part of the French colonial empire.

But in 1940, France was taken over by Germany, and Japan was at war with China.

Germany and Japan were allies, and the Japanese were worried that French Indochina would be used to import fuel and arms to China.

Plus, they quite fancied the idea of having a Japanese empire.

So Vichy France let Japan take control of French Indochina.

But of course, the reason that France had been taken over by Germany was that pretty much the whole world was at war in 1940.

And obviously the countries that were fighting Germany and Japan, the bloc led by Britain, soon to be joined by America and Russia, weren't very keen on the idea of Japan getting more territory.

But they were also busy with the whole fighting a World War thing.

So they did what governments in this situation always do.

They funded local guerrilla insurgent fighters on the basis that my enemy's enemy is my friend.

something that has luckily never had any negative consequences whatsoever, except for occasionally.

Those local guerrilla fighters were an anti-imperialist popular front, the Viet Minh, led by Ho Chi Minh, a revolutionary Communist.

They were dedicated to overthrowing foreign imperialist occupiers and gaining independence for Vietnam.

And Ho Chi Minh further wanted to establish a Soviet-style Communist government in the newly independent country.

The Allies funded the Viet Minh in their fight against the Japanese occupiers until the end of the Second World War, at which point France was liberated from German occupation, Vietnam was liberated from Japanese occupation, and the French basically said, Hooray, we get our Empire back!

To which Ho Chi Minh's response was, more or less, what part of anti-imperialist Marxists dedicated to overthrowing foreign occupation of Vietnam did you not understand exactly?

Obviously, the French weren't best pleased with this, and so began what was the first of a series of wars in the region.

The First Indo-China War lasted for years, and ended in a negotiated peace of a sort.

Of course, this led to the favoured tactic of the time, partition, splitting a formerly occupied country into two at an arbitrary dividing line, a tactic which was notably successful in securing peace everywhere it was tried, apart from Ireland, India, Korea, and a few other places.

But surely it wouldn't be a problem in Vietnam, right?

North Vietnam was controlled by the Communists, led by Ho Chi Minh, and recognised by China and the USSR, but not by the Western states.

South Vietnam was nominally independent, but led by the former puppet emperor who owed his position to France, soon replaced by a right-wing dictatorship.

And both the right-wing dictatorship and the left-wing dictatorship were soon busily oppressing their own citizens and funding military opposition groups in the other country.

This soon escalated into full-blown war, with the north backed by China and Russia, and the south backed by America.

This was one of a whole series of wars in small countries, which were really proxy wars between the two major powers, the USA and the USSR, both of which were vying for control, but which couldn't confront each other directly, because either country had enough nuclear weapons to destroy the whole world multiple times over.

But the Vietnam War quickly became more than a small proxy war.

The US started sending its own troops over, and more and more of them.

The US had never ended the draft after World War two, and by the mid sixties significant numbers of young men were being called up and sent over to fight in a war that had by that point lasted a decade, depending on exactly when you count the war as starting from, between two countries they didn't care about, over things few of them understood, and at an exorbitant cost in lives.

As you might imagine, this started to become unpopular among those likely to be drafted, and as the people most affected, other of course than the Vietnamese people, whose opinions on being bombed and shot at by foreigners supporting one or other of the dictators vying to rule over them, nobody else was much interested in, were also of the generation who were the main audience for popular music.

Slowly, this started to seep into the lyrics of songs, a seepage which had already been prompted by the appearance in the folk and soul worlds of many songs against other horrors like segregation.

This started to hit the pop charts with songs like The Universal Soldier by Buffy Saint-Marie, which made the UK top five in a version by Donovan.

He's the universal soldier, and he really is to blame.

His orders come from far away, no more.

They come from here and there, and you and me.

And brothers, can't you see?

This is not the way we put the end to war.

That charted in the lower regions of the US charts, and a cover version by Glenn Campbell did slightly better.

He fights with missiles and with spears.

He's all of 31 and he's only 17.

He's been a soldier for a thousand years.

He's a Catholic, a Hindu, an atheist, a Jain,

a Buddhist, a Baptist and a Jew.

That was even though Campbell himself was a supporter of the war in Vietnam and rather pro-military.

Meanwhile, as we've seen a couple of times, Jan Berry of Jan and Dean recorded a pro-war answer song to that, The Universal Coward.

A demonstrator, an agitator, just a knave

A conscientious objector,

a fanatic or a defector,

and he doesn't know he's digging his own grave.

This, of course, was even though Berry was himself avoiding the draft.

And I've not been able to find credits for that track, but Glenn Campbell regularly played guitar on Berry's sessions, so it's entirely possible that he played guitar on that record made by a coward, attacking his own record, which he disagreed with, for its cowardice.

This is, of course, what happens when popular culture tries to engage with social and political issues.

Pop culture is motivated by money, not ideological consistency.

And so if there's money to be made from anti-war songs or from pro-war songs, someone will take that money.

And so on October 9th, 1965, Billboard magazine Mana Report,

Colpix enters Protest Field.

Hollywood.

Colpix has secured its first protest lyric disc, The Willing Conscript, as general manager Bud Katzell initiates relationships with independent producers.

The single features Loew and Sid Davis.

Katzel says the song was written during the Civil War.

rewritten during World War I, and most recently updated by Bob Krasnow and Sam Ashe.

Screen Gems Music, the company's publishing wing, is tracing the song's history, Katzell said.

Katzell's second single is You Got the Gammaguchi by an artist with that unusual stage name.

The record is a Screen Gems production and was in the house when Katzell arrived one month ago.

The executive said he was expressly looking for material for two contract artists, David Jones and Hoyt Axton.

The company is also working on getting Axton a role in a television series, Camp Runner Mook.

To unpack this a little, Colpix was a record label owned by Columbia Pictures, and we talked about that a little bit in the episode on the locomotion.

The film and TV companies were getting into music, and Columbia had recently bought up Don Kirshner's Aldon Publishing and Dimension Records, as part of their strategy of tying in music with their TV shows.

This is a company trying desperately to jump on a bandwagon.

Colpix at this time was not exactly having huge amounts of success with its records.

Hoyt Axton, meanwhile, was a successful country singer and songwriter.

