Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hello, and welcome to Weird House Cinema. My name is Joe McCormick. My regular co host, Robert Lamb is not with me today, so I am being joined by a guest someone who will be familiar to longtime listeners of the show, our former producer and friend, Seth Nicholas Johnson. How are you doing, Seth?
Hello? Everyone, I'm doing great. Happy to be back again, and I'm glad to still be a part of the you know, Stuff to Blow your Mind family.
Oh, it's really great to have you back, man. Yeah. So the movie we're going to be talking about today is a movie you suggested, Seth, one that I had never seen before, and I am thrilled to discuss it
today because it is so strange and so interesting. Today's film is the nineteen sixty eight psychedelic musical comedy Head, starring the TV musical act The Monkeys, and people may say they monkey around, but the important thing to understand is that being a monkey is a pact with Satan, cursing you to a dreadful existence of meaninglessness and unfreedom. But also it's all for a laugh.
You know, they monkey around a lot in this movie. Like if a reviewer simply wrote that after they saw the film, you know these boys, they really monkey around, they'd be correct. That is what's happening throughout the entire eighty six minutes of this film.
But what's not true is that they're too busy singing to put anybody down. This movie sort of does put a lot of people in things down, including the monkeys and the creators of the monkeys, true, and everything that enabled the monkeys to happen, and the fans of the monkeys, and war and consumerism and the broader culture and basically everything. It's a shocking indictment of humankind.
It's very true.
So I first of all had no idea this movie was going to have such dark threads running through it, or that it would be as funny as it was. But I previously actually didn't know much about the Monkeys. I didn't like grow up watching the show or anything I knew, you know, so the songs that would play
on the radio and stuff. So before we get into discussing the film itself, Sethlake, what is your pre existing relationship with the Monkeys and did that have anything to do with you suggesting this movie for today.
Definitely, I grew up on the TV show. Well obviously on the reruns. I wasn't around for the first round. But if folks don't know, around the mid to late eighties, MTV started replaying old episodes of The Monkeys simp believe it was like the thirtieth anniversary, twentieth anniversary, something like that, And when that happened, yeah, I guess would have been the twentieth anniversary sixties, seventies, eighties, correct anniversary on MTV.
They had a bunch of reunions and they played the TV Show and there was like a second wave of Monkey Mania, and this was kind of a big bolster, not only to their record sales, some of their albums like re entered the charts and stuff like that, but in addition to that, they started doing reunion tours like the Monkeys came back in the mid to late eighties, and I guess I was influenced by that as a as a small child, because I watched those reruns and fell in love with it and just like the humor
and the silliness, and honestly also the quality of the music really won me over as a child and it stuck with me for a long time. And eventually, when I did become old enough to start like you know, buying my own albums and like caring about music, I was like, you know, some of these Monkeys albums are great.
So then I went like through the effort of actually like learning the history of them and when they took over and started, you know, being in control of their own music compared with when they just had a bunch of like you know, studio heads telling them what they had to do, and what the difference between that sound was. Like, I really did a deep dive and just to just to you know, educate myself. And yeah, I would call
myself a big Monkeys fan. I have seen my personal favorite Monkey, Mike Nesmyth, in concert multiple times, and you know what, that's what I'll definitely say. I'm an enormous Mike Nesmyth fan, and Mike Nesmyth used to be in the Monkeys, That's what I'll say.
It is surprising when you go back and listen how good a lot of these songs are, like well written pop tunes. Yeah, And I honestly Seth thought you might say that you're on Ramp to the Monkeys was the smash Mouth cover in the Shrek soundtrack. I'm a believer.
I don't think I'm quite young enough for that. I'm sure the generation below us would definitely say that. But now I was brought on board with the reruns on a MTV back in the late eighties.
Yeah, was that song. By the way, this would be a good segue to the fact that actually a lot of the great Monkeys tunes that we know were written by people who would go on to become great, you know, musicians, well known stars and songwriters in their own right. I think I'm a believer who was written by Neil Diamond, wasn't it.
I believe there is some truth to that. I can't remember if it was originally intended to be a Neil Diamond song originally, but yeah, there was a bunch of that kind of like flip flopping back and forth back then. But he was definitely involved, that's for sure.
Yeah, But other songs of the Monkeys were written by like Carol King and collaborators. So, like, there are several Carol King songs that pop up in this movie, and they're fantastic. Probably one of the best songs in the movie. The Porpoise song is a Carol King and I forget the collaborator to his name will come up later.
Harry Nielsen too. They had some really good Harry Nielsen collaborations in the future. And not to you know, harp too much on my favorite monkey, Michael Nesmith. But Michael Nesmyth definitely wrote all of the best Monkeys songs. Well, we'll hear at least one in this movie, a Circle Sky. But when you hear that that Texas twang out of Mike Nesmyth's mouth, you know, you know it's a Nesmuth original.
And man, he writes a damn fine song. If folks don't know he was, well, well, we'll get to this later. But he was already a famous songwriter before he joined the Monkeys, like, for example, he wrote Linda Ronstadt's Different Drum. You know that song that's a Mesmith original? Yes, yeah, uh yeah.
Okay, So we'll have to talk about the different elements as we go along, But maybe before we go into the history of the Monkeys and what the monkeys mean, we should just give a brief description of what is head,
What is this movie? It is hard to describe, but I think the way I would put it is that it is a nonlinear mad cap comedy starring the mid sixties made for TV band the Monkeys as themselves or as the slightly fictionalized versions of themselves that were that were the Monkeys, or actually you might say as like a second order character, like a a second order fictionalized version of the Monkeys that appears in this movie to sort of comment on the characters that they played in
the show. Does that make any sense?
It absolutely does. And you know, I was just thinking to myself, what other structures around this time were happening, And here's something that I don't believe this can be connected because the timelines are too similar. I think it was probably just like the vibe going through the air was. Did you ever used to watch Rowan and Martin's laugh.
In I think I've seen like one episode of it.
I had pointing out how old I am, But I definitely used to watch reruns of Rowan and Martin's Laughing back in the day, and it has that same highly gosh, how to even put it, because there's a combination of psychedelia, corny old jokes, rapid succession from like shot to shot, very little from thing to thing, and that show came out in nineteen sixty eight, the same year as this movie.
So okay, I'm not claiming that there's any connection there, but I do think there must have been something in the water that made people feel that this was like where the pendulum was swinging, that this was the kind of structure that was needed in the world.
Or something in the kool aid yea, the electric kool aid exactly there, I think it would be. In fact, I was going to say it would be hard to deny the drug influences on this movie, but in fact you couldn't. Even Like the creators have explicitly said this movie was fueled by psychedelic drugs. Like Bob Rayfelson, who will talk about in a bit, has given interviews extensively talking about how much the use of drugs like marijuana and LSD played into the creative process that led to
this film. I don't know how much for the monkeys themselves, but for the writers and the director certainly this is a very psychedelic forward comedy comedy film. But also so yeah, you get that very like only loosely logically connected or sometimes totally logically unconnected sequence of images and scenes. But also I just wanted to run down like a list
of things that this movie does. What these these comedic episodes in the movie do so, they satirize American media, especially like movies and TV with traditional square storytelling genres like westerns and war movies. But also they they satirize American advertising and just the general landscape of the media, news report reports and stuff like that. But also these there are several points in the movie that quite viscerally critique the morality of US involvement in the Vietnam War
with like truly shocking imagery. But then the movie also experiments with psychedelic music and imagery styles. I think if I was going to offer some critiques of this film, one of them would be that I think they got a little too excited about the solarization effect. I don't know if that's quite as cool as they thought it was.
Right for sure, I felt the same thing. Eventually, it was just a one throwoff moment, so I doubt we'll be referencing it directly. There was a scene with a bunch of mylar balloons floating around, and I think they thought it would blow our minds, and I was like, nah, we know what my lar balloons are. It's fine.
But then along with all that we get traditional song and dance numbers. There's even like a Broadway show tune kind of number in it. That's fantastic that there are just like constant detours into corny non sequitor jokes. Like the jokes are not all you know, like dark, incisive comedy. A lot of it is just really the bottom of the barrel kind of just the silliest puns and stuff.
And like you said too, the non sequitur nonsensical nature. Some of the humor is some of my favorites too. One of my favorites I'll mention later. It's early in the movie, so I'll bring it up later. But a lot of it is just good timing and good editing with just like odd creative choices, especially captions. They use a lot of odd text on screen captions and editing choices that are fascinating.
Oh like when the guy says to Mickey Dolan's.
Yes, yes, that yeah, that happens early in the movie. We'll mention that scene soon, but that that genuinely made me laugh out loud. That's that we'll mention soon, Okay.
But another big thing this movie does is it meditates on, I would say, from the movie's perspective, the genuinely quite terrifying, implied psychic undercurrents of Beatlemania and monkey mania. The movie almost suggest there is something like threatening and fascist about the adulation of bands like this. And then also it meditates on the meaninglessness of the Monkeys as a concept, and on the meaninglessness of life, and on illusions of freedom. But also it's funny.
It's very true. It's it's genuinely a funny film. And it's amazing how they balance all of these pieces, that it can be this dark, this unconnected, but also this watchable and this funny. It's it's actually quite masterful in many ways. Yeah.
