Monkee Do

The logic is hard to beat. The Liverpool sound sells records; so does rock 'n' roll, so does straight pop, so does country music. Why not bring together four kids, one for each style, name them the Monkees, promote them harder than hair oil, and hire a Brink's truck to haul the money away?

And so, in the summer of 1965, two fledgling producers named Robert Rafelson and Bert Schneider put an ad in Daily Variety for "4 insane boys, aged 17-21." Out of 437 would-be lunatics who showed up to audition, Rafelson and Schneider picked David Jones, 20, a 5-ft. 3-in. former jockey from Manchester, England; Mickey Dolenz, 21, a former child actor from Hollywood; Peter Tork, 24, a college professor's son from Connecticut; and Mike Nesmith, 23, an Army brat from Texas. Only two of them could read music at all professionally, and only two had ever acted before. None of them could play the drums, so Mickey was tapped; Davy Jones couldn't play anything, so he was handed two maracas and a tambourine and told to get with it. None of them sounded as if they could sing, and they still don't.

Half-Hour Steal. With an insouciance that curdles the imagination, the producers shoved them in front of the cameras, and in five days filmed a genial half-hour steal of the Beatles' A Hard Day's Night, only they called it The Monkees. "We wanted to keep them natural, as unrehearsed as possible, and give them plenty of room for ad-libbing," says Rafelson. "It all went great: NBC bought the series 24 hours after it saw the pilot and sold it to two sponsors 72 hours later."

The Monkees had not yet got around to singing anything, however, so Donnie Kirshner, the 32-year-old pop-rock entrepreneur (TIME, April 22), flew out to Hollywood from New York to spend two months with them. From these sessions emerged a single recording, Last Train to Clarksville, and an album called The Monkees; this week the album is first in sales in the nation, and Clarksville the second among singles.

Into Business. The TV series, breathless with jump cuts, stop action, asides, speedups, titles, slow motion, and every other photographic gimmick that the Beatles people ever thought of, is doing well enough to be assured of a good run. Bright, unaffected and zany, it romps around haunted houses and toy factories with no intention of making things all add up. The boys more or less sing two or three songs per show, while the camera follows them in surrealistic pandemonium aboard everything from unicycles to epicycles. The show ranks 53rd in the Nielsens, but it has 32% of the audience in its time spot and is getting stronger by the week. All the same, the surest sign that the Monkee gland will function comes not from TV or records but from the promotion department. The inevitable flood of Monkee merchandise, from guitars to comic books and Monkee pants (of which J. C. Penney alone has ordered $670,000 worth), will gross $20 million this year.

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