“What’s my idea of an awesome song? Simple. A truly awesome song is one that I could listen to with a smile in my heart every single day for the rest of my life without growing sick of it.”
I’m not sure anyone could write a more pure distillation of why some rock songs are simply awesome than that. And that’s how I feel when I listen to much of The Monkees’ music – I don’t care who wrote it, I don’t care who played the instruments, and I sure as hell don’t care if that is really Peter Tork playing the tambourine. The fact of the matter, and the only fact that matters, is that I could listen to the best of their songs “with a smile in my heart every single day for the rest of my life”. And there are a ton of the best of their songs on Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones Ltd, which is our topic of discussion today, and a recent request I’ve been meaning to get around to.
Take “What Am I Doin’ Hangin’ Round?” What a fantastic slice of ‘60s big, catchy chorus pop. I tell you, more than any other decade, songwriters in the 60s knew how to write a big, catchy chorus. By the ‘70s Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd had largely dispensed with choruses, and the prog rockers never had any use for ‘em. But the ‘60s were the decade of Big Catchy Choruses, and this song has an excellent example of one, it lodges in your brain and refuses to come out for the rest of the day. Clever story too – a “loud mouth Yankee” goes to Mexico for a week and takes “advantage of a girl who loved me so”. But there’s a twist at the end – after the week is over he has fallen in love with her, and a year later still can’t get her off his mind and wants to get enough money to go back and see her. I love a catchy song, and I love a song with a great story – but what I really love is a catchy song with a great story, and this one ticks both of those boxes.
There’s also a twist to “Love is Only Sleeping” – some guy’s girlfriend goes all cold on him, and he tells her “sometimes love is only sleeping”, and he sticks it out and by the end of the song she’s warmed up to him again. Great song, but it’s kind of lousy relationship advice – if she isn’t into you anymore, just accept it and get on with your life, too many people spend too much time hoping that a sleeping love will wake up when it never does. There are plenty of fish in the sea buddy, go find another one. Anyway, it’s another song with a phenomenal chorus, and I love the moody vibe of the whole thing. That’s the thing about The Monkees – the Pre-Fab Four moniker wasn’t inaccurate (and it’s actually pretty funny when you think about it), but their albums were always more than just bubble gum. Don Kirshner and Co. probably overestimated the taste of the music-buying twelve year old, they probably didn’t need to get the top-notch songwriters they did for The Monkees to have hit albums. Geez, even having just one high quality song on every album would have been more than they really had to do to sell records, the TV show was popular enough to sell records all on its own without great songs. Every pre-fab TV group since The Monkees has learned this lesson and not bothered with paying for the best songwriters money can buy, they know they don’t need to. The Disney Channel has become expert at making massive amounts of money selling subpar music through pre-fab TV bands and stars. Lucky for us, the first TV rock band was sailing in uncharted waters, and so just to be safe the producers put up the cash to get first-rate material. “Love is Only Sleeping” is pretty first rate if you ask me.
Of course, the song from the album everyone has heard is “Pleasant Valley Sunday”, and it was a pretty obvious choice as a single. A groovy guitar figure kicks it off, it’s got another of those 60’s catchy choruses, and it subtly taps into the typical suburban teenagers’ vague recognition that something feels a little off in their world. Yeah, there’s charcoal burnin’ everywhere, and the local squire is mowing his lawn, and Mrs. Gray’s blooming roses really are impressive, but underneath the surface of this “status symbol land” there’s a stifling conformity, a bland sameness, and underneath that there’s Roger-Waters-stealing-from-Henry-David-Thoreau’s “quiet desperation” from a sense that there’s more to life and all the suburbians are missing out on it. “Creature comfort goals they only numb my soul/And make it hard for me to see/My thoughts all seem to stray to places far away/I need a change of scenery”. That says it all. Not only is the song something you want to sing along to, but it also taps into that mid-60s spirit of questioning everything the 50s had been striving for in terms of uniformity and convention. But it’s a soft touch, it’s not in-your-face enough to be threatening to the parents of those twelve year olds who bought the records. Thank heavens Gerry Goffin and Carole King moved to the suburbs and consequently felt compelled to write about how they really felt about it – they were master songwriters anyway, but their experience in suburbia allowed them to really tap into something when writing this song. This wasn’t just a great pop song – it was a gentle expression of what many young people were feeling at the time (many of whom eventually gave in to convention and went on to live lives of quiet desperation in the suburbs themselves – most people feel the allure of the unconventional, few people have the strength to actually follow it themselves). It’s the rare song you can rock out to, but if you take a little time to listen while you’re rocking, you might get something to think about too.
“The Door Into Summer” is another surprisingly deep slice of social commentary. When I first saw the title I was expecting a sun, fun, sand and girls type of summer song à la The Beach Boys, but what I got was a meditation on how the corporate ladder leads nowhere and climbing it as fast as you can gets you nothing but regret. There’s a somewhat veiled shot at the Vietnam War in the first two lines, but it’s mostly the story of a man who learned too late that for all the time he neglected family and friends to chase success in the corporate world “…he pays for it with years he cannot buy back with his tears/As he finds out there’s been no one keeping score”. This is a song with exceptional lyrics, a resonant message, and a fantabulous melody to boot – I’d rate it as one of The Monkees’ very best. From: https://brutallyhonestrockalbumreviews.wordpress.com/2022/08/09/album-review-the-monkees-pisces-aquarius-capricorn-jones-ltd/