We met his mother many episodes back.

May Axton was the writer of Heartbreak Hotel.

Axton himself is now best known as the dad in the 80s film Gremlins.

David Jones will be coming up shortly.

Bob Krasnau and Sam Ash were record executives then at Karma Sutra Records, but soon to move on.

We'll be hearing about Krasnau more in future episodes.

Neither of them were songwriters, and while I have no real reason to disbelieve the claim that the willing conscript dates back to the Civil War, the earliest version I have been able to track down was its publication in issue 28 of Broadside magazine in June 1963, nearly a hundred years after the American Civil War, with the credit by Tom Paxton.

Paxton was a popular singer-songwriter of the time, and it certainly sounds like his writing.

The first recording of it I know of was by Pete Seeger.

There are several lessons that I haven't mastered yet.

I haven't got the hang of how to use the bayonet.

If he doesn't die at once, am I to stick him with it more?

Oh, I hope you will be patient, for I've never killed before.

And the hand grenade is something that I just don't understand.

You've got to throw it quickly, or you're apt to lose your hand.

Does it blow a man to pieces with its wicked muffin?

But the odd thing is that by the time this was printed, the single had already been released the previous month, and it was not released under the name Lovinson Davis, or under the title The Willing Conscript.

There are precisely two differences between the song copyrighted as by Krasno and Ash, and the one copyrighted two years earlier as by Paxton.

One is that verses three and four are swapped round, the other is that it's now titled The New Recruit.

And presumably because they realised that the pseudonym Lovinsid Davis was trying just a bit too hard to sound cool in drug culture.

They reverted to another stage name the performer had been using, Michael Blessing.

Oh, please be patient, Sergeant, for I've never killed before.

And the hand grenade

Blessing's name was actually Michael Nesmith.

And before we go any further, yes his mother, Betty Nesmith Graham, did invent the product that later became marketed in the US as liquid paper.

At this time though, that company wasn't anywhere near as successful as it later became, and was still a tiny company.

I only mentioned it to forestall the 10,000 comments and tweets I would otherwise get asking why I didn't mention it.

In Nesmith's autobiography, while he talks a lot about his mother, he barely mentions her business and says he was all interested in it.

He talks far more about the love of art she instilled in him, as well as her interest in the deep questions of philosophy and religion, to which in her case and his they found answers in Christian science, but both were interested in conversations about ideas, in a way that few other people in Nesmith's early environment were.

Nesmith's mother was also responsible for his music career.

He He had spent two years in the Air Force in his late teens, and the year he got out, his mother and stepfather bought him a guitar for Christmas after he was inspired by seeing Hoy Taxton performing live and thinking he could do that himself.

be sung.

And I don't give a damn about a green knack a dollar.

Spend it as fast as I can.

For a whaling song and a good guitar, the only things that I have.

As he put it in his autobiography, what did it matter that I couldn't play the guitar, couldn't sing very well, and didn't know any folk songs?

I would be going to college and hanging out at the student union with pretty girls and singing folk songs.

They would like me.

I might even figure out a way to get a cool car.

This is of course the thought process that pretty much every young man to pick up a guitar goes through, but Nesmith was more dedicated than most.

He gave his first performance as a folk singer ten days after he first got a guitar, after practising a few chords in most folk songs for twelve hours a day every day in that time.

He soon started performing as a folk singer, performing around Dallas both on his own and with his friend John London, performing the standard folk repertoire of Buddy Guthrie and Let Belly songs, things like Pick a Bale of Cotton.

He also started writing his own songs and put out a vanity record of one of them in 1963.

Wandering

down that lonesome highway

Wandering, but I'm traveling

all alone

Wandering and going

absolutely nowhere.

And where I hang my hat is where I call it.

London moved to California, and Nesmith soon followed, with his first wife Phyllis and their son Christian.

There Nesmith and London had the good fortune to be neighbours with someone who was a business associate of Frankie Lane, and they were signed to Lane's management company as a folk duo.

However, Nesmith's real love was rock and roll, especially the heavier RB end of the genre.

He was particularly inspired by Bo Diddley, and would always credit seeing Diddley live as a teenager as being his biggest musical influence.

Soon, Nesmith and London had formed a folk rock trio with their friend Bill Sleeper, as Mike and John and Bill.

They put out a single How Can You Kiss Me?, written by Nesmith.

around and walk away.

You don't even miss me.

And I know you're gonna say

the same things you said to me

to another man.

They also recorded more of Nesmith's songs, like All the King's Horses.

But that was left unreleased as Bill was drafted, and Nesmith and London soon found themselves in The Survivors, one of several big folk groups run by Randy Sparks, the founder of the new Christie Minstrels.

Nesmith was also writing songs throughout 1964 and 1965, and a few of those songs would be recorded by other people in 1966, like Different Drum, which was recorded by the bluegrass band The Greenbrier Boys.

I've got my doubts.

You can't see the fall.

That would more successfully be recorded by the Stone Ponies later, of course.

And Nessmith's Mary Mary was also picked up by the Paul Butterfield Blues Band.

This

But while Nesmith had written these songs by late 1965, he wasn't able to record them himself.

He was signed by Bob Krasno, who insisted he change his name to Michael Blessing.

and recorded two singles for Colpics, The New Recruit, which we heard earlier, and a version of of Buffy Samarie's Until It's Time For You to Go, sung in a high-tenor range, very far from Nesmith's normal singing voice.

But to my mind, by far the best thing Nesmith recorded in this period is the unissued third Michael Blessing single, where Nesmith seems to have been given a chance to make the record he really wanted to make.

The B-side, a version of Alan 2 Cent's swamp rocker, Get Out of My Life Woman, is merely a quite good version of the song, but the A side, a version of his idle Bo Diddley's classic, Who Do You Love?, is utterly extraordinary, and it's astonishing that it was never released at the time.

But the Michael Blessing records did no better than anything else Culpics were putting out.

Indeed, the only record they got onto the hot 100 at all in a three and a half year period was a single by one David Jones, which reached the heady heights of number 98.

What are we going to do if the word gets out?

Well, what did your sister say when she saw us kiss?