So in otherwise though, I mean, it's it's a movie clearly made in the sixties, and like the sixties are just wafting through it. So it is very dated in a lot of ways. But in other ways it stands out as surprisingly fresh and good and even shockingly, as I said earlier, sharp with its satire. Sometimes it's hard for me to think of another movie be quite like this. Agreed, Maybe we should hear some trailer audio.
Not since the Ten Commandments.
If you liked Covered Wagon Beyond from Here to Eternity. They can't be the Marx Brothers.
They're too young. Columbia Pictures presents the Monkeys Mickey, Davey, Mike Peter in Head. That's right, Head, what's it all about? Only Victor Mature's hair dresser knows for sure. Head is the most extraordinary adventure, western comedy, love story, this greed, drama, musical, documentary, satire ever filmed.
All Right, So this is the part of the episode we usually call connections where we talk about some people involved. There were a lot of people involved in this movie. It has a ton of cameos that we can't possibly name them all, but we'll try to talk through some of the main figures and then maybe we'll hit on some other things as we go through the plot a little bit. The plot quote, It doesn't have a plot,
but as we talk about what happens on screen. The director and writer of this film as a guy named Bob Rafelson who lived in nineteen thirty three through twenty twenty two. He was an American director, writer, and producer. Head was his first feature film, though he had previously worked on TV as one of the creators of The Monkeys TV series for NBC in nineteen sixty five sixty six. I think maybe he created it in sixty five and
it debuted in sixty six, I believe. But he would later go on to be best known as a director of films like Five Ez Pieces in nineteen seventy, which he directed and co wrote with Carol Eastman and which starred Jack Nicholson and Karen Black. He also directed the nineteen eighty one adaptation of The Postman Always Rings Twice. This is a story that was made had multiple movie versions over the years, this version starring again Jack Nicholson and Jessica Long, and then he also did The King
of Marvin Gardens in nineteen seventy two. Stay Hungry in nineteen seventy six, a film starring Jeff Bridges and Sally Field, but also Arnold Schwarzenegger in a straight dramatic role. This was I think his first movie after he appeared as Arnold's strong in that Hercules film.
I've never seen that, and I'm actually kind of curious too. That sounds pretty fascinating.
Yeah, yeah, it's like it's not an action movie at all. Arnold Schwarzenegger plays like a guy who either owns or manages a gym and a gym I think somewhere in Alabama. And Jeff Bridges is like a shady real estate developer who's trying to like scam him into selling the gem property for some reason.
Fascinating And I bet this would have been technically the first time his voice was on film, because wasn't he dubbed in that Hercules movie? Oh?
I bet he was. Yeah, that's sounds familiar. Yeah.
Interesting.
Rafelson also directed Black Widow in eighty seven, which is a sort of neo noir movie. I think that has a Deborah Winger in it. Andy did the nineteen ninety biographical film Mountains of the Moon, about the journeys of Richard, Francis Burton and John Hanning. Speak Rafelson along with his partner Bert Schneider. They also provided funding for the production of Easy Rider in nineteen sixty nine, which was huge. It's kind of hard to overstate the impact Easy Rider
on the film industry. It was hugely influential independent film and a kind of frozen in time snapshot of the feeling of an era, that era being the late sixties counterculture, and together with another producer named Steve Blouner, Rafelson and Schneider would found a company called BBS Productions, which from what I understand, they entered into an agreement with Columbia Pictures to finance films without allowing creative interference by the studios.
And I think this is seen by some as like an important component in the evolution of the new Hollywood of the nineteen seventies, which was more it was sort of less focused on creative control by the studio and more focused on creative control by the directors and filmmakers. But before all that, Rafelson made The Monkeys. When I as a kid and I was aware of, you know, the Monkeys, that I knew their songs from the radio and stuff, I actually did not realize that they were
a band created for television. And I don't know if this qualifies them as a quote fictional band, because I was talking about this with my wife Rachel. We watched the movie together and we were talking about, like, what does it mean for a band to be fictional? At least what you can say about the Monkeys is they are not a band that formed by musicians on their
own right. They were formed for a project that was organized by someone else, and originally not all members of the band played their instruments and wrote songs, though they would kind of grow into different roles. But because of that like growth and coming more into musicianship over time, I guess you might say that they could in some sense be considered a quote real band, whatever that means.
But at least at the beginning, Yeah, they did not all write songs or play instruments the way I understand it, and Seeth you can correct me if I'm wrong. I think Mike Nesmith and Peter Tork played instruments, and Nesmith alone had written songs, but the others were kind of new to music in this way.
Kind Of one way that Mickey Dolans would often kind of make an analogy for the situation was that they hired Leonard Nimoy to play a vulcan, and eventually they had to actually become a vulcan. That was their job. And so let's see here, Davy Jones was a Broadway guy like he was. He got really popular because he was the artful dodger in Oliver that was like his like claimed defect fits. Yeah, exactly, your salesman. Yeah, very
very like soft shoe. That's his thing, and that's kind of the role that he kind of kept throughout the movie. In fact, Zappa Frank Zappa makes a great cameo later and makes reference to that in the film, which we'll we'll get there. But so, yeah, that was his background. He could he could do like Broadway type singing, but he wasn't really a musician. And when you see him on the Monkeys, he's usually playing like the tambourine or
the moroccas or something like that. But he's sort of the lead singer exactly, although technically, if you go by the numbers, Mickey Dolan's sang more than anyone. But but anyway, anyway, anyway, so then we had Mike Nesmith, who was the full blown real musician. He was making a living as a musician, that was his job. And then Peter Tork definitely hung
out with hippies. In fact, the only reason he came to the Monkeys was that his friend Stephen Stills had auditioned been rejected, and then Stephen Stills said to Peter Tork, hey, man, I think you're actually what they're looking for you should go you should go check this out. And that's how that happened.
I heard that. Yeah, the way I heard it put was that he was like a younger, cuter version of Stephen Still.
Yes, exactly. He's like, they weren't into this, but you might, you might get it. Go ahead, Yeah, And then yes, mick Key Dolan's was a child actor. So he was the star of a television show called Circus Boy, I believe, and so he was already like deep inside like the Hollywood scene, and he had some experience I believe playing guitar, but nothing else. And then as a default, when the band kind of got together, they were like, someone has to sit behind the drums. Mickey, that's you. And he's like,
I don't know how to play the drums. He's like, well, you don't know how to play anything, You'll figure it out. So Mickey by default had to learn how to be the drummer. Okay, yeah, so yeah, yeah, they all had some experience, but Nesmuth was the only real musician there. But so they were.
The Monkeys were created by Rafelson and Schneider to pitch as a show for NBC that would be like a sitcom about a struggling folk rock band in California. But it was, from what I understand, very much based on Beatlemania and the success of the Beatles, maybe the Beatles movies at that point.
Right, Yeah, let's go. Let's go a little bit into the history here. And in fact, when he first pitched this series, Rafelson, he pitched with the band The Love and Spoonful. He said, this will be the band that we will focus on, and that fell apart for who knows how many reasons, and rumor has it? Who knows, you know, I mean, what's the saying there are many fathers to a creative idea or something like that, you know, whatever that phrase.
Is, success has a million fathers or something.
Something like that. Who knows the absolute truth behind all of this. But Rafelson said that he did have the idea for the Monkeys actually long before Beatlemania, but then he had the clout to start pitching at it around after the Beatles nineteen sixty four film A Hard Day's Night hit the theaters and was a big success. It's
a very simple film. It basically just shows the Beatles preparing for a concert and then they have some wacky adventures along the way to their oncerts, with many little musical interludes peppered throughout, but probably because it happened in the height of Beatlemania, and also because it actually is a genuinely good movie. Have you ever seen Hard Day's Night before, Joe?
No. Strangely enough, the only one of the Beatles films I've seen is Yellow Submarine, so I haven't seen. Yeah, I have not seen Hard Day's Night, or I think the other one from just a year later, which was.
Help, Help, is also quite good. And then also there's one more which was more or less a concert film, which was the Magical Mystery Tour. That one also exists. But Harday's Night is actually quite good. If anyone the audience hasn't seen it, I recommend it's actually a Criterion pick, I believe. And so that was a big commercial and critical success, and so based on that success, Bob Rafelson, are you pronouncing it? Rayfulson? Is that? Is that what we're going with?
I like that, That's what I'm saying. Yeah, that's what That's what I heard Jack Nicholson say in an interview. So I assume he's right because they were friends.
Exactly let's go with Rafelson. So Bob Rafelson then, based on this success, was able to go around to the studios and be like, hey, you saw that success, we want to do that for TV. Let's do that. So Bob Rafelson and as you mentioned earlier, Bert Schneider, they were able to sell this concept to television, and the concept was four charming musicians lived together and they have wacky adventures just like just like a hard day's night.
