Glenn A. Baker

They made nine albums, fifty-nine television programmes and a feature film in three years. It should have been a straightforward story of a production company recruiting actors to play the characters in a fictional band inspired by 'A Hard Day's Night'. When the fictional band's music began to outsell their inspirations' records though, the musicians in the fictional band revolted in order to wrest control of the music from the film-makers.

The orthodox Monkees story is told in terms of the music. From this perspective, Michael Nesmith invariably emerges as the hero, confronting the vested interests that conspired to sideline his undeniable talent and suffocate his visionary hybrid of country and rock music. By concentrating on The Monkees as a televisual phenomenon, however, the authors flip the convention on its head and from this story Nesmith emerges as an irksome eccentric, self-centredly wrecking a genuinely ground-breaking comedy show for the sake of his maverick muse.

The consequence of this spin is that the journeyman Davy Jones becomes an unlikely and unworthy focus of effusion. In this version of events, the legend of the open auditions that supposedly brought the Monkees together is debunked as little more than a marketing ploy to add background colour to Columbia's efforts to find a vehicle for Jones. The Monkees' struggle for musical integrity in 1967 is a derisible whimsy that diverts Jones from his main task of fulfilling his contractual obligations to Columbia subsidiary, Screen Gems - and on it goes. Nesmith's sublime work from 'Headquarters' to 'Present' is dismissed as largely dull and indulgent while Davy's doggedly determined tap-dance across the television screens of the 'sixties is lauded for its clause-fulfilling persistence. Yet it was Nesmith who created and sustained a career from the wreckage of the Monkees and that enabled him to distance himself from the prefab four, while it was Jones who, when returned to the uncertainties of life as a jobbing actor, eventually made more money from retreading musical ground in Monkees nostalgia tours.

'Monkeemania' is a reasonable read with occasionally surprising perspectives - Nesmith being sprung from jail and spared from bankruptcy by Screen Gems before the pilot was even shot makes his subsequent ornery behaviour even braver or shittier depending on your predilection for Jones. Ultimately, though, its relegation of the Monkees' music to incidental status is its undoing, but then an author who describes 'Never Tell A Woman Yes' as "overlong and very ordinary" is plainly cloth-eared and compromised as a critic, so it's likely better that it toys about on the surface of the celluloid and keeps the music it barely appreciates at arm's length.… (meer)