The public’s lasting perception of 60s pop-rock band the Monkees sounds a little like this: a Neil Diamond impersonator screaming out to a group of picnicking families, “How many of you remember a Saturday morning program known as The Monkees?!” followed up by a live rendition of the title track from Shrek (2001), “I’m a Believer.” The Monkees are best remembered as a short-lived bubblegum pop group put together by television producers to sell records, appeal to an audience of tweenage girls, and cash in on the floppy-haired success of the Beatles. It would be ludicrous to suggest they were anything more than a product of their time—or would it?
In 1978, nearly a decade after the band had broken up, former Monkee Michael Nesmith was quoted in Blitz magazine as having said, “and what’s all of this I keep hearing about the Monkees becoming punk heroes?” This was true—after eight years of nearly no mainstream activity from any of the former Monkees, the Suicide Commandos, the Sex Pistols, and numerous other punk bands had cited the Monkees as major influences on their work, and by doing so were redefining the Monkees’ image to be exactly what the band themselves had attempted to do a decade prior.
In 1965, Micky Dolenz, Michael Nesmith, Peter Tork, and Davy Jones were brought together to become the newest Beatlesque idols in the 60s tween-scene, selected in a casting call for a dream job: a guaranteed record deal, a TV show, and instant celebrity status. However, mere days into their stint as Monkees, the dreamland illusion faded: the band was forbidden to play on their records or write their own songs, and when the public found out that the Monkees “did not play their own instruments” (despite the fact that they could, just weren’t allowed to), the backlash was earth-shattering. The press began to refer to them as the “Prefab Four,” other musicians viewed them as a manufactured cash-grab, and the Monkees themselves grew resentful.
In 1967, after a battle with their music supervisor, the Monkees gained full creative control and released their first “real” album, Headquarters, in which they were finally able to play together as a real band. Dolenz, a non-drummer cast as “the drummer,” had learned to play within the year, and he, Nesmith, and Tork all wrote their own original material for the album. Headquarters is historic because it is the first example of a prefabricated vocal act becoming a real band. It doesn’t matter that Dolenz’s drum lines are shaky at times or that the instrumental arrangements are simplistic, through a DIY approach that would later become popular in the 1970s punk movement, The Monkees reclaimed their image from the establishment that had controlled them and cobbled together an album through sheer force of will.
In this way, the Monkees can be likened to the Ramones, whose stripped-down, simplistic sound became the basis for the entire genre of punk rock. The Ramones were not musical virtuosos, but their music, though crude, has a power that still excites audiences to this day. The Monkees’ Headquarters is certainly no example of outstanding musical skill, but it contains a track that is perhaps as punk as any song the Ramones ever wrote, the Dolenz-penned “Randy Scouse Git,” translated in England as “horny Liverpudlian putz,” and deemed so offensive that it was renamed “Alternate Title” on all UK issues. “Randy Scouse Git” is a remarkably hardcore single for a bubblegum-pop band. The heavy timpani line striking a dramatic impression as Dolenz screams out, “Why don’t you cut your hair? / Why don’t you live up there? Why don’t you do what I do / See what I feel when I care?” in a straight-to-the-point chorus leveled at the criticism the Monkees received for their long hair and manufactured image. Dolenz didn’t stop there. As Monkeemania died down he wrote a song so controversial that the record label forced him to change ninety percent of the original lyrics before release. “Mommy and Daddy,” released on The Monkees Present (1969), is brutal, including lyrics such as, “Ask your Mommy and Daddy who really killed JFK” and “Whisper Mommy and Daddy, ‘Would it matter if the bullet went through my head? / If it was my blood spilling on the kitchen floor / If it was my blood, Mommy, would you care a little more?’” Even though both of these songs seem lighthearted in musical arrangement, their proto-punk, anti-establishment side shines through in their lyricism. It is clear to see why a band like the Sex Pistols, famous for their “no-masters” lyrical critiques, would take copious notes.
And yet, these songs barely scratch the surface of the Monkees’ countercultural suicide note. In their 1968 film Head, every aspect of the Monkees’ manufactured career is highlighted, mocked, and destroyed. The film quite literally begins with a suicide: Dolenz jumps off a bridge and the scene transitions into a mockery of the Monkees television theme, a taunting rhyme titled “Ditty-Diego War-Chant” that opens with the verse, “Hey hey we are the Monkees / You know we love to please / A manufactured image / With no philosophies.” And as if the Monkees hadn’t already proven that they were tired of living a narrative pushed by the capitalistic greed that had created them, they follow the chant with the completely uncensored execution of a Viet Cong soldier. Head goes on to feature Dolenz blowing up a Coke machine with a tank (a comment on the Monkees being forced to “sell out” for sponsors), a live performance of Nesmith’s protest song “Circle Sky” (The lyric “And it looks like we’ve made it to the end” foreshadowing the end of the Monkees), Dolenz and Nesmith placing bets on whether a girl will commit suicide or not, a constant motif of the band ending up in the “black box” of their own manufactured prison, and to close the movie, all of the Monkees committing suicide by jumping off the same bridge, only to end up back in the locked black box in which they are waterboarded.