And so this come is going to be called The Monkeys, and basically it would a premiere September twelfth, nineteen sixty six. They had a open cast and call, and they basically had auditions with hundreds and hundreds of musicians which they filmed actually, and they actually include some of that footage in the TV show The Monkeys, which is actually very charming and very entertaining. And they wound up hiring the four that we've mentioned, Mickey Dolan's, Peter Tork, Michael Nosmith,
Davey Jones. Now, all four actors had some experience, like we mentioned, but the only one amongst them that was like, no, I'm a musician and I care about music was Mike Nesmyth. These four, they were hired to be actors pretending to be musicians. They were not hired to be musicians. All the music from the show was going to be written and recorded by quote unquote real musicians behind the scenes, and these four actors were going to provide the singing voices,
and that's it. They were not. The creators had no interest in this. I can go to much deeper detail about the fights they had with like the original music producers and all this other stuff, but another time, another time. But basically, the first two albums that they recorded that would have been nineteen sixty six Is the Monkeys and nineteen sixty seven's More of the Monkeys. These functioned as like the soundtrack for season one of the TV show, And eventually it just kind of came out that this
was all phony, this scripted TV show wasn't real. This was how dark there so the audience they felt deceived. They felt that like they had been sold a bill of goods that was not genuine, and so then they had to kind of like there was a backlash against them now in defense of the Monkeys themselves. Nesmuth actually complained about this pretty early on. For example, on the first record the Monkeys. If you look at it, it
looks like just a genuine record from a band. There's no like liner notes showing which musicians played on it and who wrote and blah blah blah blah blah. It looks like the Monkeys made this record. And he complained about that. He said, you're fooling these people. He's like, you're making them think that we're a real band by design, and that's not going to work out in the long term.
I can see that, Okay. So I would have thought it would be silly to be mad at this TV band for not being what is portrayed as because it's obviously a fictional show and all that. But I guess I would feel differently if yeah, I can unders saying like, if you put out a record in the liner notes, don't give credit to the people who actually played on the songs and all that, that would feel more like a true deception exactly.
And so that's what happened on the first two albums, and the Monkeys basically put their foot down. This is in between seasons one and two, and they were like, we want more creative control, especially over the music, but in general, you know, if we are the Monkeys and this is a hit, and it was a hit. Then we want, you know, to feel like we are getting our voice put through here and not feel like frauds,
not feel like hacks, you know. So that's what happened, and they were able to start making their own music and really focus on everything themselves, and that started with their third album, Headquarters. And you know, based on whatever, a different situation you want to say, after that season where they took control, the series was canceled. So I don't think we can fully blame that on the Monkeys,
but hey, that is something that definitely happened. And then the next step after their TV show was canceled, Hey let's make a feature length film. And that's the movie that we're talking about today. And so after the commercial and critical failure of head the movie we're talking about today, the Monkeys then started a long series of breaking up and getting back together and having a reunion and hey, this time the Monkeys are just two people, and hey,
this time the Monkeys are three people. And basically every combination you could imagine of those four either being together or a part it happened at one point or another. And in fact, there was this great joke made at some point. This would have been in the early seventies, where so Peter Tork was the first Monkey to quit. This was after the movie came out. Then Nesmuth quit soon after that, and so each Monkey's album for a while there just had one fewer member. There was one
with just three, then there was one with two. And then when a reviewer reviewed the album that just had Mickey Dolan's and Davy Jones on and he's like, I'm pretty sure the next album is just to be called the Monkey and I was like, that's pretty good, that's pretty funny. So so this happened on again, off again for years and years. They had different like moments of nostalgic popularity again. They even got back together to record
new albums at different points throughout their career. Some of those are actually quite good, some of them not so much. And this all kind of ended for sure for sure in their final farewell tour that was just Nesmuth and Dolan's and that tour ended in twenty twenty one, and then the third of the Monkeys, Mike Nesmyth, he died. So I believe Davy Jones was first. Peter Tork was second, Mike Nesmyth was third, and Dolan's is our last living monkey at this current date on twenty twenty four.
Yeah, now, I did want to come back and emphasize though there's one. Even though we're talking about how the you know, the there was this frustration with the fact that the creative direction of the music was mostly given from the studio, originally from the television studio, and not
from the Monkeys themselves. I don't think we should undersell the importance of the Monkeys, like the individual guys in the band, as as as like what made the show popular, because Rayfelson talks about how when they first put together the pilot episode, they had only the scripted elements in it, and the executives and test audiences whoever, everybody who looked at it hated it. They were like terrible, awful. And
then he made a change. And the only change he made was he inserted what you were talking about, some of the interviews that were totally unscripted, just conversations, interviews with the guys in the band when they were like auditioning for the roles, and that completely changed the reaction. Everybody loved it, and so it was like the original personal charm of these four actors slash musicians, which was what made the show initially as successful as it.
Was for sure. And yeah, I mean, if you ever get a chance, I'm sure you could find them on YouTube or just watch the TV show The Monkeys. I think it's quite good. But yeah, like very funny Beatles esque quips, like I remember in a Davy Jones's audition, He's in there and the interviewer is just like, oh, so, like, well, what kind of a sound do you make? And he's like, what do you mean? I don't get that. He's like, no, what kind of sound? Like a like a rock sound
or a folk sound. It's like, I make a terrible sound. It's funny, very nice.
Okay. So another thing that will be important going into talking about the movie is that I think I think you could say that each monkey in the band has a has a bit. They've each got sort of an archetype they fit and seth. You can tell me if I'm wrong about these, but this is the way I understood it. I don't know the Monkeys as well as you, but the way I read it is that Davy Jones is the singer and he's the cute one. Mike Nesmith is on guitar and he's like the serious one or
the brooding artist. Peter Tork is on bass and he is the simple one, sort of the California stoner, the surfer type. And then Mickey Dolan's is on drums and he's.
The cut up, the goofball. I think that's pretty accurate for sure. I would quibble on very small things, like I would say Peter Tork instead of being simple, he was more naive, like he was the one that was gonna believe you. He was the hippie. But I think what you said was close enough. And then I would like I mentioned before too, Mickey Dolan's, by the numbers, is perhaps the actual lead singer of the Monkeys, just
because he sang on the most tracks. Many people consider Mickey's voice to be the actual voice of the Monkeys, but part of that might be just too that he stuck with at the longest. He is the last surviving monkey, so his voice is the voice of the Monkeys.
Now, I guess I'm thinking more about the way I've seen them arranged on stage when forming that they have they would have Davy Jones out front, and.
I've seen that talked about before too, where like I said, none of them were drummers. One of them just had to become the drummer. And they at first were thinking about Davy and they're like, he's too short, we won't see him. We need a bigger monkey back there. And that's why Mickey became the drummer. And here's the interesting thing too. Here's an interesting thing too, is that, like I said, obviously they were trying to duplicate the Beatles
and the Beatles' success. So if you look at it, the manufactured personality types are actually kind of one to one to the Beatles. Davy Jones, the cute one was Paul McCartney, The cute one Mike Nesmith. The serious artist was John Lennon. The serious artist Peter Torque, the quiet one was George Harrison, the quiet one. And then Mickey Dolan's kind of the goof was Ringo Star kind of
the goof. I don't think it quite matches up because they're real personalities of the monkeys actually kind of like further develop, but it is interesting how close they are one to one.
Yeah, Mickey Dolans's goofiness is different than Ringo's goofy noess, Like Mickey is not an octopus's garden kind of goof He's a he's he's a different He's got a sharper kind of goofiness.
He's a ham for sure. He definitely like he's putting on a he's putting on a show. He he he mugs to the camera. He's he's he's a he's a Hollywood actor, That's what he is.
But actually the like it, I mean, he's good in there. In some of his comedic scenes in Head, he's legitimately hilarious, like the scene where he's fighting the coke machine is I was laughing out loud, definitely. But briefly, to come back to dray Felson for just a moment, I wanted to mention a quote of his I found where he said he said, quote, of course, Head is an utterly
and totally fragmented film. Among other reasons for making it was that I thought I would never get to make an other movie, so I might as well make fifty to start out with and put them all in the same feature. And when I read that, I was like, that's exactly that's what this movie feels like. So he did go on to become a big deal in Hollywood in the seventies. He made a lot of other successful films, but at this point that hadn't happened yet. He didn't
know that was going to happen. So it's like he just tried to put everything he had on screen in one go, and it's surprising how well it works.
It's almost like he was constructing his own like directors reel that he could show off later.
Look, I did a more film, Look at my range.
I did a deserts I did a party, I did a concert, I did all these things. I've actually heard something similar from Jordan Peel, where when he started directing stuff for Key and Peel, he went all out and really dedicated himself to these big set pieces with lots of production value, because in the future he knew that if you wanted to say I'm a film director now, he would be able to go back and show them these examples of Oh, look at these zombies. I did zombies. Hey,
look at this. You know I did sports.
That would why the makeup effects on Key and Peel were so good. Yeah, exactly, he was.
He was constructing a future directors reel much like Rafelson.
Okay, next person I want to talk about here with head is the other writer of the film, Jack Nicholson born nineteen thirty seven. Have we talked about Jack Nicholson on the show before? A little known actor mostly famous for playing the possibly playing the giant crab in Roger
Corman's Attack of the Crab Monsters. Speaking of this movie in an interview many years later, Nicholson said, at this point in his career he was actually thinking that he probably wanted to be a writer director instead of an actor. And at this point his acting career was mostly like B movies. I mean, he'd actually done stuff with the Roger Corman crew. You know, he'd been in Little Chop of Horrors, I guess, and you know Corman type stuff. He was in what was it called The Terror? Have
you ever seen that? It's a Corman movie from sixty three, starring Boris Karloff and Jack Nicholson. So like actors I love, you'd think it'd be riveting, But I think I've tried to watch it and like literally never made it more than ten minutes. I think it's a snooze fest from what I can recall, but I don't know. Maybe if I went back and revisited, I would think differently. It's been a long time, but yeah, so he mostly had like B movies under his belt at this point.
