![]() For Kirshner’s part, he got fired from the show after releasing the Neil Diamond-written Monkees single “ A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You” without authorization from the show’s producers. The Monkees, Michael Nesmith in particular, resented the hell out of Kirshner, the executive who spent years preventing them from being in charge of their own musical destinies. In 1968, the Monkees TV show was cancelled, and the Monkees themselves made Head, a surreal and perplexing movie that Jack Nicholson co-wrote. ![]() They started making their own decisions, pivoting to bugged-out psychedelic pop music. They fought and fought for their independence. They wanted to be a real band, and they did not like the way they’d become a punchline in the music world. Kirshner hardly ever let the actors who’d been cast as Monkees play on records, and those records often ended up being truly great. Those same TV producers hired the producer Don Kirshner to oversee the Monkees’ music. TV producers had assembled the four fresh-faced actors in 1966, casting them in a sitcom about the struggles of a go-nowhere band. The Monkees were not a real band until they became one. What "Sugar, Sugar" offers is a complete escape from reality, sticky-sweet feel-good music so blatantly commercial and artificial it wasn't even attributed to three-dimensional performers - coming at a time when counterculture credibility meant seemingly everything, it would be almost tempting to call the Archies revolutionary if that didn't defeat the entire purpose of what they were all about.In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present. The song is the very essence of simplicity, a classically constructed pop record with an undeniably infectious melody and charmingly inane puppy-love lyrics nothing revelatory and nothing earth-shattering, which is precisely the point - as the "bubblegum" appellation suggests, it's total ear candy, and lord knows it struck a chord, selling over six million copies. Conceived by producer Don Kirshner following his firing by another pre-fab (albeit flesh-and-blood) group, the Monkees, and inspired by the long-running Archie comic book line and subsequent animated series, the cartoon band was in reality a group of session musicians including vocalists Ron Dante, Ellie Greenwich, Andy Kim, and Toni Wine Kim co-authored "Sugar, Sugar" with Jeff Barry, Greenwich's husband and longtime songwriting partner. For better or worse, "Sugar, Sugar" and the countless bubblegum records which came before and after didn't reflect their times, but rejected them - escapist fare at its purest and most palatable. With the Archies' "Sugar, Sugar," pop music moved 180 degrees away from the overtly political, consciousness-expanding aesthetic which emerged during the Summer of Love toward a calculated simplicity and innocence not heard since the years prior to the British Invasion. In fact, it wasn't even the work of a real band at all. In spite of (or, more likely, because of) the momentous cultural turning points which stretched across 1969 - among them, Woodstock, Vietnam, the moon landing, and the beginning of the Nixon presidency - the biggest-selling pop single of the year was not the product of a generational torch bearer like the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, or Bob Dylan.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |