The Monkees didn't do too badly for themselves, given that they were created as a TV sitcom
response to the Beatles.
But the Monkees haven't always been blessed with good fortune, despite their celebrity.
Here's the tragic real-life story of the Monkees.
The success of the Beatles movies A Hard Day's Night and Help! inspired a group of TV producers
to do something similar with an American sitcom.
That's how the Monkees were born.
The members didn't come together the way bands traditionally do.
They auditioned and were selected, not especially for their musical talent, but for TV-friendly
qualities like charisma, good looks, and acting skills.
Yet band members Michael Nesmith and Peter Tork were accomplished musicians, and Micky
Dolenz and Davy Jones also had decent musical chops.
The show was conceived like any sitcom.
The actors would play characters, and the music was to be strictly prerecorded, with
the band only providing vocals.
After the band released its first single and played a few shows, it became clear that they
were more than just actors.
Even so, the Monkees were never able to shake their less-than-iconic origin story.
They became fairly universally known as the "Pre-Fab Four," a play on the Beatles' nickname,
"the Fab Four."
In January 1967, Peter Tork and Michael Nesmith were upset when they listened to their second
album, More of the Monkees, and discovered that it was nothing but recycled music from
the show.
According to AllMusic, the group finally decided to take a stand, demanding creative control.
The Monkees were enough of a sensation that the producers couldn't just fire them and
replace them with more agreeable performers.
So they capitulated, fired the show's music coordinator, and the Monkees finally became
the "real" band that critics had for so long accused them of not being.
Creative freedom also meant freedom to disagree, and the band's autonomy also ended up showcasing
creative differences.
Their third and fourth albums were commercial and artistic successes, but the fifth, The
Birds, the Bees & the Monkees, was starting to feel a little disjointed.
Also around that time that the television series was canceled.
The band wasn't happy with the sitcom format and thought it should be more of a variety
show.
The network, in turn, decided to just ax the whole thing.
Success in music depends a lot on the preferences of your audience.
Success in movies depends on other factors, such as screenwriting, plot, and making enough
sense to avoid turning off your fanbase.
The Monkees 1968 feature film, Head, failed on pretty much all of those points.
According to Night Flight, Jack Nicholson wrote the screenplay, but even that didn't
do much to recommend it, because Nicholson was a B-movie actor no one had ever heard
of at the time.
The band brainstormed the film while high at a party.
Then Nicholson strung the ideas together into a screenplay while on LSD.
The finished movie was a weird, plotless, disjointed commentary on everything from consumerism
to media deception to police brutality to the exploitation of tragedy.
It was also a self-deprecating jab at the Monkees themselves.
It was poorly advertised, audiences that did see it were confused, and it was a flop.
Of course, Head is now a cult favorite and is mostly well-liked by modern critics.
But it was both the beginning and end of the Monkees' film career.
Peter Tork seemed especially deflated by the failure of Head.
In a 2011 interview with the Guardian, he said,
Tork soon left the band.
The three remaining members stuck it out for another couple albums but failed to generate
any new hits.
According to AllMusic, toward the end of 1969, Nesmith called it quits, too.
He'd already released a solo album and wanted to go it alone.
Jones and Dolenz recorded a final album, but the two-man version of the Monkees was not
what the band had once been.
The band officially broke up after that 1970 album.
The Monkees ended not with a bang, but a fizzle.
"Peter quit first, Mike quit second.
Davy and I just kept going until nobody offered us anymore money."
After the Monkees broke up, Peter Tork formed a band called Release, which ironically dissolved
before it was able to release a single record.
He also attempted to start a production company, but No Treble reported that enterprise also
went nowhere.
Tork struggled throughout the 1970s.
His money ran out, he was forced to rent his home to a friend to avoid foreclosure, and
he ended up moving with his pregnant girlfriend into the basement of David Crosby of Crosby,
Stills, Nash and Young.
He was also arrested for possession of hashish and had to spend three months in an Oklahoma
penitentiary.
Tork eventually moved away from the music industry altogether.
He took a job teaching high school classes and coaching baseball.
Ultimately, he had difficulty with the structure of the school system and was fired.
Fortunately, Tork was able to turn things around when he quit drinking in the early
'80s.
He stopped taking drugs not long after that and was finally able to revitalize his music
career.
But it was a long, hard road to get there.
Most Americans go out of their way to make sure their never, ever have to deal with the
IRS apart from sending them a tax return on April 15.