That's amazing. Can I tell you a couple of fun things about Jack Nicholson directly tied into this movie?
Yes? Please?
Here are a couple of fun facts about Jack Nicholson, specifically when he was working on this film. One is that if you listen to the soundtrack album of this movie, it's actually highly respected. It's one of the Monkeys' most beloved albums only from the fans, but also from the Monkeys themselves. They think it's one of the best. Jack Nicholson completely compiled and arranged that soundtrack because it's got all kinds of little like clips and soundbits from the
movie itself and blah blah blah. It's really a beautiful noise collage of an album. It's fantastic. And the reason that happened was that one day Jack Nicholson saw Mike Nesmuth working on It's like in the studio and he was like, oh, I'd love to help out with that if he need If he needs some you know, need to need an extra hand, and Nesmuth was like, I just want to go home. You do it. So Jack
stepped in and just did it himself. And then because this was, you know, at the time just probably the biggest thing that Jack Nicholson ever had ever been associated with. The Monkeys were all stars. This is amazing. He got to write a monkey's movie. This is his big break.
You know. He took a very active hand in the promotion of this film, doing all kinds of like you know, like street team like stickering campaigns and stuff like that, going to like all the different premieres, and he eventually said, quote, I saw it like one hundred and fifty eight million times. Man, I loved it.
I don't know if this is true, but I read a supposed fact that Jack Nicholson was at one point arrested for putting a sticker to promote the film on a cops helmet in New York.
That matches with everything I've heard, so I think we can call that in fact.
But yeah, so he was. So this is interesting that he eventually got so deep into this movie and was so dedicated to promoting it, because that sort of clashes with his initial reaction to the pitch. So this was when he wanted to be a writer director instead of an actor. This would be you know, the mid late sixties. And the way he was explaining it in this interview is he went to pitch himself as a writer to Bob Rafelson, who he knew, and he was, you know,
trying to sell himself on that. He's like, yeah, put me to work. Bobby said, Bob, I can write a movie about anything, anything, And Rafelson said, okay, can you write me a movie for the monkeys? And Nicholson replied with evident disgust the monkeys. You gotta be kidding me.
Uh.
And I think this this indicates the interesting place this movie came from. You were talking about this this earlier assessed with the Monkey's backlash after the first couple of seasons of the show, where they came to be perceived as like brutally uncool by the by the the hip out there taste makers, you know, sort of the acid ronan like like Jack Nicholson and probably even Rafelson himself like that. They were looking on this as oh, this
is very uncool now. And I think you could say this is also indicative of a kind of there's a thing like this that pops up, not just with respect to the artists themselves, but I've often noticed like there's like there's like a revulsion a lot of like dudes have to to acts that are very popular vicially with teenage girls. You know that there's like a kind of sexist backlash to that too, And I bet that was part of it as well.
What makes comparison to like the late nineties early two thousands of boy bands assembled in the same way, there's some you know, corporate overlord behind the scenes who puts a cast and call out and just assembles the cute ones and gives them each like a personality type, and then they're presented to the public with music that they
didn't write and didn't perform. It was one hundred percent like the original templates that became the boy band template in the future, and that wasn't well respected when it first happened. I think over time, you know, very similarly. I'm sure boy bands, you know, take more control over their creative output and et cetera, et cetera, and all that stuff. But I can see why someone like Jack Nicholson would be like you want me to make an in Sync movie. No, I'm not interested.
Yeah, I don't know what the equivalent in the nineties would be, like, who is the Jack Nicholson of the time being asked to make an n Sync movie?
Well, you know what, here's here's an example. This would have been much later, though, But do you remember when it was first announced that the next David Fincher movie was going to be the Facebook movie? And everyone thought, what, what? Why? Why? Why? Of all the things David Fincher can do. He's the seven guy, He's the game, you know, he's a What's what's a great one? The fight Club? He's the fight club guy? Why is he making a movie about Facebook?
And then the social network came out? And it's a great movie because great, great artists can make great art out of anything.
Yeah, and people didn't realize how dark the take would be in the mid right, yes, but oh yeah. Anyway, So coming back to like, so Nicholson's initial reaction is like, you want me to make a movie for the monkeys? I can't, You can't be serious. But then Rayfelson replies, like, wait a minute, you just said you could write about anything where you know, were you lying to me. So
Nicholson says, okay, I'll do it. And so the next day Nicholson has to go in and pitch his Monkey script to Rafaelson's partner, Bert Schneider, and Nicholson goes in meets him. He tells him, Okay, I've got two movie ideas for you, Bert. One of them I can guarantee with one hundred percent certainty will be as big a hit as A hard Day's Night, and the other one I can guarantee you with equal certainty won't make a dime. And then, without hearing another word, Schneider says, I want
the second one. Well, and you know, well, here we are with.
This is actually gonna be something that is full blown rumor mill. But some people believe this, including some of
the monkeys. There's a rumor that Jack Nicholson and then Bert and Jack wait, wait, hold on, there's too many Jacks, right, What's what's raf Bob Bob Bob Rafelson, Jack Nicholson and Bert Schneider that the three of them intentionally tanked this movie because they wanted to be done with the Monkeys, in particular, that Bob Rafelson wanted to move on from this into bigger and better things, and the only way he was going to get that was if the monkeys
failed and went away. Now I think this is perhaps complete fabrication, but many people believe it so much, to the point that if you watch there's a biopic about the monkeys. I believe it's called Daydream Believer, but it's one of those made for TV, very low budget things. There is a scene where they are filming the Dandriff scene, which we will get to later of the film head in the artificial made for TV biopic of the Monkeys.
I know this is getting like inception layers, but in that scene, someone walks onto the set and it's like, what are you doing? This is garbage. No one's gonna like this. And you see Jack Nicholson, the actor playing Jack Nicholson, and the actor playing Bob Rafelson look at each other and give each other a knowing look. Then they continue filming. I don't think there's any confirmed truth behind this, but that is something that many people believed, including some of the monkeys.
I mean, that's interesting. I could see that being possible. I will say that while I would regard that with skepticism, I also regard with skepticism. A lot of the first hand accounts of people like Rafaelson and Jack Nicholson about their time working on these projects because like, I don't know, some of them are kind of like contain self contradictory details, like and also it's just like you know, it's Hollywood storytelling.
There's it's just notorious for people kind of like telling tall tales about how projects came to be, maybe not even remembering totally and just making it into a good story. So who knows really, And as.
You mentioned, there were definitely drugs involved.
They were, Yeah, that's established. Rafelson said in an interview that a lot of this movie was written under the influence of psychedelics in Harry Dean Stanton's basement amazing, So that's Harry Dean Stanton's basement is its own sort of in theagen. I guess this was.
Also depicted in the biopic, and it's them sitting around in a haze of pot smoke with a tape recorder just saying all of the wildest ideas that can possibly think. And it's a fascinating biopick if anyone wants to learn more about the monkeys.
Now, when it comes to the cast of this movie. Most of the cast, apart from the monkeys, I think could best be classified as cameos. They are not really very substantial roles in the film, but more like people who pop in and out for strange little scenes or recurring gags.
Oh and audience, don't feel bad if you don't notice these cameos when you watch this film, because I've seen this movie many many times and I recognize like none of them, even from actors and personalities I know, like Terry Garr and a net Funicello. I cannot tell you where Terry gar is in this movie, and I cannot tell you where a net Foodedicello is in this movie. I can blame part of that in my face blindness, but I think the other part too, is that these
are just blips. These are just passing things in the nights. Most of these cameos have very little substance to them.
And Rafelson has said in interviews that when finding when finding people to do all of these cameos, he claims he was specifically looking for people who were recognizable to the public but who had in some way been like used up, mistreated, rejected, or sort of grown passed so he wanted this like large cameo chorus of has beens, weirdos, outcasts and who's thats And I don't know if that's exactly what he successfully summoned here, but if that's indeed
what he was going for, I can kind of see it. The movie is frantic, and the lines that characters deliver are not characteristic of the characters as they appear, if that makes any sense. So it's almost like it's almost like people like cameo people show up to do a cameo, but the lines they say could have been randomly reassigned to any of the other people, you know what I.
Mean, Yes, for sure. And the lines don't feel like they're developing anything. Many of them are just non sequitur poetry. In many ways, a lot of them don't actually mean anything other than conveying a feeling or like maybe perhaps just kind of setting the mood for the scene that is to follow.
So there is no way I can mention all the cameos in this movie, but I'm gonna just mention some of the top ones who get some of the some of the most screen time. So you already mentioned Seth that there is Annette Funicello who live nineteen forty two to twenty thirteen. She was an American actress who started out as a child performer on The Mickey Mouse Club. She was a mousekutier, and she would later become a pop singer. In the sixties, she had success with movies
in the beach party subgenre. And I just love how a popular genre of movies.
Used to be the beach Yes.
Sort of a Ken genre, you know, and it makes me think, like, so the other you know her? Her partner in these movies was often Frankie Avalon. So was he sort of the original Ken?
Absolutely? One hundred percent. Absolutely.
We also get Terry Garr who you mentioned born nineteen forty four, American actress and comedian. Acted in lots of TV and movies. She's famously very funny. She was a dancer too. I think before she was an actress and comedian, she was in movies as different as Francis Ford Coppola as The Conversation and Young Frankenstein the Milbrooks movie.
