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THE MONKEES - LISTEN TO THE BAND (1968)

View attachment 543999

Side One
I'll Be Back Upon My Feet
My Share Of The Sidewalk
As We Go Along
Lady's Baby [1]
Tear The Top Right Off My Head
Magnolia Simms

Side Two
Little Girl
Someday Man
Merry Go Round
You And I
Rosemarie
Goin' Down
Listen To The Band

"There was a point up until the mid-60s when teen pop and pioneering rock were pretty much the same thing. Just as The Monkees started, those two strands started to separate. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that if Brian Wilson hadn't finished Smile, that separation would have come much earlier. There were rumours that when Brian was hospitalized, the new Beach Boys album would be cancelled as no-one knew how to finish it without him.

"But it wasn't a miracle. We weren't exactly accepted by the heads, y'know, we were just less unacceptable. The attitude from San Francisco turned to kind of patronizing instead of hostile. So instead of the counterculture using us as an example of everything wrong with pop, they used it to build themselves up. 'The counterculture is so amazing, even The Monkees want to be part of it'. The old 'they can't play their instruments' thing was replaced with 'they learned to play their instruments'. That was bullshit, too, but any port in a storm, right?

"So with all that happening, Listen To The Band was The Monkees album it was OK to like."

[1] Take it as read that ITTL, Peter hasn't spent endless sessions recording this one, meaning there isn't the bad blood between him and Nez over the cost