Davy Jones, Rocker

After Davy Jones’s unexpected death on 29 February, a lot of commenters responded by citing or quoting the Monkees’ biggest chart hits—most of which he didn’t sing lead on. Micky Dolenz was the band’s most successful singer, with the best pop voice.

But Davy Jones was crucial to the band as an entertainment entity. Without him, there would have been no Monkees. There might have been a similar television show, but the combination of those performers and their personalities wouldn’t have gelled successfully.

First of all, Jones was cute. So cute he could put over a song like Harry Nilsson’s “Cuddly Toy,” which has some of the most heartlessly caddish lyrics in pop:

You’re not the kind of girl to tell your mother
The kind of company you keep.
I never told you that I loved no other—
You must have dreamed it in your sleep.

You’re not the only cherry delight
That was left in the night
And gave up without a fight!
You’re not the only cuddly toy
That was ever enjoyed
By any boy.

Watch the video of that song, and you’ll see that Jones was at heart an English music-hall song-and-dance man. And at the height of the British Invasion, being English was another of his assets.

Jones was already under contract with Screen Gems when the Bob Rafelson and Bert Schneider started to develop the sitcom. His manager, Ward Sylvester, was part of the search for other cast members. The show could easily have been built around Jones with the rest of the group treated as his backup band: Davy and the Three Tall Guys! Indeed, his character’s penchant for falling in love drove the plot of the pilot.

But Rafelson and Schneider had a different vision, inspired by the Beatles. They wanted four distinct, interesting personalities. They cast four talented young men. And, crucially, Jones threw himself behind that decision.

In his self-published autobiography They Made a Monkee Out of Me! [doesn’t everyone have a copy?], Jones described an awkward lunch with the other three Monkees early in their training, and how (after bursting out with criticism at Dolenz’s table manners) he broke the ice by gobbling up his salad. If he’d played the aloof Broadway star or the solo teen idol, I doubt the group would have found the chemistry to make their show so entertaining, much less to try to break out of its constraints.

Oh, What Can It Mean?

The Monkees' "Daydream Believer" video is a nearly perfect deconstruction of an art form from within.

Of course, it helps to start with good raw material: a fine pop song by Kingston Trio veteran John Stewart which spent four week at #1 on the Billboard singles chart. Add the groovy psychedelia of late 1967, before the trend went sour.

But what makes the video great is the Monkees themselves: four young performers starting to chafe at the limits of the television personas that have made them famous, rich, and creatively unfulfilled. So they chip away at the very nature of the music video, revealing that they're only pretending to play their instruments and then competing to lip-synch the lead vocals. But they've become such practiced comedians that they can do that without destroying the enjoyment.

All that makes this literal version of the "Daydream Believer" video simply redundant. It's already deconstructed itself. The result is like listening to people recite Monty Python routines at length.

I find "literal" remakes work best with music videos that are pretentious and hint at a narrative thread amidst all the imagery, such as a-ha's "Take On Me" and Bonnie Tyler's "Total Eclipse of the Heart." Those deserve deconstruction. The Monkees--they already did the job forty years ago.