Two questions for you, just real quick, I started to interrupt. One. So was Terry Garr a known entity when she filmed this? I guess we can't answer it. To me, I don't you know we weren't alive at the time, because like to me and I only have you know, hindsight to look at this. To me, I picture like the birth of Terry garr As being young Frankenstein. But that's just because that's what I know her best from. So my
perception is definitely skewed. I wonder if someone in nineteen sixty eight knew who she was and actually real quick a net Funacello, where is she in this movie? I've never once been able to, like pinpoint review in.
The I think she's in the scene where Davy Jones wants to be a boxer, like he could have been a contender. He's boxing with Actually, so he's boxing with Sonny Liston. Okay, another cameo in the movie. So Sonny Liston, who lived nineteen thirty to nineteen seventy American pro boxer. He became a world heavyweight champion in nineteen sixty two after knocking out Floyd Patterson, and then in nineteen sixty four, Sunny Liston was feeded by Muhammad Ali, who is then
known as Cassius Clay. So by the time this movie was made, Liston had already lost his world heavyweight title, and here he's in the scene where he's boxing Davy Jones, and I think Annette Funicello is like Davy Jones' wife who's sitting in the audience watching him. And then I think he's supposed to take a dive. And then they have this emotional scene where she's shown crying asking him. I don't even remember what she's asking him to do, and you see like a hand reach in from from
off screen to like wipe her tears away. It's not her hand.
Okay, I'm learning. This is great.
I'm pretty sure that's her. But so yeah, that's Sunny Liston. That's another one of them. Timothy Carey is in this. He's sort of he's recognizable. He lived twenty nine through ninety four. He was an American actor known for playing like weird, crazy characters. He was in several Stanley Kubrick movies.
He was in The Killing Who's in Paths of Glory, and he was also in films as varied as the Marlon Brando western One Eyed Jackson nineteen sixty one and the nineteen sixty five beach party movie Beach Blanket Bingo starring guess who, Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello. And then finally, sort of, if this film has a villain, the villain might be us the audience, but also the film's villain might be Victor Mature who lived nineteen thirteen to nineteen
ninety nine. He kind of plays Satan like this, Okay, So Victor Mature, the actor was an American actor. He was known as like a suave leading man in movies in the forties and fifties. He was like in the Cecil b de mil biblical epics Samson and Delilah. And in this movie he plays a cosmic trickster who sometimes appears out of the sky, and he seems to want to entrap the monkeys in a world of illusions that
will cause them to forget their true nature. So he's sort of like like an old Hollywood gnostic demi urge.
I saw this movie at a young age originally, so I always considered him to be the jolly green giant of this film. Doesn't quite make sense, but that's still a part of his character in my head whenever I see it.
Yeah, and there are tons of other cameos who I guess we should go ahead and say Frank Zappa's in this for like half a second. He pops in to say a line and then a cow talks after him and his I would say Frank Zappa's vibe in this movie is halfway between Alan Watts and Bertram Gilfoyle.
And it's fun too because Frank Zappa was definitely a friend of the monkeys, and he makes an appearance in the TV show as well, and the scene that he played in the TV show, Frank Zappa plays Mike Nesmith and Mike Nesmith plays Frank Zappa, and I've seen their clip. It's very entertaining.
I've seen this clip. I think they're like they they interview each other as each other, and doesn't Mike Nesmith like try to grill Frank and Zappa as Mike Nesmith on like why their music is so hollow and commercial?
Yes, yes, it's great, it's great, and yeah, yeah, I believe Frank's main thing here. So uh, it's right after Davey has just performed like a soft shoe song and dance, he comes out and Frank Zappa goes, man, that's really white, and then Davy Jones goes, yes, so am I very strange, very strange.
And then a cow talks. What does the cow say.
Oh I cuckoo chew or something, you know, gabba gabba hay, something nonsensical. A lot of my favorite quotes in this movie are complete nonsense.
Okay, So here's the part where we would normally do a full plot breakdown. This movie doesn't really have a plot, so we can't do that, but we will instead try to describe some things that happen. And in the movie. Yeah, it opens with a scene that's like a ribbon cutting ceremony where there are all these police gathered around marines and silver helmets, and then we see a politician get out of a limo. This character is credited as mayor Feedback,
and he comes up to a ribbon. Somebody like hands them a huge pair of scissors and he walks up to a ribbon and this is for the opening of a new arch bridge in the Los Angeles area. This this is apparently, I guess, supposed to be a real location,
like a bridge in Long Beach, California. But the mayor like can't speak into the microphone without creating an infinite echo of feedback, and we just see this like loop of the cop keeps hammering on the microphone and then handing it back to the mayor like it's fine, but
it's still creating all this feedback. So it's like, even this moment seemed kind of thematically significant to me, Like the person who's supposed to speak here knows that it is not going to sound right, but he just keeps getting the mic handed back to him like, yeah, go ahead.
It's an amazing bit of timing from I'm sure the director but as well as the editor to have the confidence to start this, you know what. I'm sure would have been viewed as a children's film in nineteen sixty eight before anyone saw it. I'm sure a lot of fans of the TV show showed up waiting for the TV show in feature length, and this is how they start.
Because it's not even a quick moment. It's what probably like four minutes perhaps of yeah, of this slow pondering view of a mayor trying to talk into a microphone and getting in It's just it's not something that someone would do, by the book, it's a very deliberate decision.
Yeah, and then so before the mayor can cut the ribbon. Oh, here come the monkeys. So there's the introduction, except there is no introduction. They just run through the frame. They run through like tearing through the ribbon, like the finish line of a race, signifying a kind of finality here at the beginning. And then they keep running, with Mickey Dolan's running ahead of the other guys while these loud sirens wail all around them as if they are being pursued.
It suggests a feeling of persecution, but also like, ooh, these boys are bad, but we never see anybody in pursuit at this point at least. But then the monkeys come to the edge of the bridge, and then Mickey Dolan's jumps off the side of the bridge, and this is like not a low bridge, it's like really high up. He just jumps off. That's a way to start a movie.
And audience remember this scene for later, because I definitely want to talk about it at the end again and where it will have a completely different context.
Oh yeah, this does come back. So we see Mickey's body tumble through the air in slow motion, occasionally cutting to long shots of an obvious dummy, but when it's close up, I think it looks like it actually is Mickey and he's jumping on a trampoline, but he plunges into the water below. And then we get our first musical number. And this is a strange choice for an opening musical number because it number one. I think this
song is great. It's one of the best songs in the movie, and I love it, but it's not really the vibe you would expect for the first song in A Monkey's Movie, which you'd think would be a more, I don't know, upbeat, tuneful pop number. Instead, this is kind of a slower tempo psychedelic sound with a big instrumental section with like guitars, cello and other strings, woodwinds, organ,
ringing bells. So it's almost like a day in the life that has all this crazy orchestra in it, just like pounding on the beat while this languid melody plays. And the song is called the Porpoise Song. And seth, I don't know if you want to talk about your thoughts about the song before we discuss the lyrics.
Oh, sure, sure, I love this song. I think it is amongst the Monkey's best tracks. And I grew everything you just said. I love the deliberate choice that the director and the writer and everyone honestly is making at this point to tell the audience get out of here. You know this movie you came to see, We're not going to give it to you. We're going to give you something very strange. Get out of this theater. And I think that's great, And there's actually a really great
future use of this song. If anyone's ever seen the Cameron Crow film Vanilla Sky, this song is very intentionally, very prominently and in multiple locations used in Vanilla Sky. So if you've seen that film, you've heard this song.
I have seen that movie, but it was long ago, and I don't remember the use of this. Do you what part of the movie is it?
I guess I don't want to give anything away, but I will say never mind, but I'll give a very vague illusion. It matches in many ways Mickey's Leap from the Bridge.
Okay, So this song was written by Jerry Goffin and car Old King. Carol King co wrote a couple of the best songs in the soundtrack, and the lyrics seem very much to be a commentary on the creative frustrations of the monkeys who wanted to be musicians on their own terms, but were controlled by a corporate marketing apparatus. So like there's a verse that so the first verse is my mi. The clock in the sky is pounding away.
There's so much to say. A face, a voice, an overdub has no choice, an image cannot rejoice, And so the lyrics end up sort of holding up this idea of like whatever the singer's position is as kind of like an image or an insubstantial reflection opposite the idea of the porpoise. The porpoise, it says, is laughing goodbye, goodbye, goodbye. The porpoise is kind of the image of freedom in the song. It's like a wild animal that can swim away in the ocean. And we hear the sounds of
the porpoise literally like sampled at the end of the song. Uh, and it's just repeatedly. It's like the sounds become mocking because it is clear that the singer will never have freedom like the porpoise does. The singer instead summarizes their situation in the verse that says, clicks clacks, writing on the backs of giraffes for laughs is all right for a while the ego sings of castles and kings and things that go with a life of style, wanting to feel,
to know what is real. Living is a lie. The porpoise is waiting goodbye, goodbye.
See and Sink would never do that. These boys far beyond it and sync.
I think, you know, a lot of psychedelic songs have lyrics that, like, they kind of sound cool. They're more for sonic effect than they are for meaning. But I don't know, I think these are good, meaningful lyrics. It's really clever. The line about clicks and clacks, you know, clicks being the idea of like the clicks that control the band, the clicks of producers and so forth. The claques being clacked meaning like a paid audience members.
