Davy Jones and the Prefab Four

There are a couple of things swirling around my head tonight. First, at the age of 58 (which is how old I am), you seem to be on an eternal death watch. Someone who helped define your youth seems to die every day.

And second, one of the best things about being a kid is that you think everything is real. You may find out different when you get older, and mature enough to absorb it, but unless someone punches a hole in your innocence when you're 11 or 12, you're spared the disillusionment of knowing what's really going on.

These two cultures clashed today when news came of the sudden death of Davy Jones, erstwhile singer/maracas player in The Monkees.

Here's the deal with the Monkees. It took two years from the time the Beatles and the rest of the Brits invaded America in 1964 for Hollywood to recreate them for a weekly sitcom. And by the time that happened, and the Monkees debuted, the actual Fabs themselves had gone well beyond being cute teen idols. John Lennon had already waxed philosophical about Jesus Christ and the apostles, and Revolver was in record stores and on turntables everywhere, with the weird sounds of "She Said, She Said," and "Tomorrow Never Knows" proving that these weren't your lovable moptops anymore.

So that's the first thing you have to know about the phenomenon that was The Monkees. They were, in 1966, what the Beatles had been two years prior. They also helped escort Gilligan's Island off the air, but that's another story for another day. I'd have preferred looking at Maryann over Davy Jones any day. But, alas, that wasn't my call.

The Monkees were sure a lot of fun. And when you've just turned 13, and you're about as unsophisticated and unknowledgable as you can be, all you see are four guys playing instruments and singing. You don't stop to ask yourself how, for example, there can be only one guitarist (Mike Nesmith) and such rich, layered sounds coming back at you from some of those impeccably produced songs. You think it's all on the level.

So it was, therefore, a shock to me when, over the summer of 1967, word got out that "the Monkees don't play their own instruments." It was like, "No. Of course they do. I see them on TV every week ..."

Now, it's 2012, and I've obviously done a lot of reading up on rock as it grew in the 1960s. And believe me, finding out the Monkees didn't play their own instruments pales in comparison to knowing, for example, that neither did the Beach Boys. With the exception of Carl Wilson (who did play some lead), the rest of the group didn't play a note on the recorded version of "Pet Sounds." All of that instrumental backing was done by a group of session musicians known as "The Wrecking Crew."

So let's get that elephant in the living room out of the equation now. The Monkees did not play their own instruments. The Monkees were, in fact, formed by Don Kirschner (among others) with an eye on acting ability first, and musicianship second. Two of the four were professional actors (Jones and Mickey Dolenz). The other two were musicians first (Nesmith and Peter Tork).

Peter Tork's best friend from his Laurel Canyon days was Stephen Stills, who'd auditioned for the gig, but whose less-than-perfect teeth disqualified him from consideration. Stills then went to Peter Tork and urged him to try out. Tork, obviously, got the gig.

There was nothing startlingly original about the shows. They were all pretty much based on the madcap exploits of the Beatles, as chronicled in both "A Hard Day's Night" and "Help." There was a plot that served more as a bridge connecting the songs that were featured than anything else.

It didn't go over well with the serious rock press, which, in 1966, was beginning to emerge (we're talking about something beyond "16 Magazine" and "Tiger Beat" here), and the Monkees were coined "The Prefab Four."

If there's something the producers and managers of the Monkees did right, however, it was connect them with some of the era's best songwriters. Neil Sedaka, Carole King and Neil Diamond penned some of their best songs (Diamond wrote maybe their most enduring hit, "I'm a Believer," while King, along with her then-husband Gerry Goffin, wrote "Pleasant Valley Sunday."

However, their most frequent collaborators were Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart, who wrote countless feel-good songs that helped put the group squarely in the middle of the ever-changing rock 'n' roll picture of the mid-1960s. Among them were "Last Train to Clarksville," "Stepping Stone" and the theme song, "Hey, Hey, We're The Monkees."