What have I got to pay, so she won't talk about this?

What are we going to do if your dad finds out we're in love?

Jones had been brought up in extreme poverty in Openshaw in Manchester, but had been encouraged by his mother, who died when he was 14,

to go into acting.

He'd had a few parts on local radio, and had appeared as a child actor on TV shows made in Manchester, like appearing in the long-running soap opera Coronation Street, still on today,

as Ina Sharples' grandson, Colin.

Here, just tell me again what your Auntie Madge said about me last bank holiday.

The Auntie Madge gave me a shilling last week.

Did she?

Yeah.

More than she's ever given me.

It's nice to have a bit of money in your pocket, isn't it, Grandma?

Yes.

What did she say?

She said she didn't know where you managed to put it.

She said you must have all her legs.

Hmm.

Now let's hear what she had to say about my face again.

She said you look like a budgie that had turned into a Pekanese.

Right.

That's done it.

That's seen our mag of the train.

He also had small roles in Zed Cars.

and Bill Norton's TV play June Evening and a larger role in Keith Waterhouse's radio play There is a Happy Land.

But when he left school, he decided he was going to become a jockey rather than an actor.

He was always athletic, he loved horses, and he was short.

I've seen his height variously cited as 5'3 and 5'4.

But it turned out that the owner of the stables in which he was training had show business connections and got him the audition that changed his life.

for the part of the artful dodger in Lionel Bart's West End musical Oliver.

We've encountered Lionel Bart before a couple of times, but if you don't remember him, he was the songwriter who co-wrote Tommy Steele's hits, and who wrote Living Doll for Cliff Richard.

He also discovered both Steele and Marty Wilde, and was one of the major figures in early British rock and roll.

But after the Tommy Steele records he'd turned his attention to stage musicals, writing book, music, and lyrics for a string of hits, and more or less single-handedly inventing the modern British stage musical form, something Andrew Lloyd Webber, for example, always credits him with.

Oliver, based on Oliver Twist, was his biggest success, and they were looking for a new artful Dodger.

This was the best role for a teenage boy in the UK at the time.

Later performers to take the role on the London stage include Steve Marriott and Phil Collins, both of whom we'll no doubt encounter in future episodes.

And Jones got the job, although they were a bit worried at first about his Manchester vowels.

He assured them, though, that he could learn to do a Cockney accent, and they took him on.

Jones not having a natural Cockney accent ended up doing him the biggest favour of his career.

While he could put on a relatively convincing one, he articulated quite carefully because it wasn't his natural accent.

And so, when the North American version found in previews that their real Cockney Dodger wasn't being understood perfectly, the fake Cockney Jones was brought over to join the show on Broadway and was there from opening night on.

On February 9th, 1964, Jones found himself as part of the Broadway cast of Oliver on the Ed Sullivan Show.

Anywhere for your smile,

anywhere for your smile,

everywhere I see.

Would you climb a hill or anything?

Well, yeah.

That same night, there were some other British people who got a little bit more attention than Jones did.

I can't hide.

If you

got that

Davy Jones wasn't a particular fan of pop music at that point, but he knew he liked what he saw, and he wanted sort of the same reaction.

Shortly after this, Jones was picked up for management by Ward Sylvester of Columbia Pictures, who was going to groom Jones for Stardom.

Jones continued in Oliver for a while, and also had a brief run in a touring version of Pickwick, another musical based on a Dickens novel, this time starring Harry Seacombe, the British comedian and singer who had made his name with the Goon Show.

Jones' first single, Dream Girl, came out in early 1965.

Dream girl, I love you.

Little angel, can't you see I do?

Dream girl,

make my dream come true

Tell me that you love me too Dream girl, with your pretty eyes

Little angel, I'll they if not that It was unsuccessful, as was his one album, David Jones, which seemed to be aiming at the teen idol market but failing miserably.

The second single, What Are We Going to Do, did make the very lowest regions of the Hot 100, but the rest of the album was mostly attempts to sound a bit like Herman's Hermit, a band whose lead singer, coincidentally, also came from Manchester, had appeared in Coronation Street, and was performing with a fake Cockney accent.

Herman's Hermits had had a massive US hit with the old music hall song, I am Henry VIII, I am.

I'm Henry VIII, I am.

Henry VIII I am, I am.

I got married to the widow next four.

She's been married seven times before, and everyone wasn't any.

She wouldn't have a willy or a Sam.

No, sir.

I'm an eighth old man, I'm Ennerine.

Henry the Eighth, I am.

Second verse, same as the first.

I'm Henry the Eighth.

So of course, Davey had his own old musical song, Annie Old Iam.

Also, the Turtles had recently had a hit with a folk rock version of Dylan's It Ain't Me Babe, and Davy cut his own version of their arrangement in the one concession to rock music on the album.

The album was, unsurprisingly, completely unsuccessful.

But Ward Sylvester was not disheartened.

He had the perfect job for a young British teen idol who could sing and act.

The Monkees was the brainchild of two young TV producers, Bob Rafelson and Burt Schneider, who had come up with the idea of doing a TV show very loosely based on the Beatles film A Hard Day's Night, though Rafelson would later claim that he'd had the idea many years before A Hard Day's Night, and was inspired by his youth touring with folk bands.

Schneider always admitted the true inspiration, though.

This was not a particularly original idea.

There were a whole bunch of people trying to make TV shows based in some way around bands.

Jan and Dean were working on a possible TV series.

There was talk of a TV series starring The Who.

There was a Beatles cartoon series.

Hannah Barbera were working on a cartoon series about a band called The Bats, and there was even another show proposed to Screen Gems, Columbia's TV department, titled Liverpool USA, which was meant to star Davy Jones, another British performer, and two American musicians, and to have songs provided by Don Kirschner's songwriters.

That The Monkees, rather than these other series, was the one that made it to the TV, though obviously the Beatles cartoon series did too, is largely because Rafelson and Schneider's independent production company, Raybert, which they had started after leaving Screen Gems, was given $225,000 to develop the series by their former colleague, Screengems' vice president in charge of programme development, the former child star Jackie Cooper.

