The Monkees – Good Times! Concert
Jun. 2nd, 2016 10:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroWhat do I get my father for his 65th birthday? Tickets to see a band he first listened to 50 years ago!
If it was impressive that Shawn Colvin is playing concerts at 60, the performances by Peter Tork (74) and Micky Dolenz (71) are even more so. They fronted an eight-person band (that included Micky’s sister Coco Dolenz on backing vocals), each played multiple instruments, and even did some of the goofy physical comedy you’d expect from them.
Davy Jones died a few years ago, but they pulled a few of his vocal tracks out of the vault (complete with Wayback Machine joke) and played along to them. It’s interesting, actually, as the Monkees is a band that had four lead singers: There are songs that are explicitly “Davy” songs or “Mike” songs and they call out how they’re handling them. Which means they handled a Mike song in a particularly amusing way: They called Nesmith on Skype, put him on the big screen, and had him play a song from his den.
(I thought that latter bit interesting because usually when the members of a band don’t want to tour together, there’s some drama or bad blood and they don’t speak or whatever. This was clearly more along the lines of Nesmith is 73, he’s filthy rich because his mom invented Liquid Paper, he didn’t want to schlep to do the tour, but everybody’s still friends and they wanted to include him.)
Part of the point of this tour was to promote their new album, Good Times!, which includes songs by a number of modern artists, including Adam Schlesinger of Fountains of Wayne—who came on stage to do that song with them, and apparently fulfilled a lifelong rockstar dream of playing onstage with the Monkees.
If I had any complaints, it’s that the balance of the microphone sometimes drowned out the vocals, which wasn’t a big deal on the songs (it’s not like we don’t know all the lyrics already) but meant we lost some of the patter. There was a great line about early on when the Monkees didn’t play their own instruments, and noting that they often still don’t—two of the guitars were borrowed from friends and the drums were rented.
Also, Dolenz had a line about a party they attended with the Beatles many years earlier, “I was there, and I’m told I had a good time.” Tork noted that he’d been trying to use that line in a song for decades, and they then played a song from the new album that used it.
Randomly amusing: The contrast of Dolenz’s giant hair in the videos and the fact that he now never takes off his hat because he’s totally bald.
Overall: It was a nice mix of older and newer material with some fun accompanying videos and the band obviously having a great time. Good show, would monkey around again.
If it was impressive that Shawn Colvin is playing concerts at 60, the performances by Peter Tork (74) and Micky Dolenz (71) are even more so. They fronted an eight-person band (that included Micky’s sister Coco Dolenz on backing vocals), each played multiple instruments, and even did some of the goofy physical comedy you’d expect from them.
Davy Jones died a few years ago, but they pulled a few of his vocal tracks out of the vault (complete with Wayback Machine joke) and played along to them. It’s interesting, actually, as the Monkees is a band that had four lead singers: There are songs that are explicitly “Davy” songs or “Mike” songs and they call out how they’re handling them. Which means they handled a Mike song in a particularly amusing way: They called Nesmith on Skype, put him on the big screen, and had him play a song from his den.
(I thought that latter bit interesting because usually when the members of a band don’t want to tour together, there’s some drama or bad blood and they don’t speak or whatever. This was clearly more along the lines of Nesmith is 73, he’s filthy rich because his mom invented Liquid Paper, he didn’t want to schlep to do the tour, but everybody’s still friends and they wanted to include him.)
Part of the point of this tour was to promote their new album, Good Times!, which includes songs by a number of modern artists, including Adam Schlesinger of Fountains of Wayne—who came on stage to do that song with them, and apparently fulfilled a lifelong rockstar dream of playing onstage with the Monkees.
If I had any complaints, it’s that the balance of the microphone sometimes drowned out the vocals, which wasn’t a big deal on the songs (it’s not like we don’t know all the lyrics already) but meant we lost some of the patter. There was a great line about early on when the Monkees didn’t play their own instruments, and noting that they often still don’t—two of the guitars were borrowed from friends and the drums were rented.
Also, Dolenz had a line about a party they attended with the Beatles many years earlier, “I was there, and I’m told I had a good time.” Tork noted that he’d been trying to use that line in a song for decades, and they then played a song from the new album that used it.
Randomly amusing: The contrast of Dolenz’s giant hair in the videos and the fact that he now never takes off his hat because he’s totally bald.
Overall: It was a nice mix of older and newer material with some fun accompanying videos and the band obviously having a great time. Good show, would monkey around again.
