"Randy Scouse Git" - The Monkees (1968)

This is one of those songs that sometimes nag at your memory. You can almost hear it but not quite. I was trolling through the You Tube garden and ran across a title I didn’t recognize; which is this record. That was weird, because I remember the song completely. Just never stored the title I suppose.

The real reason I probably remember this song is because of the backstory to it; which involved The Beatles, who had thrown a party welcoming the Monkees to London in May 1967. This was the same time frame as the Mick Jagger/Keith Richards “Redlands” bust. I remember the news saying stuff like “but the American pop group The Monkees have stayed out of trouble while in London.”

   

Micky Dolnez came up with the title while watching the BBC show Til Death Do Us Part”; which was the precursor to our American series “All In the Family.” In this show the main character was a guy named  Alf Garnett who spent much of the shows insulting his son-in-law from Liverpool and calling him a “scouse”; which is is kind of a nasty term. Anyway, it made an impression on Dolnez; enough that he wrote his first song about it. That’s some powerful TV!

The Beatles threw a party at the Speakeasy; a popular London nightclub of the day. The song is really about the people at the party. From the opening line of “She’s a wonderful lady, but she’s mine…” it alludes to the people they met that night. The “wonderful lady” is Mama Cass Elliot; while “the four kings of EMI” are The Beatles themselves. The “disc  girl” is Samantha Juste, who later became Micky Dlonez’ wife. It’s interesting to note that this is kind of the same way in which Don McClean wrote “American Pie” about 4 years later.

This song was never released as a single; only on the album. The Monkees; as was the practice with most groups at the time; released several singles which were not on the LP’s; like “D.W. Washburn”, which was a favorite of mine.

"Pleasant Valley Sunday" - Carole King Demo (1966)

Here’s Carole King’s demo recording of “Pleasant Valley Sunday” which she co-wrote with her then husband Gerry Goffin. He wrote the lyrics about the life they were then leading living in a suburban development in West Orange, New Jersey.

Demos are recordings made by artists who are writers and not necessarily performers. The demos are shopped around to various artists in the hopes that one of them will score a Number One hit with their own version of the song. The resultant royalties due the writer are enormous when a record goes Gold or Platinum. In the days before she recorded her own songs, Ms. King made a small fortune in this way. That was before she released her blockbuster album “Tapestry” in 1970.

The Monkees had the big hit with this one. Of course they aren’t really playing all the instruments as they appear in the film below. Chip Douglas, their music producer, played bass on this one, after showing Mike Nesmith which strings to play on guitar to make the signature riff. 

Notice the absence of that riff in Ms. King’s version and you will understand the difference between being a writer and a performer. That riff is actually a variation of George Harrison’s guitar part on “I Want to Tell You” from the Revolver album. Peter Tork did actually play the piano and Davy Jones shook the maracas while Mickey Dolnez sang the lead vocal.

The record peaked at Number 3 and still gets plenty of airplay today. It’s always an interesting experience to compare a writer’s version of a song to the “hit” by someone else. More often than not I enjoy the writer’s version more. But in this case, I have to go with the Monkees.

The Monkees - Daydream Believers

This was originally posted yesterday afternoon, but I wanted to give Mr. Jones his own day in the light;

Davy Jones, the innocent, boyish faced singer for the Monkees, one of the iconic "bubble gum" rock groups of the 1960's, has died. I titled this piece Daydream Believer(s) after one of their many hit records, "Daydream Believer", which was written for the group by John Stewart just before he left the Kingston Trio. The top notch songwriters who wrote for the Monkees included; Neil Diamond, Burt Bacharach, Hal David, and Carol King, who wrote "Pleasant Valley Sunday". I was one of those kids who watched the record as it spun on the turntable, and actually used to read the names beneath the titles of the songs.

Years after the fact, I realized that Davy Jones had played the Artful Dodger in the Broadway version of "Oliver", which I had seen for my birthday in 1963. As a matter of fact, on the night the Beatles first performed on the Ed Sullivan show; February 9th, 1964; the entire cast of "Oliver" appeared. Davy Jones reaction was immediate, he was later quoted as stating, "I watched the Beatles from the side of the stage, I saw the girls going crazy, and I said to myself, this is it, I want a piece of that."

The Monkees were thrown together as a group for a TV series which would try to capture the daily adventures of a madcap rock band; kind of like an American version of the Beatles in "Help." They were actually assembled, by chance, through a process of individual auditions. This was, after all, a "make believe" group. Well, nobody took the "make believe" part seriously, the songs coming from the radio and TV were bouncy and, like the times themselves, were catching. From one end of the country to the other, kids were wearing black ski caps with a pom-pom at the end, in imitation of Mike Nesmith. They also resurrected the old Navy Pea Coat, which became a staple of fashion for quite a few years. I know I had one, long before I joined the Navy, and even then, the real one was never quite as "cool" as that first one.

And, in the end, along with the help of some wonderful songwriters, they made "Daydream Believers" of us all.