Of course, as well as being their former colleague, Cooper may have had some more incentive to give Bob Rafelson and Burt Schneider that money, in that the head of Columbia Pictures, and thus Cooper's boss's boss, was one Abe Schneider.

The original idea for the show was to use the loving spoonful, but as we heard last week, they weren't too keen, and it was quickly decided instead that the production team would put together a group of performers.

David Jones was immediately attached to the project, although Rafelson was uncomfortable with Jones, thinking he wasn't as rock and roll as Rafelson was hoping for.

He later conceded, though, that Jones was absolutely right for the group.

As for everyone else, to start with, Rafelson and Schneider placed an ad in a couple of the trade papers, which read, Madness, Auditions, Folk and Role, Musicians, Singers for Acting Roles in New TV series, running parts for four insane boys ages 17 to 21, once spirited Ben Franks types, have courage to work, must come down for interview.

There were a couple of dog whistles in there to appeal to the hip crowd.

Ben Franks was a 24-hour restaurant on the Sunset Strip, where people including Frank Zappa and Jim Morrison used to hang out, out, and which was very much associated with the freak scene we've looked at in episodes on Zappa and the Birds.

Meanwhile, Must Come Down for Interview was meant to emphasise that you couldn't actually be high when you turned up, but you were expected to be the kind of person who would at least at some points have been high.

A lot of people answered that ad, including Paul Williams, Harry Nelson, Van Dyke Parks, and many more we'll be seeing along the way.

But oddly, the only person actually signed up for the show because of that ad was Michael Nesmith, who was already signed up to Colpix Records anyway.

According to David Jones, who was sitting in at the auditions, Schneider and Rafelson were deliberately trying to disorient the auditioners with provocative behaviour like just ignoring them to see how they'd react.

Nesmith was completely unfazed by this, and apparently walked in wearing a green wool hat and carrying a bag of laundry, saying that he needed to get this over with quickly so he could go and do his washing.

John London, who came along to the audition as well, talked later about seeing Nesmith fill in a questionnaire that everyone had to fill in.

In a space asking about previous experience, Nesmith just wrote life and drew a big diagonal line across the rest of the page.

That attitude certainly comes across in Nesmith's screen test.

You just came to it two years ago?

What before then?

I was a failure.

Yeah, but did you work at that?

Yeah.

I mean, yeah, I just didn't do anything.

I was a failure.

Do you think you're a goof?

Do you?

No.

Well, see, it depends on what you're saying.

Do I think you're a goof?

Yeah.

No.

Well, okay see then that's where it's at.

If you think I'm a goof fan I'm a goof.

You know what I think is what I am.

So I don't think I'm a goof.

I don't think you're a goof.

Right.

Okay.

I think I'm out of work.

I hope I get this serious.

But a goof?

No, I'm not a goof.

Let me ask you this.

Do you have any ego hang-ups?

Yeah.

Meanwhile, Rafelson and Schneider were also scouring the clubs for performers who might be useful and put together a short list of people.

including Jerry Yester and Chip Douglas of the Modern Folk Quartet, Bill Chadwick, who was in the survivors with Nesmith in London, and one Mickey Braddock, whose agent they got in touch with, and who was soon signed up.

Braddock was the stage name of Mickey Dolans, who soon reverted to his birth surname, and it's the name by which he went in his first bout of fame.

Dolans was the son of two moderately successful Hollywood actors, George Dolans and Janelle Johnson, and their connections had led to Dolans, as Braddock, getting the lead role in the 1958 TV series Circus Boy, about a child named Corky who works in a circus looking after an elephant after his parents, the Flying Falcons, were killed in a Tripeze accident.

We ran every outlaw and bad man out of the territory.

Was there much shooter?

Huh.

Outlaws and rustlers bit the dust every time we tangled with them.

How many did you get?

Six.

Gee.

Maybe even eight.

Do you suppose I could join the Rough Riders with you?

You're a little young, don't you think?

Well, you and Teddy are such good friends, maybe if you asked him.

Well,

they do have drummer boys in the army.

Well, I can't play a drum.

I can teach her.

Let's get back.

Oddly, one of the other people who had been considered for that role was Paul Williams, who was also considered for the Monkees, but ultimately turned down, and would later write one of the Monkees' last singles.

Dolans had had a few minor TV appearances after that series had ended, including a recurring role on Peyton Place, but he had also started to get interested in music.

He'd performed a bit as a folk duo with his sister Coco, and had also been the lead singer of a band called Mickey and the One Nighters, who later changed their name to the Missing Links, who'd played mostly covers of Little Richard and Chuck Berry songs, and later British Invasion hits.

He'd also recorded two tracks with Wrecking Crew backing, although neither track got released until after his later fame.

Don't Do It.

the floor.

When the band starts playing, now you ask no more.

You do it with everybody you see.

Why won't you do it with me?

Don't do it, why don't you do it?

Don't do it, why don't you do it?

Don't do it, why don't you dance with me now?

And hoof-puff.

You can bill it on Burning Desert, you can feel on bonus sea.

You can feel on tallest mountains, but you'll never get away from me.

I'm on a huff and huff and blow your house down.

I'm on a hook, huff, puff,

blow your house down.

And if you don't let me in, I'm gonna get mad.

I'm gonna hook and puff and blow your house down.

I don't feel on burnin' desert, you feel on bottom sea.

You can feel on tallest mountain, but you'll never get away from me.

I'm gonna hook and puff and

Dolans had a great singing voice, an irrepressible personality, and plenty of TV experience.

He was obviously in.

Rafelson and Schneider took quite a while whittling down the shortlist to the final four, and they were still considering people who'd applied through the ads.

One they actually offered the role to was Stephen Stills, but he decided not to take the role.

When he turned the role down, they asked if he knew anyone else who had a similar appearance to him, and as it happened, he did.

Steve Stills and Peter Torque had known of each other before they actually met on the streets of Greenwich Village.

The way they both told the story, on their first meeting they'd each approached the other and said, You must be the guy every one says looks like me.

The two had become fast friends, and had played around the Greenwich Village folk scene together for a while, before going their separate ways, Stills moving to California, while Torque joined another of those big folk ensembles of the new Christie Minstrels type, this one called the Phoenix Singers.

