Hey Hey We Were The Monkees

There is only one Monkee left. It's Micky Dolenz, the madcap drummer of the Prefab Four, and he wants to see the files the FBI has on the band.

Say what, now?

For context, some people who saw The Beatles in the movie "A Hard Day's Night" had an idea to get four musical types together, have a great writing and production team make great music for them (two great singles and 10 half-fast filler songs per album) and then put the four guys - Dolenz, Michael Nesmith, Peter Tork and Davy Jones - in a knockabout tv show with physical comedy, sight gags, and people doing silly things.

It worked great for two years, but the inmates wanted to run the asylum, by which I mean the band decided that the people who were putting their music and their videos together didn't know what they were doing, and insisted on playing their own instruments and writing their own songs. In 1967, they had four #1 albums, a feat unmatched before or since.

In 1968, they were unemployed, and the show sank like a stone in six months.

 

Dolenz now says that their first hit, "Last Train To Clarksville," was a subtle anti-Vietnam War protest. And the FBI, at the time under the direction of the totally sane J. Edgar Hoover, opened a file on these revolutionaries, and now Dolenz is suing the Federal Bureau of Investigation so he can see any records with his name in the fed files.

Actually, some of the file came out in 2011. Through the heavily blackened-out pages, we can see than an FBI fink went to a Monkees concert in 1967, and told the steadfast agency that there was a backscreen to the rear of the stage "that depicted “subliminal messages … which, in the opinion of [redacted], constituted ‘left wing innovations of a political nature.’”

And...“These messages and pictures were flashes of riots in Berkeley, anti-U.S. messages on the war in Vietnam, racial riots in Selma, Alabama, and similar messages which had unfavorable response from the audience.”

The FBI website mentions another document on The Monkees that is "redacted entirely."

Micky filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request this summer, to get a look at those files. With no reply in hand, he's pursuing legal action “to obtain any records the FBI created and/or possesses on the Monkees as well as its individual members.” 

I don't know if this is in the files, but when The Monkees tour played Baltimore in '67, the opening act was a certain Jimi Hendrix, who was booed off the stage by kids screaming for The Monkees. He ran for the hills after playing seven shows as their opener, because If Six Was Nine, he couldn't have taken two more shows.