‘Head’ by The Monkees: Folly or Artistic Genius?
You probably know more Monkees songs than you realize. Their ubiquitous music is the soundtrack to shopping malls and elevator rides the world over. Whenever a filmmaker is looking for a kitsch moment, it’s always a Monkees tune that pops up.
The juxtaposition of bubblegum pop with ultra-violence is a heady mix. Recently, ‘Daydream Believer’ was featured on Space Force, Wandavision, and Handmaidens Tale. They’re basically everywhere but you probably haven’t noticed.
Like most people of a certain age, I have a love/hate relationship with The Monkees. It wasn’t until I watched ‘Head’ that I truly embraced their anarchic brilliance.
Children’s programs back in the 70s/80s would feature The Monkees as the perfect start to a Saturday morning. Later they would be repeated on Sunday morning before the adults awoke and were force-fed ‘Songs of Prayer’ and other religious crap. The Monkees weren’t as anarchic as The Banana Bunch and had too many breaks in antics pushing their music during interludes of crazy.
It didn’t take long for every child in my school to be able to sing along with The Monkees theme tune and do the bizarre monkeying stroll down the street.
They were easy to dismiss. Bubblegum pop. Light entertainers. Pantomine actors. Not even a real band.
I didn’t pay much attention to them and in my late teens, I wondered who gave a shit about a ‘Pleasant Valley Sunday’?
It wasn’t until my drug guru Richard turned me on to ‘Head’ did I see the light.
By the time I was introduced to LSD I was well and truly past the gateway drug of weed. We had taken the Merry Pranksters as our guides and tried to live every moment like we were the new stars in ‘The Electric Koolaid Acid Test’. This was our bible. Our goal was to function or pass as normal within society while being completely fucked on acid.
To date, I don’t think we ever achieved normality.
At some moment, probably just before we came up, we would watch a movie. We were always searching for psychedelic nirvana in terms of video experiences. The more special the effects, the better. Nowadays there are multiple films that you could trip out to, but back in the 90s, it was a real mission to locate a VHS videotape showcasing such a film.
On one such night, Richard slipped this movie into the player promising an experience like no other. We booed and hissed like children as we skinned up, forced to watch children entertainers perform their circus tricks. But boy, were we wrong!
Head was written by Jack Nicholson and Bob Rafelson, and made by the studio in order to destroy The Monkees pre-teen image of nice guys you can take home to meet your mother.
The Monkees were sickly sweet and nobody took them seriously. They were a manufactured group whose artistry could never compare to their rivals in the teen market, The Beatles. Nicholson was about to make it big with Dennis Hopper in ‘Easy Rider’ the following year, but at the time, both were relatively unknown. Together with Sonny Liston and the most bizarre appearance by Frank Zappa walking a cow, they would both make a cameo in the movie.
The film is one long trip into dysfunction.
A surreal world where The Monkees worse parts of their public image were amplified and then destroyed. Davy Jones’s innocence was mocked. Peter Tork became the insightful one instead of everybody’s idiot. Micky Dolenz’s madness was taken to the extreme as a delusional nutcase and Michael Nesmith for once didn’t have a plan or any of the answers.
Even the music was exceptional. ‘Porpoise Song’ (only reaching 45 in the US charts) kicked off with a blissful multicolored swim under the Gerald Desmond Bridge. The Monkees burst through the ticker tape as the announcers struggle with reverb on the mic. This was the end as well as the beginning of the movie and I was hooked.
There are images of the execution of Nguyễn Văn Lém cutting into screaming girls and the group leading the crowd into chants of ‘WAR!’. The breathtaking rock song is ‘Circle Sky’ and it’s like no other Monkees tune you’ll ever hear! It demolishes their previous sound into something hard-edged and blistering pace. The words are barely comprehensible and at the end, the band is virtually ripped apart by their fans with heads being decapitated.
On acid, I was horrified at what I had witnessed. It really felt like a warzone and an incredible statement on the Vietnam War.
“The music of the Monkees often featured a rather dark subject matter beneath a superficially bright, uplifting sound. The music of the film takes the darkness and occasional satirical elements of the Monkees’ earlier tunes and makes it far more overt, as in “Ditty Diego — War Chant” or “Daddy’s Song”, which has Jones singing an upbeat, Broadway-style number about a boy abandoned by his father.” Source-Wikipedia
It was sheer genius.
Of course, the record company didn’t have a clue how to market it. Shocked at what they had seen, they felt they had to bury this folly before word got out The Monkees were all on drugs.
Meanwhile, the counter-culture, an elusive market of non-paying hippies, rejected what they saw as an obvious attempt to win them over. The general public also stayed away. Nobody could understand why The Monkees carefully groomed image of playful boys next door was being demolished.
It was a massive flop. The film had succeeded in alienating the band’s teenage fanbase while failing to attract a more adult audience.
Even the marketing was totally off. The trailer attempted to cash in on Andy Warhols infamous short film ‘Blow Job’. A movie that only showed a close-up of a man’s face for an extended period while supposedly receiving ‘head’. The Monkees parody simply left everybody confused.
The film was released on video in 1986. Michael Nesmith would eventually describe ‘Head’ as The Monkees ‘swan song’ and that they ‘murdered’ the group with this movie.
Lucky for you, it’s now available to watch on YouTube.
This is still my psychedelic movie of choice. The greatest masterpiece that any band has ever made. No other musician has even come close to pulling a stunt like this.
Roll a spliff, relax, take some acid, and sit back to enjoy the madness of The Monkees biggest folly.
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