Torque had later moved to California himself, and reconnected with his old friend, and they had performed together for a while in a trio called The Buffalo Fish, with Torque playing various instruments, singing, and doing comedy bits.

Oddly, while Torque was the member of the Monkeys with the most experience as a musician, he was the only one who hadn't made a record when the T V show was put together.

But he was by far the most skilled instrumentalist of the group, as distinct from best musician a distinction Torque was always scrupulous about making, and could play guitar, bass, and keyboards all to a high standard, and I've also seen him in more recent years play French horn live.

His great love, though, was the banjo, and you can hear how he must have sounded on the Greenwich Village folk scene in his solo spots on Monkey shows, where he would show off his banjo skills.

Torque wouldn't get to use his instrumental skills much at first, though, as most of the backing tracks for the group's records were going to be performed performed by other people.

More impressive for the TV series producers was his gift for comedy, especially physical comedy.

Having seen Torque perform live a few times, the only comparison I can make to his physical presence is to Harpo Marx, which is about as high a compliment as one can give.

Indeed, Mickey Dolans has often pointed out that while there were intentional parallels to the Beatles in the casting of the group, the Marx brothers are a far better parallel, and it's certainly easy to see Torque as Harpo, Dolans as Chico, Nesmith as Groucho, and Jones as Zeppo.

This sounds like an insult to Jones, unless you're aware of how much the Marx Brothers films actually depended on Zeppo as the connective tissue between the more outrageous brothers and the more normal environment they were operating in, and how much the later films suffered for the lack of Zeppo.

The new cast worked well together, even though there were obvious disagreements between them right from the start.

Dolans, at least at this point, seems to have been the gel that held the four together.

He had the experience of being a child star in common with Jones, he was a habituary of the Sunset Strip Clubs when Nesbeth and Torque had been hanging out, and he had personality traits in common with all of them.

Notably, in later years, Dolans would do duo tours with each of his three bandmates without the participation of the others.

The others, though, didn't get on so well with each other.

Jones and Torque seemed to have got on okay, but they were very different people.

Jones was a showbiz entertainer, whose primary concern was that none of the other stars of the show be better looking than him, while Torque was later self-diagnosed as neurodivergent, a folky proto-hippie who wanted to drift from town to town playing his banjo.

Torque and Nesmith had similar backgrounds and attitudes in some respects, and were united in their desire to have more musical input into the show than was originally intended.

But they were such different personalities in every aspect of their lives, from their religious views to their politics to their taste in music, they came into conflict.

Nesmith would later say of Torque, I never liked Peter, he never liked me, so he had an uneasy truce between the two of us.

As clear as I could tell, among his peers he was very well liked, but we rarely had a civil word to say to each other.

Nesmith also didn't get on well with Jones, both of them seeming to view themselves as the natural leader of the group, with all the clashes that entails.

The four monkeys were assigned instruments for their characters, based not on instrumental skill, but on what suited their roles better.

Jones was the teen idol character, so he was made the maracad playing frontman who could dance without having to play an instrument, though Dolans took far more of the lead vocals.

Nesmith was made the guitarist, while Torque was put on bass, though Torque was by far the better guitarist of the two.

And Dolans was put on drums, even though he didn't play the drums.

Torque would always say later that if the roles had been allocated by actual playing ability, Jones would have been the drummer.

Dolans did, though, become a good drummer, if a rather idiosyncratic one.

Torque would later say Mickey played the drums, but Mike kept time on that one record we all made, headquarters.

Mike was the timekeeper.

I don't know that Mickey relied on him, but Mike has a much stronger sense of time.

And Davy, too.

Davy has a much stronger sense of time.

Mickey played the drums like they were a musical instrument, as a colour.

He played the drum colour.

As a band, there was a drummer and there was a timekeeper, and they were different people.

But at first, while the group were practising their instruments so they could mind convincingly on the TV and make personal appearances, they didn't need to play on their records.

Indeed, on the initial pilot, they didn't even sing.

The recordings had been made before the cast had been finalised.

The music was instead performed by two songwriters, Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart, who would become hugely important in the Monkees project.

Boyce and Hart were not the first choice for the project.

Don Kirshner, the head of Screen Gems Music, had initially suggested Roger Atkins, a Brill Brill-building songwriter working for his company, as the main songwriter for the Monkees.

Atkins is best known for writing It's My Life, a hit for the animals.

But Atkins didn't work out, though he would collaborate later on one song with Nesmith.

And reading between the lines, it seems there was some corporate infighting going on, though I've not seen it stated in so many words.

There seems to have been a turf war between Dun Kirschner, the head of Screen Gems Music Publishing, who was based in the Brill building, and Lester Sill, the West Coast executive we've seen so many times before.

The mentor to Lee Brunstoller, Dwayne Eddy, and Phil Spector, who was now the head of Screen Gems Music on the West Coast.

It also seems to be the case that none of the top Brill Building songwriters were all that keen on being involved at this point.

Writing songs for an unsold TV pilot wasn't exactly a plump gig.

Sill ended up working closely with the TV people, and it seems to have been him who put forward Boyce and Hart, a songwriting team he was mentoring.

Boyce and Hart had been working in the music industry for years, both together and separately, and had had some success, though they weren't one of the top-tier songwriting teams like Goffin and King.

They'd both started as performers.

Boyce's first single, Betty Jean, had come out in 1958.

Well, I'm so keen

on Betty Jean.

She's such a dream.

Oh, Betty Gene,

but will she ever know?

My heart is yearning so to have her teenage love.

Well, I'm so keen

on Betty Gene,

she's a dream, oh Betty G.

And hearts love what you're doing to me under his birth name Robert Harshman, a year later.

What did I happen to me?

It's love.

Can you really be?

It's love.

All of the world sees.

Oh, love, love, love.

What you're doing to me.

Boyce had been the first one to have real real songwriting success, writing Fats Domino's top 10 hits, Be My Guest, in 1959.

We're gonna dance to the Rob Hero.

We're gonna Emer, Dear Stroll.

We're gonna Lindy Hoppers in the cue.

This special party just for you.

Hi,

my oh, my

geez.

