No pop music act has ever taken part in such a brutal evisceration of themselves as The Monkees did in 1968. Their television sitcom was canceled, the group was exhausted and Peter Tork was about to quit. Sounds like a good time to take some LSD and make a movie to me. It’s a psychedelic headcase comedy with the same plot as Un Chien Andalou, which is no plot. It’s a kind of collage of surrealist gags. As soon as any scene starts to make rational sense, director (and co-creator of the TV series) Bob Rafelson sucks up the boys with a giant vacuum cleaner or shoves them into a black box or yells “Cut!” but keeps the camera rolling as the crew steps into the frame. What makes it a good (maybe even great) feature-length movie is that there is a point to the madness. It’s about undressing The Monkees phenomenon, answering and conceding to the group’s critics and even sticking a few skewers into the audience. It takes a quartet of teen idols and turns them into suicide bombers. There’s no walking away from this.
The only thing that spoils its perfection is that The Monkees DID continue after this, but then what else were they going to do? The movie bombed and so no one really acknowledged their Big Crack-Up. Even the soundtrack album (The Monkees’ last great record with their last Gerry Goffin-Carole King top drawer tune “The Porpoise Song”, their last great Harry Nilsson track “Daddy’s Song” and Mike Nesmith’s rocking “Circle Sky”) hit the charts like The Hindenburg. The LPs that followed aren’t so much pop music as they are glimpses into a fading group’s purgatory. They’re the sound of spotlights dimming.
All of that is pretty much forgotten today though, while time treats the wackjob humor of Head kindly. It’s still uncomfortable in 2017. Still funny, too. As a cynical piece of acid cinema, it’s the one place where The Monkees ultimately trounce The Beatles.
FUN FACT: According to the Bob Rafelson interview on the Criterion Blu-ray, he and Jack Nicholson (yes, Jack Nicholson) wrote the screenplay in Harry Dean Stanton’s basement. How cool is that?