The Monkees
Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn, Capricorn & Jones, Ltd. LP
1967, Colgems
Guilty pleasures are the best. I love everything about guilty pleasures. That’s why I have about 9,000 of them. Meanwhile, some others outright hate the very expression. “Why should I feel guilty about the things I like?” goes the usual argument. They seem to interpret it as a feeling of shame and ostracism, best avoided. In spirit, I agree, but I still think these people are all mixed up.
Guilt is an exciting emotion and I prefer to savor it.
Obviously, I’m not talking about the kind of guilt where you feel bad because you trampled over an old lady and shoved a guy with Down’s Syndrome out of your way when you were in that shoe store that caught fire. This is totally different.
This is delicious defiance. Be bad and know it. Do not argue for your innocence. Confess to all crimes that you have committed against good taste and the prevailing idea of cool. Out yourself as a subversive. Lay your own head in the guillotine. You’ll be fine afterward. Seriously. I do it all the time. It’s fun. It’s safe. I even think it’s good for you.
Your guilt is interesting, revealing and, most importantly, it’s a reminder to yourself that you’re not as discriminating or perfect as you think. Guilt grounds you. It makes you a better person. Hold it close.
And speaking of hot air, isn’t the fourth Monkees album GREAT? It’s got to be my favorite pop-group-goes-psychedelic record. I like it even more than Revolver, which came out a year earlier and which this album rips off brazenly, starting with its artist’s ink rendering of the band on the cover. While Revolver begins with “Taxman”, the Monkees open their album with “Salesman”, another rocking indictment of guys in suits who want to take your money, but THIS ONE shoehorns in a scandalous drug reference (“he’s sailing so high, so high”). Naughty, naughty Monkees.
Track two though is where my sympathies start to lean far toward the Monkee way. On the Beatles album, the second song is “Eleanor Rigby”, that depressing lump of coal that seems to exist mostly so Paul McCartney can tell the rest of the band to fuck off while he performs solo with a string section. By contrast, the second song on this fine LP is the delightfully evil “She Hangs Out” (written by exalted trash pop hitmaker Jeff Barry), in which Davy Jones (image-wise, The Monkees equivalent to McCartney) warns somebody that their innocent little sister—”How old you say you’re sister was?”, goes the hook—is getting more wild than they know at parties. I care about this WAY more than I care about McCartney’s sad sacks.
Davy, by the way, is a venomous little creep all over this album—and it’s great. He’s the heart throb of the group, the balladeer, every 12 year old girl’s favorite. But here, he’s sinister. His big moment is the Harry Nilsson-written “Cuddly Toy”. It’s the cynically observed portrait of a promiscuous girl who keeps it on the sly–the narrator has clearly slept with her and is done with her–as told within the confines of the bright, pink, compact sphere of the poppiest of pop. His second great moment is “Star Collector”, the meanest song about groupies ever recorded by a big-selling act. Yeesh, even Kiss were more sensitive to groupies in their songs than this piece of black-hearted psychedelia that includes barbs such as “How can I love her when I don’t respect her?” and “It won’t take much time before I get her off my mind”.
Back to the Beatles comparisons, the big psychedelic moment on Revolver is John Lennon’s “Tomorrow Never Knows”, which is one of the most overpraised songs in rock history, if you ask me. Lennon is way too impressed with getting high. The Monkees’ answer song, “Daily Nightly”, is fifty times better. Mike Nesmith wrote it and he’s too busy prowling late night Los Angeles streets and laying down terrific hard-boiled nonsense beat poetry to say anything truly dumb like “Turn off your mind, relax and float down stream”. Micky Dolenz sings it—HOWLS it like an animal, actually—and screws around on a Moog synthesizer until it sounds less like a musical instrument and more like a UFO that just landed in the studio.
Throw in Gerry Goffin and Carole King’s bang-up single “Pleasant Valley Sunday” and the sugar-and-spice mysticism of Chip Douglas and Bill Martin’s “Door Into Summer” (maybe my favorite here) and plenty of swaying beaded curtains and stinging hooks in between, and you’ve got an album worth a few marks on your criminal record. There’s not one bad song on the whole shebang. Yes, even the love ballad “Don’t Call on Me”, with its perfect lounge lizard organs and Nesmith doing his best croon, sends me off to dreamland in its own way.
The Monkees are one of my summer bands. They’re as essential to the season as sunscreen and mosquito repellent and beach movies and cold beer.
I plead guilty to thinking that this album is one of rock’s great masterpieces and I smile in my mugshot.