The Monkees were mad as hell — and they weren’t going to take it anymore.
Well, at least two of them were mad. Michael Nesmith and Peter Tork chafed the most about having to “play” a rock band on The Monkees television show without being allowed to “be” a band in the studio. They’d had minimal input into their first two albums (the chart-topping The Monkees and More of The Monkees), and now they wanted that to change. Their fellow Monkees, Micky Dolenz and Davy Jones, weren’t as bothered about the setup, but agreed to go along with Nesmith and Tork for the sake of group unity.
Things came to a head in late January 1967, when the group confronted their music supervisor, Don Kirshner, in a meeting that left a hole in the wall of Kirshner’s bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel. But the fracas resulted in the band members finally being able take over the reins when they recorded their next album, Headquarters, writing just over half of the material, and playing most of the instruments. The recently released Headquarters: Super Deluxe Edition (available from the band’s website, monkees.com) takes a deep dive into the making of the album, offering much previously unreleased material that reveals new insights into the sessions where The Monkees made their case for musical independence. And along with the bonus material, the Headquarters album itself has been remixed, presented for the first time in its original recorded pitch.
TV series was created by Bob Rafelson and Bert Schneider, who’d met while working at Screen Gems, a television-film production company. Rafelson had long had an idea for a TV series about a music group,, there was now more interest in a show about a rock band, and Screen Gems picked it up.
