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. Check out one of our newest videos right here! Plus, even more Grunge videos about The Monkees
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