Fifty-six is such an odd number for an anniversary. Fifty and fifty-five I get but fifty-six is sort of awkward.
What am I babbling about? Well fifty-six years ago today The Monkees fifth consecutive (and last) Top Ten album was released on Colgems Records called “The Birds, The Bees & The Monkees”.
Since it’s such an odd anniversary I’m really going to call this blog a celebration of the album rather than just another anniversary post.
By early 1968 The Monkees were at the apex of their recording career. Their first four albums (“The Monkees”, “More of the Monkees”,”Headquarters” and “Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones, Ltd.”) all hit the top of the Billboard 200 charts with each one selling well over a million copies.
In fact The Monkees were so hot that their first two albums sold over five million copies each while their third and fourth albums sold well over two million copies a piece. That’s A LOT of records to be sold and in such a short space of time between late 1966 through early 1968. It’s kind of mind boggling actually.
I won’t go into The Monkees complete history here, you can read several of my previous blog posts for more Monkees info, but needless to say their fifth album had some large shoes to fill.
By the time the group released “The Birds, The Bees & The Monkees” they had gone from doing mainly vocals only on the first two albums which were helmed by music supervisor Don Kirshner featuring the top studio musicians of the time to being a full-flegged recording and touring self-contained group.
(Note: To be fair, The Monkees were the cast of a TV show called “The Monkees” and were not actually a “group” at the outset of the project thus while they did indeed become a recording and performing group, at the beginning they were simply required to provide vocals for songs to be featured on their television show)
For their third record “Headquarters” things were switched up as the group were not only featured as vocalists but they managed to gain the right to provide their own instrumental work as well as and write a good portion of the songs on the album to boot.
Their fourth album “Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones, Ltd.”, some say the group’s pinnacle as a recording act, was a mixed-mode album as group member Peter Tork liked to call it where they played some of the instruments while some were provided by the studio pros of the era though the group had more control of the material recorded.
Both of their third and fourth albums were produced by ex-Turtle member Chip Douglas and are now seen as two of the best albums the group ever created.
Their fifth album though saw the group sort of return to the Kirshner era in the sense that they used a lot of studio pros for the instrumental work but had more input in the material they recorded. The main thing that had changed since their last two albums is that while they had become a bona fide group on their last two albums they were basically solo acts within the structure of The Monkees by 1968.
(Note 2: Weirdly enough “The Birds, The Bees & The Monkees” is the only original studio album by The Monkees to feature two Top Ten hits – “Daydream Believer” from late 1967 and “Valleri”)
The main thing that hindered the success of the group’s fifth record is that their television show “The Monkees” was cancelled shortly after the album came out and most of the songs from the album were not featured on the show thus the exposure of the material was limited in comparison to their first four albums.
Though “The Birds, The Bees & The Monkees” did manage to eventually sell a million copies it only managed to climb to No. 3 on the Billboard 200 and was seen as a step down from their previous work both commercially and artistically at the time of its release.
Another thing that may have hindered the albums success, relative to their previous albums, is that the group’s main audience liked the more pop oriented Monkees sound while by early 1968 the group wanted to record material more in line with the times.
Songs like “Writing Wrongs”, “Auntie’s Municipal Court” and “Magnolia Sims” for example, all Nesmith tunes, had a much more psychedelic sound and were far less accessible to a younger audience which may have alienated some of their fanbase at the time.
In hindsight it can be said that the album may have been too much of mixed bag for the younger crowd that bought Monkees records but over the years it has grown somewhat in esteem especially with the release of the Rhino box set a few years ago which featured some truly terrific outtakes recorded at the same time as the album material.
Personally I really love the quirkiness of the album and while not their best it’s still one heck of a good album and a fun time capsule of some classic mid-‘60s pop.
I remember first hearing my brother’s copy of the album from 1968 – at the tender age of two I might add – but I got my own copy of the album in 1971 when my mother bought me one that was in the discount bins at Kmart. Of course it was an original Colgems stereo copy which has now unfortunately seen better days.
Above and below I am sharing my current original copies – a first press stereo in the shrink, an original stereo UK pressing as well as a U.S. stereo promo copy.
Oddly enough though the Colgems copy in the shrink is near mint and never played until I opened it, it still has some distortion especially on “Daydream Believer” which is disappointing though it mainly sounds very good.
Surprisingly the UK stereo copy sounds very nice and maybe a tad better than the Colgems copy as it had no distortion at all throughout. My promo copy has the same issues that the other Colgems stereo copy has so to me the UK one is a winner sound wise.
Of course I’d love to have a Colgems mono copy but I have never seen one other than expensive copies on eBay. The mono mix has a lot more punch than the stereo and I consider it a must listen if you like this album.
Some of my favorites on the album include Davy Jone’s “Dream World”, “Daydream Believer” (a classic pop tune) and “The Poster” as well as the Dolenz sung “I’ll Be Back Upon My Feet” (pop perfection), “P. O. Box 9847”, “Zor and Zam” and “Auntie’s Municipal Court” (my favorite song on the album) plus Nesmith’s epic and utterly spooky “Writing Wrongs”.
“The Birds, The Bees & The Monkees” holds a strange place in the Monkees canon as it’s not quite the album that preceded it but I love it in its own right and after all this time it has become one of my favorite Monkees albums.
If you really want a better handle of where The Monkees were at in 1968 the epic 3 CD box set of this album from Rhino Records from 2010 truly shows the great material the group were recoding at the time but was unfortunately passed over and remained unreleased for decades. If you can find one it’s well worth your time discovering the gems that lay hidden throughout that terrific set.
So today let’s celebrate the release of this quirky yet loveable album from fifty-six years ago. If you’ve never heard it then now’s the perfect time to discover it.
That’s all for now. Until next time be well and healthy and see you soon!
Records, CDs and Music: 