Fact #148394

The Monkees were the first manufactured pop group, but it's worth remembering that the system used to record music under The Monkees monicker had long been standard practice in the music industry. Teen idols like Frankie Avalon, Bobby Vee and Bobby Vinton, were routinely fitted up with songs by Brill Building tunesmiths and then presented with a backing track recorded by session men, to which they would add their vocals.

There was never any pretence that Motown groups like The Four Tops or The Supremes played on or wrote the songs they sang, but The Monkees' svengali Don Kirshner, realised that in order to launch The Monkees as a viable American alternative to The Beatles, they had to appear to be a credible rock band. And that was where the lies had to start.

Inspired by the success of The Beatles' Hard Day's Night movie, Don Kirshner of the successful Aldon Music publishing company in New York, concocted a scheme to manufacture an equally loveable pop band, and realised that a weekly television show in the wacky Hard Day's Night style was the ideal means of delivery.

Having recruited four handsome boys via trade magazine adverts, Kirshner hired professional writers, including Neil Diamond, and teams such as Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart, Carole King and Gerry Goffin, to knock out enough songs for a debut album.

The crack Los Angeles session-player mafia, known as the Wrecking Crew, was employed to create backing tracks to which The Monkees added vocals, and then mimed to on tv.
The formula worked, the album sold four million copies and The Monkees were trapped into living Kirshner's lie for some while to come. Tempting as it is to dismiss The Monkees as pop trash, songs like Last Train To Clarkesville and Take A Giant Step are hard to resist and the only two songs with composer credits for Monkee Mike Nesmith, Papa Gene's Blues and Sweet Young Thing, revealed that here was a bona fide talent in waiting.

Eventually, of course, The Monkees turned on Kirshner, demanded the right to compose their own songs and play on their records, and promptly saw their career flush itself down the drain. Kirshner, having learned his lesson, next transformed the popular Archie comic book characters into a tv cartoon band called The Archies and had another huge international smash with Sugar Sugar. And, being cartoons, they never insisted on writing their own songs.

(Source : by Johnny Black, first published in the book Albums from Backbeat Press, 2007)