And co-writing two songs with singer Curtis Lee, both of which became singles produced by Phil Spectre, Under the Moon of Love and the top 10 hit, Fitty Little Angel Eyes.

Pretty little angel, pretty little angel, pretty little, pretty little, pretty little angel.

Voice and Heart Together, along with Wes Farrell, who had co-written Twist and Shout with Burt Burns, wrote Lazy Elsie Molly for Chubby Checker, and the number three hit, Come a Little Bit Closer, for Jay and the Americans.

And I knew, yes, I knew I should

At this point, they were both working in the Brill building, but then Boyce moved to the West Coast, where he was paired with Steve Fennett, the brother of Nick Vennett, and they co-wrote and produced Peaches and Cream for the iCat.

Don't you know what I mean?

Ah, ah, ah, peaches.

Peaches and cream.

Don't you know what I mean?

Now I'm grown and living on my own.

Hart, meanwhile, was playing in the band of Teddy Randazzo, the accordion-playing singer who had appeared appeared in the girl Can't Help It.

And with Randazzo and Bobby Weinstein, he wrote Hurt So Bad, which became a big hit for Little Anthony and the Imperials.

It makes me feel so sad

It makes me hurt so bad to see you again

But Hart soon moved over to the west coast where he joined his old partner Bois who had been busy writing TV themes with Vennett for shows like Where the Action Is.

Hart soon replaced Vennett in the team and the two soon wrote what would become undoubtedly their most famous piece of music ever, a theme tune that generations of TV viewers would grow to remember.

Like sands through the hourglass, so are the days of our lives.

Well, what did you think I meant?

Yes, just as Davy Jones had started an early episode of Britain's longest-running soap opera, one that's still running today, so Boyce and Hart wrote the theme music for America's longest-running soap opera, which has been running every weekday since 1965, and has so far aired well in excess of 14,000 episodes.

Meanwhile, Hart had started performing in a band called The Candy Store Prophets, with Larry Taylor, who we last saw with the Gamblers playing on LSD twenty five and Moondorg, on bass, Jerry McGee on guitar, and Billy Lewis on drums.

It was this band that Boyce and Hart used, augmented by session guitarists Wayne Irwin and Louis Shelton, and backing crew percussionist Gene Estes on tambourine, plus Boyce and session singer Ron Hicklin on backing vocals, to record first the demos and then the actual tracks that would become the Monkees' hits.

They had a couple of songs already that would be suitable for the pilot episode, but they needed something that would be usable as a theme song for the TV show.

Boyce and Heart's usual working method was to write off another hit.

They'd try to replicate the hook or the feel or the basic sound of something that was already popular.

In this case, they took inspiration from the song Catch Us If You Can, the theme from the film that was the Dave Clark Five's attempt at their own A Hard Day's Night.

Here they come again, mm,

catch

Catch us if you can.

Catch us if you can.

Catch us if you can.

Now we gotta run.

Voice and Heart turned that idea into what would become the Monkeys theme.

We heard their performance of it earlier, of course, but when the TV show finally came out, it was re-recorded with Dolan singing.

For a while, Boyce and Hart hoped that they would get to perform all the music for the TV show,

and there was even apparently some vague talk of them being cast in it, but it was quickly decided that they would just be songwriters.

Originally, the intent was that they wouldn't even produce the records, that instead the production would be done by a name producer.

Mickey Most, the animals producer, was sounded out for the role but wasn't interested.

Snuff Garrett was brought in, but quickly discovered he didn't get on with the group at all.

In particular, they were all annoyed at the idea that Davy would be the sole lead vocalist, and the tracks Garrett cut with Davy on lead and the wrecking crew backing were scrapped.

Instead, it was decided that Boyce and Hart would produce most of the tracks, initially with the help of the more experienced Jack Keller, and that they would only work with one monkey at a time to minimise disruption, usually Mickey and sometimes Davy.

These records would be be made the same way as the demos had been, by the same set of musicians, just with one of the monkeys taking the lead.

Meanwhile, as Nesmith was seriously interested in writing and production, and Mafelson and Schneider wanted to encourage the cast members, he was also assigned to write and produce songs for the show.

Unlike Boyce and Hart, Nesmith wanted to use his bandmaid's talents, partly as a way of winning them over.

as it was already becoming clear that the show would involve several competing factions.

Nesmith's songs were mostly country rock tracks that weren't considered suitable as singles, but they would be used on the TV show and as album tracks.

And on Nesmith's songs, Dolans and Torque would sing backing vocals, and Torque would join the wrecking crew as an extra guitarist, though he was well aware that his part on records like Sweet Young Thing wasn't strictly necessary, when Glenn Campbell, James Burton, Al Casey, and Mike Deasy were also playing guitar.

Flip your wings.

I can underflies.

We come clean.

People try to talk to me, their words are ugly sounds.

I resist all their attempts to try and bring me down.

Turned on to the sunset like I've never been before.

I listen for your footsteps, and you'll not upon the door.

That track was written by Nesmith with Goffin and King, and there seems to have been some effort to pair Nesmith early on with more commercial songwriters, though this soon fell by the wayside, and Nesmith was allowed to keep making his own idiosynphatic records off to the side, while Boyce and Hart got on with making the more commercial records.

This was not, incidentally, something that most of the stars of the show objected to, or even thought was a problem at the time.

Torque was rather upset that he wasn't getting to have much involvement with the direction of the music, as he'd thought he was being employed as a musician, but Dolans and Jones were actors first and foremost, while Nesmith was happily making his own tracks.

They'd all known going in that most of the music for the show would be created by other people.

There were going to be two songs every episode, and there was no way that four people could write and record that much material themselves, while also performing in a half-hour comedy show every week, assuming, of course, that the show even aired.

Initial audience response to the pilots was tepid at best, and it looked for a while like the show wasn't going to be green lit.

But Rafelson and Schneider, and director James Frawley, who played a crucial role in developing the show, recut the pilot, cutting out one character altogether, a manager who acted as an adult supervisor, and adding in excerpts of the audition tapes, showing the real characters of some of the actors.

As three of the four were playing characters loosely based on themselves, Peter's dummy character wasn't anything like he was in real life, but was like the comedy character he'd developed in his folk club performances, this helped draw the audience in.