But Michael Nesmith ended up spending a lot more time with the agency than he wanted.
In his 2017 memoir, he wrote that the dissolution of the Monkees was followed almost immediately
by the descent of the taxman.
He wrote:
After his whirlwind rise to fame, he was pretty much left with nothing to show for it.
After the IRS took all his stuff, Nesmith's marriage collapsed, and he dealt with the
emotional blow in the most toxic way possible: He had an affair with the wife of a friend.
In his memoir, he lamented that he was basically at a career and personal rock bottom:
It wasn't all bad for Nesmith, though; not only was he heir to the Liquid Paper fortune,
he literally was the creator of MTV.
Micky Dolenz also spent a lot of years doing not very much of anything.
For a while, his resume's main selling point was not his success as an actor, which predated
the Monkees by nearly a decade, or his vocal talents, it was that he was one of the Monkees.
That notoriety earned him some small television roles and a few voice acting credits on cartoons
like Scooby-Doo and Captain Caveman.
At one time he was neck-and-neck with Henry Winkler for the role of Fonzie on Happy Days,
but that opportunity also passed him by.
He told Guitar World,
Dolenz didn't flounder for long.
By 1976, he was headed to the U.K. to star in a musical, and plans to stay for three
months eventually morphed into a 12-year career as a director and producer.
With the power of MTV and with help from others in their orbit, Dolenz, Jones, and Tork, got
together for a 20th anniversary Monkees reunion tour in 1986 that exploded into an unexpectedly
huge hit.
By the 1990s, the former Monkees were all off doing their own things, but the 30th anniversary
was approaching.
According to AllMusic, the band got together to talk about the impending anniversary, discovered
they still had some musical chemistry, and recorded a new album.
The 1996 album Justus became the first Monkees record written and produced entirely by Nesmith,
Tork, Jones, and Dolenz.
When the band decided to start touring again, all of their creative differences and personal
animosities started to resurface.
Nesmith dropped out of the tour early on, and the remaining band members weren't quiet
about how that made them feel.
The remaining three toured again in 2001, but this time it was Tork who abandoned ship,
although Jones and Dolenz said they fired him.
Tork later complained that Jones and Dolenz drank so much on the tour that they became
"mean and abusive."
But it wasn't just Tork clashing with Jones and Dolenz.
Evidently Jones and Dolenz weren't getting along swimmingly, either.
In a 2009 interview, Jones said he,
Ouch.
Things weren't going awesomely for Michael Nesmith, either.
In 2010, Nesmith's wife left him, and in the middle of all of that emotional turmoil, he
started to go blind.
Nesmith wrote in his 2017 memoir Infinite Tuesday: An Autobiographical Riff,
Fortunately, Nesmith's blindness was reversible.
Cataract surgery restored his sight, but his strange, crippling illness was more difficult
to overcome because no one knew what it was.
The illness left him largely unable to use his left hand, and his right foot was useless
enough that he had to drag it when he walked.
The specialists he visited mostly just scratched their heads and offered him pain medication.
The good news is that the illness, whatever it was, eventually went away on its own.
Nesmith, a Christian Scientist, believes prayer and meditation cured him.
The Monkees got together once again in 2011 and went on tour, only without Michael Nesmith
who by then had inherited his Liquid Paper fortune.
The 45th anniversary tour actually went shockingly well for rockers clearly past their prime,
though after a summer of traveling around North America, the band members, who were
all well into their 60s, chose not to add more dates to the tour.
Then in February of the following year, Davy Jones died of a heart attack.
Jones' death shocked everyone who knew him.
A business associate told CNN,
That, finally, was the end of the Monkees as a foursome, but Michael Nesmith joined
the remaining two Monkees for a short set of reunion performances, each of which featured
a tribute to their fallen bandmate.
In February 2019, the Monkees took their most recent blow.
Peter Tork finally succumbed to the rare form of head and neck cancer he'd been battling
for a decade.
Tork was first diagnosed with adenoid cystic carcinoma in 2009.
Two years later, he told Rolling Stone that the surgery he'd undergone to remove the cancer
had been a success.
He wrote,
Cancer doctors will always hesitate to say cancer is "cured," and for good reason.
It can come back even years after it's disappeared, and when it does, it's often resistant to
the treatments that took it down the first time.
After Tork's death, the two remaining Monkees posted heartfelt messages in their bandmate's
honor.
Nesmith's was especially profound.
He wrote,
And the Monkees will be part of us.
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