And phonetically too, like just just just the automnopic sound of both those things works on that level as well. It's it's deep, it's meaningful, and it sounds good. It's it's excellent songwriting.
But also it's an incredible downer of an opener, good Bye, Goodbye, Goodbye. The point of this song is that we will never have creative freedom, and we are living a life of falsity and illusion.
Get out of the theater, kids, this isn't for you.
So in the water here Dolan's like synks to the bottom and he's like surrounded by coral and here we get extensive use of that. I apologize if this is not exactly the correct way to describe this, but it's I think what would be called a solarization effect. It's where like the colors are all weirdly inverted. It's like sort of saturated and has opposite kinds of contrast intensities
of what the original image would be. I think I read that the part of this was done because like they shot some underwater scenes somewhere out actually in the ocean, but there had just been a hurricane and so the water was really cloudy and so it didn't look right, and so then they ended up having to reshoot things in a swimming pool, and then they used this solarization
technique to kind of cover that up. And it clearly at the time they must have thought, yeah, this looks so psychedelicly cool, but it kind of it wears at it's welcome pretty quick. But anyway down there in the water, like Mickey, he sinks down and then mermaids come to his rescue apparently.
Well, rescue or doom, because you know, depending upon the mythology that we're talking about here. Okay, think about the movie Hook. You know those mermaids they rescued Peter Pan. However, you think about the other kinds of mermaids where they're luring you deeper and deeper into the water so ultimately, you know, make you drown and then consume your flesh. So it could be either it could be either one.
Yeah, so we see one of the mermaids. It appears to be resuscitating Mickey with mouth to mouth.
Hook style, Peter Pan.
Yeah. But then the solarization departs and we can see them clearly again, and the water in the foreground is revealed to be not real water or not water that they're in, but only a fish tank in front of the camera with the mermaid and Mickey behind. And in fact, the mermaid is no longer a mermaid. It's just a regular woman with legs and everything. And she's kissing Mickey on the mouth. Then she walks away from him, revealing
they're in some kind of weird apartment. This might have been correct me if I'm wrong here, Seth, this apartment might have been like a standard part of the Monkey's TV set.
That's what it looks like. It's clearly not the exact same setup, but I think they're at least trying to either reuse the sets or make us feel, hey, we're back at the TV show for a moment. But yeah, yeah, I think that was intentional.
Okay, so it's kind of like that. It's like an apartment that's like the Monkey set, except it has like barbering equipment. There are people in these swiveling barber chairs I don't know, and the rest of the monkeys are there too, And then the lady she kisses all of them in sequence. She kisses Mickey, then Michael Nesmith, then Peter tork Uh, then Davy Jones, and Davy Jones is last. He's in front of this big orange stained glass window
with seagulls screaming outside. And after this, she goes to the door, looking kind of bored and unimpressed, and she's gonna leave the leave the apartment, but they ask her for a verdict. First. I guess this was like a kissing competition, and she's like, eh, even none of you is better than the other yep.
Uh.
And then things start getting really wild.
Uh.
There's another musical number that is credited as Diddy Diego or the War Chance, and this is sung by the Monkeys to the rhythm of the I don't know what this is originally called, but the Hello Operator song. The like the children's children's you know school yard rhyme dah da da da di duh, and so I'm not going to read all the lyrics, but some of the salient ones.
It starts with, Hey, hey, we are the monkeys. You know, we love to please, a manufactured image with no philosophies, and then later in the song it says, you say we're manufactured to that we all agree, so make your choice and will rejoice in never being free. Hey hey, we are the monkeys. We've said it all before. The money's in. We're made of tin, We're here to give
you more. And as they're singing this, the screen you're watching is filling up with miniature TV screens that I think are showing you different scenes of the movie you're about to watch. So they're all cutting in TV screens, showing you stuff that hasn't happened in the movie yet but will. Most of this stuff is silly in nature until the last screen pops up, which happens to show the execution of Nuin Van Limb, which was this important
event in the history of the Vietnam War. It was like the summary execution of a Vietcong officer in Saigon in February nineteen sixty eight in a photo that was captured by the Associated Press photographer Eddie Adams, but also was captured by a film TV camera and became like
this really important image in the American anti war movement. Obviously, this is unbelievably tonally jarring on purpose, and then the film gives way to this overwhelming montage of war and violence imagery, just like bombs exploding and weaponry and war photography, and the monkeys do like a cheerleading chant of give me a W, give me an A, give me an
R to spell war. So it's like, clearly, this incredibly sharp critique of the Vietnam War, making it look clearly intended to make it look barbarous and immoral, and then it cuts straight from that to a goofy trench warfare skit. I don't know how to explain, like I can't think of anything else like this it's so.
Strange, incredibly strange, and I mean there is humor to it, but almost the humor is the existence of humor in such a dire situation like that, like like they are making genuine jokes, but I think the joke ultimately is that they are joking in this war scene when it is not something that should be joked about, which is kind of double layer fascinating.
Yeah, So the trench warfare scene is like a parody of a World War two movie, and this will come up again and again. Like I said, there's like there are all these scenes in the movie that are parodies of sort of square movie and TV genres. They're parodies of westerns, parodies of war movies, parodies of sports movies. And so the World War two movie scene has like these gags about helmets, like Mickey doesn't want to wear his helmet, which actually seems kind of thematically significant given
the opening. And then Peter, I think, or at least there may be multiple of the other monkeys like run out across the disputed zone between the trenches to retrieve a different helmet for Mickey to wear, and eventually that ends with them like fighting a football player who keeps tackling them, but they steal his football helmet and come back and give it to Mickey.
It's beautiful in many ways. In many ways, it's making these connections between warfare and sports and the violence and the one upsmanship and this like push and pull and conflict between us and them, and it's it's fascinating and beautiful and also very nonsensical and silly. It's it's odd.
And then it transitions straight from that to a concert scene where this is just like a It starts off just kind of like a straight concert scene with the band playing on stage. They're playing their instruments and singing in front of a crowd, and the song in this scene is the Mike Nesmith song Circle Sky, written and sung by Mike Nesmith. The whole band is playing on stage in front of an audience of screaming young fans.
Fans shown shrieking and applauding with such intensity it looks almost more like pain and fear than happiness.
Well, let's throw in one bit of context here, which I'm please correct me if I'm not getting this completely correct, But this is kind of like the the series of images that I remember. So the four monkeys. They are trying to like breach this like cave or whatever, you know, in the war scene. Still, so we're still we're still picturing war. And when they get up there, you know,
they're doing things. They throw a grenade in, they charge in as if they're about to attack, and that's the direct transition into the scene you just mentioned of them at their concert, right, So do they have this antagonistic feeling towards their live shows? Do they see their concerts as a battle and their audience as like an enemy that must be bested that that this is this is this is conflict, This is war between them and this screaming horde that is their fan base.
It's odd that would make sense given what happens at the end of this thing, because well, first of all, let's talk about Circle Skide the song, and then when we talk about how the scene finishes. This is a very weird and interesting song. I'd say it's another one of my favorites in the soundtrack. Rhythmically, it's built around a Bo Diddley beat, you know, bump a dump a dump, a dump bump, but it also has this strange descending chromatic scale part after the verses that kind of reminds
me of the riff in Pink Floyd's Interstellar Overdrive. And it's a weird sounding song. It's a lot more rock than most of the other Monkey songs I can think of, if that makes sense.
Definitely, I mean, this is a this is a Nesmuth and one thing that Nesmuth is credited as inventing. And once again, no one invented anything. We're all building off each other's influences, et cetera, et cetera. But one things people give Nesmuth credit for is inventing the rock country genre, that melding, you know, something that we would see later
with like the Birds and Wilco exactly exactly. He's given credit for that, which these early Monkeys songs definitely kind of hint towards, and then he gets really into it later. This is just a quick bonus recommendation. There's a series of three solo albums from Mike Nesmyth that I think you would love, Joe, but I think everyone would love nineteen seventy Magnetic southeteen seventy Loose Salute, nineteen seventy one
Nevada Fighter. All three are this Vibe and so if anyone likes this song and the way this is going that this is like a little hint at where Nesmuth is headed next. And he put out three albums in a row that are all this vibe and are all incredible.
I would say, yeah, and even this may be a very strange comparison, but I would say, if you loosen all of the bolts on this type of music significantly, you end up with the meat puppets.
Right, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely no, it's it's it's incredible song making. It's Mike Nesmith. I'm a huge fan of his. I really really love what he does, and this is a great example of it. And this whole scene is just filmed beautifully as well. This whole like war into concert and then are you ready to go into what it goes into next?
Well, yeah, So they sing this song and it's a great musical number. But at the end of the song, the audience, which again is mostly teenage girls, they assault the stage, attack the band, and apparently kill them, except it reveals that the band are not flesh and blood like. They are ripped to pieces by the audience, revealing that they are actually just puppets. And mannequins.
They were phony the whole time.
But I do want to dwell for a second on how like it's interesting the way the movie really focuses on the intensity of the feeling and the audience for the band. And I don't know how exactly this was filmed, like if they filmed a real a real audience for a Monkey's concert, or if these were just actors, you know, asked to portray screaming. I really don't know what they did here, but you can compare it certainly to live footage of real audiences reacting to the Beatles or any
very popular band. And it just reminds me that I love music. But however much I love music now, there really is no way for me to access the kind of excruciating passion I had for my favorite bands when I was a teenager. There's like a teenage relationship with music that that doesn't come back no matter how hard you try, you know, like the way that you would just scream for a band at that age.
