Monkees Musical Group

BWW Interviews: Hey Hey It's The Monkees' Davy Jones

"You know I used to be a heartthrob and now I'm a coronary," jokes Davy Jones about his long-running epic career in show business. Yet the venerable entertainer shows no signs of slowing down any time soon. Along with his current concert tour with fellow Monkees band mates Peter Tork and Micky Dolenz , he is making TV guest appearances, hosting an upcoming PBS special on artists and songs of the 60's and even co-writing a musical theater piece that he hopes to bring to the stage in the very near future. Even with this hectic agenda, he still manages to maintain that spunky, quick-witted charm that has made him one of the most iconic musical idols of all time.

Jones has worked in the entertainment business most of his life, beginning in the early 60's when he starred as the Artful Dodger in the West End production of "Oliver". The show was a huge success, and Davy was invited to cross the Atlantic and join the show on Broadway where he received a Tony award nomination for Featured Actor. To this day, Jones remains humble about the achievement. "I've never been a terribly ambitious actor because I always thought my acting skills were just a natural thing when I was a kid. And with the Tony nomination, well I was lucky, you know. Anyway, if I had won it, I probably wouldn't have known what to say and I'd probably wouldn't have been able to be seen or reach the microphone at the time!"

During the Broadway run, Jones and the cast of "Oliver" were invited to perform on the Ed Sullivan Show on a night that would later make television history. Sullivan's other guests that evening were none other than The Beatles, making their U.S. debut. "I just watched what they were doing from behind the curtain and I thought ‘I want to do this. Look at all those girls! ", Jones recalls. "And here I thought you couldn't get any bigger or better than the standing ovations we were getting in "Oliver"!"

As a result of his Broadway success, Jones was offered a contract with Columbia Pictures and set out for the West coast, where he eventually auditioned for a new TV show about a pop-rock group called The Monkees. The producers sensed instant chemistry among Jones and his future band mates Micky Dolenz , Peter Tork and Michael Nesmith and he was quickly offered the role. The series ran from 1965 through 1971, with Jones singing lead vocals on many of the group's biggest hits, including "I Wanna Be Free" and "Daydream Believer".

Monkee Music 3: Headquarters « Sci-Ence! Justice Leak!

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was a huge commercial success but (in the opinion of at least some of the Monkees, most vocally Nesmith) an artistic failure, the working relationship between the band (other than Davy Jones) and Don Kirshner, Screen Gems’ music supervisor reached breaking point.

The band were growing increasingly embarrassed by attacks on them for not playing the instruments on their records (attacks which ignored the fact that this was true for the majority of successful American bands of the time) and Nesmith intensely disliked the bubblegum music the band had been producing up until this point. Tork, meanwhile, had auditioned for the TV show because he wanted to be in a proper rock band, and wanted the four of them to play together, while Dolenz wanted to show solidarity with his colleagues.

The resulting rows, with Kirshner wanting the band to shut up and take the money and do as they were told, and the Monkees insisting on making their own music, led to Kirshner losing his job with Screen Gems and the Monkees being allowed to record as a band.

Headquarters was the first – and as it turned out, the only – album the band produced as a band. With producer Chip Douglas (who had never produced before, having previously been bass player in The Turtles), the band cut the basic tracks live, with Tork and Nesmith handling all guitars and keyboards (with a little help from Dolenz), Dolenz on drums, and Jones on hand percussion.