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A review by jocelynw
The Monkees: The Day-By-Day Story of the 60s TV Pop Sensation by Andrew Sandoval
5.0
If you know The Monkees well, you likely also know that Sandoval, once of Rhino Records, has been central in keeping the group's fortunes afloat in recent decades. So I was ashamed that I hadn't read this - I really should have years and years ago - and it going out of print and my watching the prices start to climb was my cue to grab one. Literally two days later, Sandoval announced he's working on a revised version to be published in 2020. So perhaps I should have waited another year so as not to go over a lot of the same ground again reading the revised version next year, but it's The Monkees; I've already bought the 1960s albums on three formats and the have had the shows on three as well (oh, the months and months of patiently accumulating the shows off of Nickelodeon, starting and stopping the tape to avoid commercials), and I'll undoubtedly pick this up again next year to see what he's added.
While there is information as you go along (sorry) on a great many participants in the phenomenon, because so much of this is session information, filming, and air dates, you really have to already know The Monkees and The Monkees in pretty exhaustive detail for it all to be engaging and meaningful.
This is richest in information in the first year of the series' production and airing. Once the machine is fully rolling, the focus is largely on the information that can be captured from the making of the recordings; the series' filming and air dates are captured, but it definitely takes a backseat to the session information. For those of us who are equally fans of both outputs, I wish there was more to be known about the filming of the shows, but it's apparent that the series' production doesn't have the same abundance of surviving physical records that the sessions did.
He chose some terrific contemporaneous press excerpts to illustrate a few events; I would have enjoyed seeing more entries including those, but I suppose his choice not to might indicate that the contemporaneous coverage got as repetitious as the more recent version of it does.
What's so great about this is how strongly it gives you a sense of how quickly the fortunes of the group rose and turned. Music was moving *so fast* in this era, and The Monkees certainly felt the effects of that. When reading this day-by-day account, the sense of how much they squeezed in in two years and how then everything went into a sort of free-fall is palpable and heartbreaking. It reinforces the motif of the black box in HEAD - and perhaps the black cover was a conscious choice in that regard - these covers containing in another form this phenomenon none of them have been able to escape. Okay, yes, Thinking Too Hard About The Monkees is one of my favorite hobbies.
While there is information as you go along (sorry) on a great many participants in the phenomenon, because so much of this is session information, filming, and air dates, you really have to already know The Monkees and The Monkees in pretty exhaustive detail for it all to be engaging and meaningful.
This is richest in information in the first year of the series' production and airing. Once the machine is fully rolling, the focus is largely on the information that can be captured from the making of the recordings; the series' filming and air dates are captured, but it definitely takes a backseat to the session information. For those of us who are equally fans of both outputs, I wish there was more to be known about the filming of the shows, but it's apparent that the series' production doesn't have the same abundance of surviving physical records that the sessions did.
He chose some terrific contemporaneous press excerpts to illustrate a few events; I would have enjoyed seeing more entries including those, but I suppose his choice not to might indicate that the contemporaneous coverage got as repetitious as the more recent version of it does.
What's so great about this is how strongly it gives you a sense of how quickly the fortunes of the group rose and turned. Music was moving *so fast* in this era, and The Monkees certainly felt the effects of that. When reading this day-by-day account, the sense of how much they squeezed in in two years and how then everything went into a sort of free-fall is palpable and heartbreaking. It reinforces the motif of the black box in HEAD - and perhaps the black cover was a conscious choice in that regard - these covers containing in another form this phenomenon none of them have been able to escape. Okay, yes, Thinking Too Hard About The Monkees is one of my favorite hobbies.