Our fifth edition of the ever-popular Better Than The Beatles series focuses on the first, and greatest, manufactured pop group: The Monkees.
Literally cast into the limelight of pop superstardom, The Monkees, at their peak, outsold the Beatles while simultaneously filming weekly episodes of their zany and ultra-hip eponymous hit TV series.
You’ll go bananas for our first foray: Last Train To Clarksville (2:19). This infectious oldies radio anthem leaves the station at Paperback Writer and jumps the track at the Vietnam war. Weldon identifies Mickey “Good Diction” Dolenz as rock’s greatest dramatic enunciator.
Next we go out of our tree for A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You (47:00), some bubblegum-dung that Weldon and Erik have been flinging at their ears for years, already.
The third instalment from our troublemaking troop is Pleasant Valley Sunday (1:17:25): a thinly veiled suburban sound-off. We go ape over the vocables before barbe-cueing up one of our most crucial digressions ever: the historical importance of Superchannel in Alberta.
Another tidy piece of Monkee business, Valleri (1:56:55), is our last song from the Monkees’ golden era. Weldon cracks the textbooks with his exploration of the Boom-Bip-Bip ending and Erik admires Mike Nesmith’s air guitar. And what’s this? Starry-eyed Davy Jones doing a classic American garage rock scream?!
Last but not least (Bo Diddley Award spoiler?), we listen to the apex-beautiful Me & Magdalena (2:18:12), zoologicalproofthat the Monkees were still eating the Beatles lunch in 2016, long past their Hey! Hey!-day.
Due to their ensemble-cast approach to hit-making, the Monkees have been a polarizing entity in the rock pantheon for decades. Regardless, Weldon and Erik, the Dian-Fosseys-of-fake-phenomena, finally and conclusively determine, herein, that the Monkees are indeed more swinging, more rocking, more charming, cuter, and straight-up better than the Beatles. Welcome to the Jungle!