It also, though, contributed to some line blurring that became a problem.

The re edited pilot was a success, and the series sold.

Indeed, the new format for the series was a unique one that had never been done on T V before.

It was a sitcom about four young men living together, without any old or adult supervision, getting into improbable adventures, and with one or two semi improvised romps, inspired by silent slapstick, over which played original songs.

This became strangely influential in British sitcom when the series came out over here.

Two of the most important sitcoms of the next couple of decades, The Goodies and The Young Ones, are very clearly influenced by the Monkeys.

And before the broadcast of the first episode, they were going to release a single to promote it.

The song chosen as the first single was one Boyce and Hart had written inspired by The Beatles, specifically inspired by this.

right to

my turn.

Hart heard that tag on the radio and thought that the Beatles were singing Take the Last Train.

When he heard the song again the next day and realised that the song had nothing to do with trains, he and Boyce sat down and wrote their own song inspired by his mishearing.

Last Train to Clarksville is structured very, very similarly to Paperback Writer.

Both of them stay on one chord, a G7, for an 8-bar verse, before changing to C7 for a chorus line, the word writer for the Beatles, the no-no-no, inspired by the Beatles, yeah, yeah, yeah, for the monkeys.

To show how close the parallels are, I've sped up the vocals from the Beatles track slightly to match the tempo with a karaoke backing track version of Last Train to Clarksville I found, and put the two together.

Dear sir, oh madam, will you read my book?

It took me years to write.

Will you take a look?

It's based on a novel by a man named Lear, and I need a job, so I want to be a paperback writer.

Paperback writer!

Lyrically, there was one inspiration I will talk about in a minute, but I think I've identified another inspiration that nobody has ever mentioned.

The classic country song Night Train to Memphis, co-written by Owen Bradley and made famous by Roy Aikoff, has some slight melodic similarity to Last Train to Clarksville, and parallels the lyrics fairly closely.

Take the night train to Memphis against Take the Last Train to Clarksville, both towns in Tennessee.

And when you arrive at the station, I'll be right there to meet you.

I'll be right there to greet you.

So don't turn down my invitation.

It's clearly close to, and I'll meet you at the station.

You can be here by 4:30 because I've made your reservation.

Take that night train to Memphis, take that night train to Memphis.

And when you arrive at the station,

I'll be right there to meet you, I'll be right there to greet you, so don't turn down my invitation.

Hallelujah!

Hallelujah!

Hallelujah!

I'll be shouting hallelujah!

All the day!

All the days!

Oh, we'll have a jubilee down in Memphis, Tennessee, and I'll shout hallelujah!

Interestingly, in May 1966, the same month that Paperback Writer was released, and so presumably the time that Hart heard the song on the the radio for the first time, Rick Nelson, the teen idol formerly known as Ricky Nelson, who had started his own career as a performer in a sitcom, had released an album called Bright Lights and Country Music.

He had had a bit of a career downslump and was changing musical direction and recording country songs.

The last track on that album was a version of Night Train to Memphis.

Take that night train to Memphis, take that night train to Memphis, and when you arrive at the station,

I'll be right there to meet you, I'll be right there to greet you, so don't turn down my invitation.

Hallelujah!

Hallelujah!

I'll be shouting hallelujah all the day.

Or we'll have a jubilee down in Memphis, Tennessee, and we'll shout hallelujah all the day.

Now I've never seen either Boyce or Hart ever mention even hearing that song.

It's pure speculation on my part that there's any connection there at all, but I thought the similarity worth mentioning.

The idea of the lyric though was to make a very mild statement about the Vietnam War.

Clarksville was, as mentioned earlier, the site of Fort Campbell, a military training base, and they crafted a story about a young soldier being shipped off to war, calling his girlfriend to come and see him for one last night.

This is left more or less ambiguous.

This was a song being written for TV show intended for children after all, but it's still very clear on the line, and I don't know if I'm ever coming home.

Now, Boyce and Hart were songwriters first and foremost, and as producers, they were quite hands-off and would let the musicians shape the arrangements.

They knew they wanted a guitar riff in the style of the Beatles' recent singles, and Louis Shelton came up with one based around the G7 chord that forms the basis of the song, starting with an octave leap.

Shelton's riff became the hook that drove the record.

and engineer Dave Hassinger added the final touch, manually raising the volume on the hi-hat mic for a fraction of a second every bar, creating a drum sound like a hissing steambreak.

Don't be slow.

I'm a no-no,

I'm

Now all that was needed was to get the lead vocals down.

But Mickey Dolans was tired and hungry and overworked.

Both Dolans and Jones in their separate autobiographies talk about how it was normal for them to only get three hours sleep a night, between working 12 hour days filming the series, three hour recording sessions and publicity commitments.

He got the verses down fine, but he just couldn't sing the middle eight.

Boyce and Hart had written a complicated, multi-syllabic patterbridge, and he just couldn't get his tongue around that many syllables when he was that tired.

He eventually asked if he could just sing doo-doo-doo instead of the words, and the producers agreed.

Surprisingly, it worked.

Take the last train o'clock, now I must turn up the phone.

I can't hear you in this noisy railroad station.

I'm alone feeling lonely.

Last Train to Clarksville was released in advance of the TV series.

on a new label, Coalgems, set up especially for the monkeys to replace Coal Picks, with a better distribution deal, and it went to number one.

The T V show started out with mediocre ratings, but soon that too became a hit, and so did the first album released from the T V series, and that album was where some of the problems really started.

The album itself was fine, ten tracks produced by Boyce and Hart with the Candy Stork Prophets playing, and either Mickey or Davy singing, mostly songs Boyce and Hart wrote, with a couple of numbers by Goffin and King and other Kirschner staff songwriters, plus two songs produced by Nesmith with the Wrecking Crew, and with token participation from Talk and Dolans.

The problem was the back cover, which gave little potted descriptions of each of them, with their height, eye colour, and so on.

And under three of them, it said, plays guitar and sings, while under Dolans it said, plays drums and sings.

Now, this was technically accurate.

They all did play those instruments.

They just didn't play them on the record, which was clearly the impression the cover was intended to give.