And like the physical output, like especially if like again you're in your young teenage years, you're going to a metal show, a punk show, hardcore show, and that physical feeling you get of being amongst your peers jostling and being in a pit and all that stuff. I can't imagine doing that anymore, Like, not for a second. You know, I'm middle aged. There's not a chance.
But at least in my memory, I strongly identified with the audience in the scene. Is like, I remember that feeling of like caring about a band, even a band that maybe years later I would think was silly. Caring this much, that is just overwhelming passion.
It's wonderful. I'm glad music has that ability. And yeah, you're right, though I think teenagers connect to it in a perfectly teenage way.
Oh but from here it goes on to all kinds of other weird stuff. We get like a channel surfing montage where we see like a disembodied hand clicking a remote control. I don't think I even realized there were remote controls at this point, but clicking a remote and we see on the TV screen like cuts between commercials that highlight American consumerism. We get bits of Bible movies and stuff. There's one moment where it's a Bela Lagosi movie. I don't know what movie this is from. I didn't
look it up. But it's where Bella Lagosi is talking to some guy and the other guy says, sounds like a bunch of supernatural boloney to me, and Bello replies, supernatural, perhaps bloney, perhaps not.
This moment has a very prominent place on the album soundtrack, this spell Lagosi quote, and I love it every time.
But then we go to another very memorable scene. It's the Mickey in the Desert scene where we get Mickey Dollins lost in the desert, wandering around shirtless, thirsty. He comes across a coke machine in the middle of the desert, but it malfunctions and won't give him his coke. I found this scene very funny. Yes, he's like fighting the machine.
And then later in the scene it becomes a parody of Lawrence of Arabia with like an Arabian horseman riding over the sand dunes, and then seth, did you want to describe this part?
Sure? This is a moment we referenced earlier that genuinely made me laugh out loud just yesterday watching this. When the horseman rides up over the dunes, comes all the way up to Mickey, Mickey is confused, perhaps a little apprehensious, a little little worried, and he goes and he's like what and then he gets real close, he goes past, and then there's a big caption on the screen that just saysst some title. Yes, and then he just rides off and that's it. That's the end. I believe.
Mickey once again goes what Yeah. But then there so after that, there's a part where an Italian tank drives up right. The driver gets out of the tank, goes up to Mickey and confirms he is American. He only speaks Italian, I think, but Americano, and Mickey confirms, and then the tank driver gleefully surrenders to Mickey, and then we basically get to watch this huge train of soldiers that are like all of the axis powers lining up to surrender to the monkeys.
It's so what.
Uh?
And then oh, then finally Mickey gets in the tank and uses it to shell the coke machine, which I laughed out loud at.
You know who wasn't laughing was Coca Cola. They got mad and actually requested that this be taken out of the film. But not too long afterwards, Coca Cola actually bought the production company in the studio that made this film, so then they didn't mind so much.
Okay, let's see after this, let's what happened. Oh, it segues into another musical number and not so great scene where the monkeys are like hanging out dressed in Arabic clothing and surrounded by belly dancers. And this is to a company the Peter Torque song can You Dig It, which is set to I don't know what you call this genre, but it was like American psychedelic rock music of the sixties that was supposed to be inflected with I think like an Eastern sound, I.
Believe, right right, Yeah, when all of the white rock and roll musicians bought a sitar and didn't know how to play it, it was that era. Yeah. No, no offense to George Harrison. I'm sure he was doing it better than most.
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, But but this one feels I don't know, this is not I think one of the better musical numbers in the movie.
It feels like a little music video interlude, but one without as much meaning as the previous two Circle Sky and Porpoise song.
Yeah. No offense to the belly dancers, though they do great and we get for sure, no belly cam and all that. But then we transition to another genre parody, this time a Western featuring Terry Garr In this scene where in the middle of the scene here Mickey gets fed up and walks off set, literally tearing a hole
in the painted backdrop. And this is the first of many scenes in the movie where the fourth wall not only breaks, but the monkeys like argue with the director and with the script and express dissatisfaction with the creative direction of the movie. And I think this thing. I don't know if it's happened already in other movies before this, but I feel like this will be a sort of copied in comedy movies that follow, like movies where people break the fourth wall and start arguing with the director.
I wonder if it comes from this.
Yeah, great point. I mean this is pretty early on nineteen sixty eight is pretty early in the history of cinema for things to still be established, like, for example, this is a complete tangent. But something I learned recently, Joe, do you know where the very first fart in American cinema was?
I do not know.
Blazing saddles. Ah, that's how long it took to get a fart in American cinema.
That's really funny. Well, so long, what year was Blazing Saddles, by the way, you know, let's.
Look it up. These are just dumb facts in my head. Let's find out because I was thinking.
Of Blazing Saddles. As doesn't Blazing Saddles have a scene where the actors start arguing with the director?
They do, and that was nineteen seventy four. So perhaps Blazing Saddles was at least in part influenced by, if not this film, other things that were happening around this film.
Yeah, yeah, Or maybe it's just something that's commonly in the air in the sixties and seventies, and it is changing, yeah, changing views about the role of the artist and understanding film as a medium to be critiqued from a step back. I don't know.
It must have been fun though, that at that time you still could do things that were first that things oh felt still unexplored, like it was the wild West. No pun intended that you could just kind of do something and have it be the first time it ever happened on screen.
Oh yeah, And I wanted to mention so there are these scenes where they argue with the director, and in one of these scenes later you see Bob Raefelson and Jack Nicholson as themselves like walk on screen and start arguing with Peter Torrik and stuff.
It's amazing because you immediately recognize Jack Nicholson like it's you know, Jack Nicholson is iconic, of course, and no one looks like Jack Nicholson except Jack Nicholson. Like he is. He's a legend, He's an icon from what I've heard. Dennis Hopper is also in this scene, but I have never been able to spot him, But then again, I also couldn't spot a net Funicello, so that's not saying much.
I did not spot Dennis Hopper either, so I don't know where he is in there.
But there's I do go in this scene though. It's so it's so beautiful, like and just everything that's happening in this scene. This is this is the diner scene, correct, the later scene where they're they're arguing with the with the the director. Yeah, yes, yes, yes, yes.
But let's see other things in the movie. We've already mentioned that the Davy Jones boxing with Sonny Liston scene. There is there's the you're the dummy theme. This is a recurring thing in the movie where the monkeys kind of have a dispute about which one of them is
the dummy, and they decide Peter is the dummy. He's always the dummy, but in fact Peter in the end is revealed to be the one with wisdom right, and this gives it goes into another one of the musical numbers, a song called as We Go Along, written by Carol King and Tony Stern. I don't know who's singing this one. It sounds like a female voice, so it could be
Carol King singing, but I don't know for sure. This one's kind of a hopeful sounding hippie ballad almost kind of reminds me of the vibe of like Both Sides Now. And we see Peter Tork wandering through landscapes of snow flowers, forests, rocky beaches. It's like a land escape video. But then this transitions straight into a montage of advertising billboards, and then we go into the factory scene where the monkeys are touring a factory. What does this factory make? I
think it makes shapes, that's what we see. Yeah, and something that looks like v eight juice that we see guys like coming. It's coming out of spouts and guys are drinking it, and the foreman giving them the factory tour explains that soon everything will be automated and then the only work left to humanity will be figuring out how to amuse itself, and he ominously comments that we should be careful what we wish for.
We're getting closer to that every day.
Yeah, and then the monkeys they like somehow from the factory they get they walk into a giant tu pay and they are like being I think they're being ordered to film a commercial for something having to do with the two pay. Like this is the Dandriff scene? Can you explain this seth, what's going on?
I mean, first of all, how transition from the factory to the dan Driff happens. I'm not entirely sure. There's a few really great transitions where you can kind of like see the A to the B. I'm not sure if I can connect to this one. But so we have a giant and I mean enormous pile of fake large scale hair and the four monkeys dressed all in white, and the director is yelling at them and commanding them, no, roll around, roll on, wrap yourself up in there. You're dan drff, you're dander.
Get in there, get in the hair.
And then I think, once again, we see another example of your my puppets. Just do the stupid thing so I can hurry up and film it, we can move on with our lives. I need you to just do what I'm saying. You don't need to understand it, you don't need to have any commentary. Just roll around in there, get in there.
And then we get a like zoom out where the hair is revealed to be the hair of Victor Mature, the Hollywood actor and the like Hollywood leading man, who's got very nice looking hair, very well coaffed, and his hair is being vacuumed. Was this a common hair grooming procedure in the sixties to vacuum your hair?
To me, have you ever heard of it?
But okay, so his hair is being vacuumed, and then the monkeys get sucked up into the vacuum, and then somehow in this whole sequence, Davy gets separated, and then we get another musical number. It's completely different from anything that's come before, but I think is really good. Davy finds himself alone on a sound stage and begins a wonderful musical number that is visually dazzling by relying on such a simple visual effect, which is editing between two
takes that each have completely inverted colors. So in one take it's a white set with Davy Jones wearing a black suit and a white shirt, and in the other all the colors are the opposite, and they cut back and forth between these two and the effect is fantastic. Also, Davies dancing is really good, and he's got a dancing partner and she's really good too. I was trying to find out who his dancing partner was here, but I'm not sure who it was.