Despite my serious disillusionment over how "fake" they were, I have to say that the Monkees were an incredible amount of fun. They did, for a couple of years at least, harken back to the days when the Beatles were the lovable moptops as opposed to emerging "spokesmen for a generation." I've always believed that by the second half of 1966, pop music, which prior to that had seemed to be heading in the same direction, became fragmented to the point where there was no identifiable person, or group, that specialized in playing the type of accessible music that just made you feel good.

This isn't to say there wasn't great music produced at that time. I mean, come on. Some of the best music of the entire rock era was produced in 1966, including both Rubber Soul and Revolver; Pet Sounds and "Good Vibrations," "Paint it Black," and so many others. But you had to be a little bit sophisticated to appreciate it, whereas 11-year-olds whose suns had risen and set on "Yeah, Yeah, Yeah," didn't have that anymore.

The Monkees, regardless of their origins and authenticity, provided that. And for that alone, they have a place in the Pantheon of music history.

But curiously enough, a funny thing began to happen to them, too. They decided they didn't particularly like being the "Prefab Four." Peter Tork was a serious musician, and he wasn't at all thrilled at being perceived as a phony. Neither was Mike Nesmith, who -- out of all of them -- was probably the most unhappy about the situation.

They, too, began to change. They went through a period where their songs started to sound more like social commentaries and less like the innocent pop songs they'd started out recording. If you want to know what I'm talking about, listen to "Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn and Jones," which -- regardless of who recorded it -- is one damn fine album. A lot of those songs showed a maturity that belied their reputation as the "Prefab Four."

Davy Jones was picked for the show because he was British (not very hard to figure out) and because he had an extensive resume as a stage performer (he was The Artful Dodger in a London production of "Oliver."). He knew his way around the stage, and those talents came in handy for the weekly filming of the Monkees.

He won his role as the bonafide teen idol of the group rather by default. There was very little warm and fuzzy about either Nesmith or Tork (at least it didn't project that way from the TV screen) and Dolenz was too much of a gawky clown to be anyone's love interest, de facto or otherwise.

That left Davy Jones. And being the actor he was, he played the part very well. So, the producers would put Davy in the role of being almost the damsel in distress a lot of the time (well, as much of a damsel as anyone who's not a woman can be). He also got to sing all the slow ballads (I remember the show where he sang "I Wanna Be Free").

If you were at all cynical (and were the sixties not a very cynical era), it came across, I suppose, as cloying. You could almost hear the gears from the machinery that set all this in motion as they clanged and rattled. That's how cloying it could be.

What saved them, of course, is that it was all fun. And despite the many ways, and times, they could have taken themselves seriously, they really didn't. They, themselves, were under no illusion that they were anything but what they were. They rode the wave for as long as they could, and when one of the other of them got tired of it, they stopped (both Tork and Nesmith left the band for spells while the show was still in production).

In recent years, they became just one more nostalgia act .. .either with Jones and Dolenz, or -- once in a while -- with Tork. Nesmith, except for brief forays, did not take part.

They have a place. Whether they were fake, whether every session musician in the canyon played on those records, whether they were thrown together as part of a TV show and were not a real band, they connected. For a couple of years, they made life fun. And after all, isn't what entertainment's about? To make life fun?

Somewhere in this great land, Marcia Brady is in mourning. So are a lot of other middle-aged women and grandmothers ... and even a few crusty, cynical curmudgeons who can't let go of the fact that so much about the Monkees wasn't what it seemed.

Whenever anyone who played such a vital role in making your youth memorable dies, whether it's suddenly or after an illness, it is cause for great reflection. And when it happens, we don't differentiate between the great (the likes of John Lennon, George Harrison and Roy Orbison) and the ordinary (which is where I'd put Davy Jones and the Monkees).

But it doesn't matter either. Regardless of how great, or not great, they might have been, they made a contribution and need to be properly remembered and appreciated for it.

It's certainly a poorer world without Davy Jones. It seems as if the death of any baby boomer icon forces that generation closer to coming to terms with realities that it's spent much of its time trying to avoid ... that we all get older, we all suffer the indignities of aging whether we even want to admit that we've aged, and someday, we're all going to die.

Wednesday it was Davy Jones' turn. May he rest in peace.