Nesmith in particular was incandescent.

He believed that people watching the TV show understood that the group weren't really performing that music, any more than Adam West was really fighting crime, or William Shatner travelling through space.

But crediting them on the record was, he felt, crossing a line into something close to con artistry.

To make matters worse, success was bringing more people trying to have a say.

Where before the monkeys had been an irrelevance, left to a couple of B-list producer-songwriters on the West Coast, now they were a guaranteed hit factory, and every songwriter working for Kirshner wanted to write and produce for them, which made sense because of the sheer quantity of material they needed for the TV show, but it made for a bigger, less democratic organisation, one in which Kirshner was suddenly in far more control.

Suddenly, as well as Boyce and Hart with the Candy Store Prophets and Nesmith with the Wrecking Crew, both of whom had been operating without much oversight from Kirshner, there were a bunch of tracks being cut on the East Coast by songwriting and production teams like Goffin and King, and Neil Sadaka and Carol Bayer.

On the second Monkees album, released only a few months after the first, there were nine producers credited.

As well as Boyce, Hart, Jack Keller and Nesmith, there were now also Goffin, King, Siddaka, Bayer and Jeff Barry, who as well as cutting tracks on the East Coast, was also flying over to the West Coast, cutting more tracks with the Wrecking Crew and producing vocal sessions while there.

As well as producing songs he'd written himself, Barry was also supervising songs written by other people.

One of those was a new songwriter he'd recently discovered and been co-producing for Bang Records, Neil Diamond, who had just had a big hit of his own with Cherry Cherry.

Diamond was signed with Screen Gems, and had written a song which Barry thought would be perfect for the monkeys, an up-tempo song called I'm a Believer, which he demoed with the regular bang musicians, top East Coast session players like Al Gorgoni, the guitarist who played on The Sound of Silence.

Meant for someone else, but not for me.

Love was at the get-man,

not the way it seemed.

Disappointing on it, all

Barry had cut a backing track for the Monkees using those same musicians, including Diamond on acoustic guitar, and brought it over to LA.

And that track would indirectly lead to the first big crisis for the group.

Barry, unlike Boyce and Hart, was interested in working with the whole group.

and played all of them the backing track.

Nesmith's reaction was a blunt, I'm a producer too, and that ain't no hit.

He liked the song.

He wanted to have a go at producing a track on it himself as it happened, but he didn't think the backing track worked.

Barry, trying to lighten the mood, joked that it wasn't finished and he needed to imagine it with strings and horns.

Unfortunately, Nesmith didn't get that he was joking, and started talking about how that might indeed make a difference, at which point everyone laughed and Nesmith took it badly.

His relationship with Barry quickly soured.

Nesmith was getting increasingly dissatisfied with the way his songs and his productions were being sidelined, and was generally getting unhappy, and Torque was wanting more musical input too.

They'd been talking with Rafelson and Schneider, who had agreed that the group were now good enough on their instruments that they could start recording some tracks by themselves, an idea which Kirschner loathed.

But for now, they were recording Neil Diamond's song to Jeff Barry's backing track.

Given that Nesmith liked the song, and given that he had some slight vocal resemblance to Diamond, the group suggested that Nesmith be given the the lead vocal, and Kirshner and Barry agreed, although Kirshner at least apparently always intended for Dolans to sing the lead, and was just trying to pacify Nesmith.

In the studio, Kirshner kept criticising Nesmith's vocal, and telling him he was doing it wrong, until eventually he stormed out, and Kirshner got what he wanted.

Another monkey's hit with Mickey Dolans on lead, though this time it did at least have Jones and talk on backing vocals.

Do not her trace

of doubt in my mind

I'm in love

I'm a believer I could've leaped her if I tried

I thought love was more or less a given thing

That was released on November the twenty-third nineteen 1966, as their second single, and became their second number one.

And in January 1967, the group's second album, More of the Monkeys, was released.

That too went to number one.

There was only one problem.

The group weren't even told about the album coming out beforehand.

They had to buy their own copies from a record shop to even see what tracks were on it.

Nesmith had his two tracks, but even Boyce and Hart were only given two, with the rest of the album being made up of tracks from the brill-building songwriters Kirshner preferred.

Lots of great Nesmith and Boyce and Hart tracks were left off the album, in favour of some astonishingly weak material, including the two worst tracks the group ever recorded, The Day We Fall in Love and Laugh, and a novelty song they found embarrassing, Your Auntie Griselda, included to give talk a vocal spot.

Nesmith called it probably the worst album in the history of the world, though in truth seven of the twelve tracks are really very strong, though some of the other material is pretty poor.

The group were also annoyed by the packaging.

The liner notes were by Don Kirschner, and read to the group at least like a celebration of Kirschner himself as the one person responsible for everything on the record.

Even the photo was an embarrassment.

The group had taken a series of photos in clothes from the department store J.

C.

Penny as part of an advertising campaign, and the group thought the clothes were ridiculous, but one of those photos was the one chosen for the cover.

Nesmith and Torqu made a decision, which the other two agreed to with varying degrees of willingness.

They'd been fine rhyming to other people's records when it was clearly just for a TV show, but if they were being promoted as a real band and having to go on tour promoting albums credited to them, they were going to be a real band and take some responsibility for the music that was being put out in their name.

With the support of Rafelson and Schneider, they started making preparations to do just that.

But Don Kirschner had other ideas, and told them so in no uncertain terms.

As far as he was concerned, they were a bunch of ungrateful, spoiled kids who were very happy cashing the ridiculously large checks they were getting, but now wanted to kill the goose that laid the golden egg.

They were going to keep doing what they were told.

Things came to a head in a business meeting in January 1967, when Nesmith gave an ultimatum.

Either the group got to start playing on their own records, or he was quitting.

Herb Merlis, Kirshner's lawyer, told Nesmith that he he should read his contract more carefully.

At which point, Nesmith got up, punched a hole in the wall of the hotel suite they were in, and told Merlis, that could have been your face.

So, as 1967 began, the group were at a turning point.

Would they be able to cut the puppet strings, or would they have to keep living a lie?

We'll find out in a few weeks' time.

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