Shocking imagery and all, Head is punk before punk. A 90-minute feature film in which an auditioned boy band renounces their manufactured image and tears apart the capitalistic society that created them, all whilst demonstrating that by nature of their contracts, they will always be forced to return to their work as a product that can be bought, sold, and construed as the consumers please, is undoubtedly the gutsiest move the Monkees could have pulled, and its anti-establishment sentiments are echoed in much of the Sex Pistols’ catalogue including one of their most popular songs, “Anarchy in the U.K.” (“Your future dream is a shopping scheme”) and their cover of the Monkees’ “(I’m Not Your) Steppin’ Stone.” Yet, regardless of the Monkees’ impact on the Sex Pistols, they still have gotten next-to-no credit as a legitimate musical artist. Their constant media censorship, used in order to maintain their clean-cut image, made it so they were screaming their complaints into a void rather than on public television like the Sex Pistols did in their infamous 1976 Today interview. This extends to their albums as well—the Head soundtrack is comprised of some of the most fantastic psychedelic protest songs to have ever been put to record but has never been given credit as a momentous album, while the Sex Pistols’ Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols (1977) ranks among the top 100 albums of all time, according to Time magazine.
The Monkees’ plight in the music industry parallels the experiences of Linda McCartney. Not only was McCartney the only female musician in one of the most popular bands of the 1970s, Wings, she was also a fierce animal rights activist. And yet, McCartney’s contributions to music and activism are overshadowed by the public perception that she was not, and would never be, the “perfect Beatle wife.” When Linda McCartney married her husband Paul in 1969, the press had a field day poking cruel fun at the fact that she was curvy, that her sense of style was ‘tacky,’ that she didn’t shave, that she didn’t wear makeup, and that she had joined Wings without prior musical experience, claiming she “couldn’t really play” and attributing her place in the band to her famous husband.
And yet, just as the Monkees proved their critics wrong, McCartney learned to play keyboard in mere months in order to get Wings on the road, defying the misogynistic critics who believed she wouldn’t be up to par. The fact that McCartney dared to be a famous rockstar’s wife who was decisively uncommitted to fitting gender norms overshadowed her musical accomplishments and left many people with the impression that she remained an untrained keyboard player for her entire life. However, McCartney was actually a trailblazer for women in music, if not only for her DIY approach to learning an instrument and writing songs, but also for her unique sense of style, combining bespoke men’s fashion with women’s garments and accessories often crafted out of keys, ribbon, and safety pins—an approach similar to that of punk legend Poly Styrene. Both Styrene and McCartney experienced comparable levels of misogyny for their physical appearances considered to be “outside the beauty norm” because of the fact that they combined men’s clothes with women’s in a way considered “unfashionable.”
McCartney’s greatest ‘proto-punk’ work can be found on her posthumous album Wide Prairie (1998), a collection of songs she penned from the 1970s-1990s. The standout punk track is the defiant “The Light Comes From Within,” a song that counteracts McCartney’s unflappable public image, giving her the so-called “last word” over all the critics she encountered in her lifetime. The lyrics “You say I’m simple / You say I’m a hick / You’re fucking no one / You stupid dick,” are shocking to hear coming from soft-spoken McCartney, but convey a sense of power she was previously not allotted as a woman in rock, a style of obstinate songwriting that would be coming to a forefront in the Riot Grrrl movement around the time the album was released. The track “I Got Up” proclaims “It’s good to know that I can set myself free / Anytime I want I can be the real me,” while the Styrene-penned X-Ray Spex track, “Art-I-Ficial,” includes the lyrics “When I put on my make-up, the pretty little masks not me / That’s the way a girl should be / In a consumer society,” both songs critiquing the nature of a society that expects women to look a certain way in order to succeed and the desire of both authors to “be free.”
By nature of being a woman, McCartney experienced a different kind of discrimination than the Monkees, with most of her criticism rooted in misogyny. However, the circumstances McCartney and the Monkees crafted their finest countercultural works out of are very much the same: both artists were frustrated with their lack of autonomy as artists, and created music in retaliation to the criticism they faced for their personal styles, their public personas, and social issues they found particularly pressing. While neither artist created music in the heavy-rock genre we have now come to think of as ‘punk,’ their sentiments and artistic works are purposefully and decisively against the mainstream music industry that had come to trap them. Hence, both the Monkees and Linda McCartney’s bodies of work should be looked at with fresh eyes, for although their contributions to the punk scene may be overshadowed by the legendary acts mentioned in this piece, their use of music and art in countercultural protest is as deserving as any to be considered truly punk.
Article by Gianna Caudillo
Design by Carolina Munce