The Monkees Tried To Cut Their Strings With 'Head'
Hey, hey, they were the Monkees, and by 1968 they were sick and tired of their manufactured boy-band image, so they took a sledgehammer to it in the surreal, angry, stream-of-consciousness Head.
I don't think, as a teenage fangirl, that I realized exactly how bitter, how cynical, how teeth-grittingly the Monkees' 1968 movie is. How it starts with — more or less — a suicide: Mickey Dolenz running in a panic through a municipal ribbon-cutting ceremony and taking a leap off of a shiny new suspension bridge, tumbling through the air and crashing into the water to the stately chords of "Porpoise Song" while the rest of the band watches in consternation from the railing. How it ends the same way, except this time it's all four of them jumping. How the Carole King-penned lyrics that play over both scenes go "a face, a voice/an overdub has no choice, an image cannot