I can say this in many situations throughout this film, if you look into who the female cast member is, it's quite often someone's wife or girlfriend that that happened many times, like Jack Nicholson's girlfriend at the time was in this. I believe a couple of the Monkeys' wives were in this. Like that was a common thread throughout this film was Friends of the Monkeys.
Okay, okay, But then coming to the song itself, this is the one written by Harry Nilson called Daddy's Song, which the song sounds kind of cheerful, it sounds like it's like a classic classic Broadway show tune, but actually it is quite sad. It's a sad narrative about a young boy who remembers looking up to his father, but then his father abandons his family, and he tells about how his mother didn't know how to explain it to her son, and then he reflects on how he thinks
he might never tell his own children. It is a once again, just like a very strange and much darker and more thoughtful song then you would guess from the sound of it or from its context in the film.
And Nielsen actually did this multiple times for them. Another really great one is a song called Cuddly Toy, another one that has this kind of like soft shoe Broadway vibe to it. It's from their album Piss's Aquarius Capricorn and Jones Limited, and once again it's got Davy Jones up front being this kind of like corny dude with like a sad undertone. Like it's that they really had
a good thing going at this point. And do you think that there was a deliberate metaphor here of separating the the one monkey that did stand out that was different from the others. He's one British monkey compared to the three am and monkeys. Ah, yes, he's the song
and dance man. They're all hippies, Like, like, hmmm. I wonder if there was this kind of intentional division, or if perhaps it's as simple as like Davy Jones being like, hey, I want I want a song, you know, give me a chance to get up there and do my thing too.
That's a good point. I hadn't thought of that, but it actually does connect to something that I was talking about with Rachel. So she actually she had more knowledge of the monkeys growing up than I did, so going into this movie she knew more about the monkeys than me. And she pointed out how the movie kind of messes with the character of each monkey. So like Davy the cute one is the fighter in the movie. He's the guy who's boxing and we constantly see him actually doing
like doing karate and trying to fight people. Peter the supposed dummy or the kind of like the naive one is the wise enlightened one in this movie. Mickey the funny one is shown having very like dark moods and is placed in a very dark context. And then the odd one out here is kind of Mike. I'm not sure how Mike fits this, like playing with the character.
He does still seem pretty serious in the movie. I don't know if you have thoughts on that, but that seemed interesting to me that the movie takes time to single each one out at various points and then kind of invert them for sure.
And yeah, you know, I think you're completely right that Mike Nesbeth doesn't quite get the subversion. I don't think anything really happens to him. Maybe it's the fact that in general he's seen as like the leader of the monkeys, and in this film he doesn't really lead them at any point, like he is in many ways just kind of a passive character. But that's a stretch that's me really reaching for it. Now.
There are a bunch of other sequences in the movie. There's the horror movie sequence with like an eye behind a mirror. That's great stuff. Yeah, like Davy season eye behind a mirror in the bathroom and then he tries to show it to other people but they can't see it. There's that leads into a kind of go go dancer freak out scene set to a song called do I Have to Do This all over again? That title's kind
of on the nose from the themes. There's also this whole thing with like the monkeys searching for quote the answer, and there is a scene where like a guru inspires Peter to reflect on how we cannot tell reality from illusion. And then when we get to the ending, we actually return to the beginning. Seth, I know you wanted to talk about the ending. Do you do you want to take this here?
Sure? So at the end, we actually at first aren't even sure that we're re entering the beginning again, because it starts with basically all the characters from all the scenes we've seen all the way up until now pursuing
the four monkeys. They're chasing them. Some of the characters are feeling quite you know, antagonistic towards them chasing them around, et cetera, et cetera, And eventually we do start to put it together that oh, they're back on the bridge again, and we're basically seeing the same scene from the beginning, except that we just have context. Now we see who the chaser is, the camera is letting us see this
mob behind them. So in the beginning, if you're just watching it without context, it feels like the monkeys committed suicide on their own, that they felt the need, that they were like, the monkeys are over, let's go, and they just jump off the bridge. Now with this extra context, we can see that they were being pursued, that they were being forced to do this, that in many ways, we, the audience or perhaps society at large, forced them to jump.
That we ended the monkeys, not the monkeys. The monkeys they were just they were just dealing with what we gave them, that they were reacting to our pursuits and anger and whatever. Maybe even our need for the monkeys caused the monkeys to have to end. But yeah, it's it's that it's our fault. We ended the monkeys, not the monkeys.
It's our fault. And it's the creators of the monkey's fault because it's like the filmmaking apparatus is also chasing them, all of the actors and everything.
It's everyone's fault except the monkeys. Yeah.
Yeah, And so like they jump off, and but we get a return of the porpoise song. So there is this this idea of the freedom of the porpoise, and you wonder if maybe it's going to be a happy ending where they actually do become like the porpoise, and they, you know, when they hit the water, maybe they swim
out to sea and become free on their own. But instead, when we last see them in the water, and then it is you're teased with this idea of them becoming like wild animals, you know, marine mammals with freedom, but instead we realize that they are in fact in a fish tank on the back of a truck being lorded
over by Victor Mature. This like this devilish demi urge figure who's like sitting there in a director's chair, smoking a pipe and grinning wickedly as they are as they are carried away on a trailer presumably to be I don't know, like shelved and archived or something, or maybe.
Put in a zoos. People can can continue to stare at the monkeys, you know, you know, it would be a fun art project that would actually be relatively easy. Think of this as like a museum art installation where you walk through and you see like those little like side screening rooms where they're showing like an art film, you can sit down and watch for a minute and
then get up and walk out. You could easily turn this movie into an infinite loop that they are pursued and then when they jump, you just seamlessly edited that back into the original jumping off of the bridge, and it just goes again and again and again. This could very easily be an infinite loop of a movie, and I'd love to see that. I wonder how many times they can make it through.
That's a great idea. Yeah, organize it, Seth. You put it together, get the rights.
I'll set aside some gallery space and yeah.
All right, Well, I think that is all I have to say about head Seth. Do you have anything else you want to talk about before we wrap up here?
No, but I will say if anyone if this is their first introduction to the Monkeys, I'm sure there are people in the audience who are very familiar with the Monkeys and some that have never seen anything from them. I genuinely do recommend several Monkeys albums. But here's like the big thing to keep in mind. The Monkeys actually barely existed like the in like the Grand Timeline of life. When they were having like a successful artistic output. It was such a small window. The first album they put
out was in nineteen sixty six. This album is in nineteen sixty eight, and in that window they released one, two, three, four, five six albums and they had to already go through an entire upheaval of people thinking that they're frauds and
fighting back for creative control. That whole window of sixty six to sixty eight is just two years, and yet it encompasses this whole enormous situation that just do It's it's it's similar to when you look at the Beatles and you see how much they accomplished and they short time as a band because they're releasing more than one album a year. In sixty seven, they released three albums. In sixty eight they released two. Oh I'm talking about
the Monkeys again, by the way. So I do think it's important to look into them as just a musical act. And I will say, personally, my three favorite albums of theirs are I mentioned it briefly. Pisce's Aquarius, Capricorn and Jones Limited from nineteen sixty seven, The Birds, the Bees
and the Monkeys from nineteen sixty eight. That one's kind of their wide album because they all had their own very independent ideas of what they wanted their next album to be, so they all kind of split off, produced their own things, and then cobbled it back together like a quilt, which is pretty fun. Then, oh, of course, of course. And then in nineteen sixty eight Head of Course. I think that's also a wonderful album, which there are
two versions of. Both are good, but the original version, the one Jack Nicholson Babe's, that's the preferred version.
And hey, folks, if you would like to hear Seth talk about music like this all the time, you can subscribe to his other podcast, Rusty Needles Record Club. Seth, do you want to pitch the show? What's the deal with Rusty Needles Record Club?
I love to It's an old style podcast, back in the days, pre advertising, pre gosh, what else do podcasts have now? Pre celebrities, pre true crime, none of that stuff. It's the old style. We just sit around in chitchat for a while and then it's over and much like this show, which I really appreciate. There's a big difference between old style podcast and new style podcast. And anyway, that's a whole nother thing. Rusty Needles Record Club is a show where it's like a book club, but for music.
Each episode is a different album me and my co host. We listen to it, we talk about it, we break it down based on facts, based on our feelings, and then we give the album a review. But ultimately it's just a place for people who love music to kind of get some music conversation in their ears, to have like a nice relaxed parasocial relationship with some other people.
If you don't happen to have other friends around you that you can talk about things like what your favorite Monkeys album is, I'll do that for you.
Well, chipchat, the show is Rusty Needles Record Club. And there's an apostrophe before the s on Needles right exactly.
This is Rusty Needle. He owns the record club.
Yes, there you go wherever podcasts are found. Yep, yep, look it up. Well, thank you so much for joining me today, Seth. It has been a real pleasure to have you back on the show again. And let's do it again in the.
Future absolutely anytime.
All right, that does it for today. Huge thanks again to Seth Nicholas Johnson for joining us. If you are new to the show and would like to check us out, why not subscribe to Stuff to Blow your Mind wherever you get your podcasts. We offer a variety of different things on each day of the week. Our core episodes usually about science or science and culture in some way or on Tuesdays and Thursdays. On Mondays we read listener mail.
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