2/26/11
Super Heavy Sonic Freakout, Man
After their inspired-but-largely-ignored feature Head, The Monkees let out this last gasp, their final appearance as a quartet. 33 1/3 Revolutions per Monkee was a network TV special from 1969. I enjoyed the whole thing, which you can start here, but it really gets going in these final nine minutes. It's a cacophonous, glorious mess, a fitting end to their career and to the sixties as a whole.
(contrary to popular belief, by this point all of the Monkees were playing their own instruments. Mickey Dolenz finally learned the drums, Mike Nesmith was writing his own songs like this one, Peter Tork had always been a talented musician and Davey Jones was a drummer who had instead been cast as the singer. How good of a band they were is up for debate, but they were a band).
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2 comments:
Wow.
Davey Jones in this song is totally like that one guy in the Happy Mondays who just danced around on stage with a couple of maracas contributing nothing to the band. In fact, it occurs to me now that we might have well just screened the above 9:22 min. of tape at some point in 1982 or so and just taken a pass on that whole Manchester music scene... with apologies to the Stone Roses, of course.
I got nothing out of the Manchester scene myself. There were other scenes around at the time that were worse, but the Manchester material all sounded too alike. And that happy fluffy kind of music (a soundtrack for ecstasy) was a very different vibe from the dystopian corrosion going on here (a soundtrack for bad acid).
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