Dolenz celebrates Monkees on tour

SAN DIEGO — Micky Dolenz is the last Monkee standing.

That makes his current “The Monkees Celebrated by Micky Dolenz” tour a bittersweet affair for the 78-year-old music, TV and film veteran.

The other three former Monkees are all deceased. Davy Jones died in 2012, Peter Tork in 2019 and Mike Nesmith in 2021. Re-creating the music the four made together enables Dolenz to pay heartfelt homage to the group and celebrate its legacy with fans. But the demise of the other Monkees is on his mind, even as he celebrates them in song.

“Oh, it’s very bittersweet,” Dolenz said.

“The first few shows I did of this tour, it was tough to get through them — especially if I watched the (archival Monkees’) videos. If I don’t turn around on stage to watch the videos, I’m OK. But, with some of the videos, yeah, there are a lot of memories that come up.”

Dolenz was just 20 when he was cast in 1965 alongside Jones, Nesmith and Tork for “The Monkees.” The TV comedy series about the adventures of a young pop-rock band was inspired, in part, by The Beatles’ feature films “Help!” and “A Hard Day’s Night.”

Almost as quick as you can sing “Here we come!” — to invoke the opening line of the show’s theme song — the fictional band featured on “The Monkees” was catapulted to stardom.

The Monkees scored nine Top 40 singles in less than two years. Three of them were chart-topping hits, including “Last Train to Clarksville” and the Neil Diamond-penned “I’m a Believer,” both of which featured Dolenz on lead vocals. The group’s third No. 1 song, the Jones-sung “Daydream Believer,” was written by John Stewart, formerly of the Kingston Trio.

Outsold The Beatles and Rolling Stones

In 1967, recordings by the Monkees outsold those by The Beatles and Rolling Stones, combined. The made-for-TV band played sold-out national concert tours. The not-yet-well-known Jimi Hendrix was briefly their opening act, at Dolenz’s suggestion.

Before long, some members of the Monkees were hanging out in London with The Beatles. Back in Los Angeles, Dolenz lived in Laurel Canyon, where his immediate neighbors included David Crosby, Alice Cooper and the Turtles. Members of Three Dog Night and the Lovin’ Spoonful also had homes nearby.

“And I could see Joni (Mitchell) and (Graham) Nash’s house, with the two cats in the yard, across the way,” Dolenz noted with a chuckle. “It was a very small community and nobody was more than 10 minutes away.”

He chuckled again.

“The Monkees have given me a great life. The downsides — like losing anonymity because of fame — don’t even come close to the upsides.”

New book

Dolenz has a new, photo-fueled book — the 500-page “They Told Me I Had a Good Time” — due out later this year. He also has a new EP of four songs by the band R.E.M. scheduled for release Nov. 3 that was announced more than a week after this interview took place.

Dolenz recently spoke with the San Diego Union-Tribune for more than an hour from his home in Calabasas. His comments have been edited for length and clarity.

We last spoke in 2015 to preview your “A Little Bit Broadway, A Little Bit Rock ‘n’ Roll” show, and you said: “It’s scaring me to death! It’s way outside my comfort zone.” How did that go?

Well, very well, as a matter of fact. Better than I expected. It was outside of my comfort zone in the sense that I hadn’t sung many of these songs outside of my own shower! But I was familiar with them and my mom had sung many of them in big bands and on Broadway.

Any update on a proposed Monkees musical for Broadway?

(Sighs) There have been so many inquiries I can’t even tell you. Rhino Records owns the rights to the Monkees. They own the music, logo, the images, the clips of the show. The only thing they don’t own is domestic transmission rights to the TV series, which Sony owns. Rhino has been very positive and supportive of a possible musical. Whenever anybody calls about doing one, Rhino directs them to me and I talk to them. Invariably, they want to do a jukebox musical, which doesn’t interest me. I think there’s more there. I don’t know exactly what, but I think there is more.

What do you and the estates of the three other Monkees own?

Nothing. We never did. Our weekly salary from the TV show was $400. But I get royalties from the records and I’ve made a lot of money. And here we are, 62 years later, and you’re interviewing me about the Monkees and I’m on tour, doing Monkees’ music.

What’s the nature of your tour?

I do a tribute to each of the guys, individually. And I tell a little story about each and then show some wonderful videos. A lot of them are from my personal archives that nobody has ever seen before. And I revisit our third album, (1967’s) “Headquarters,” which we wrote all of ourselves. That was when we put our collective foot down, and said: “We want to record all our own music and have control.’ We’d never had control over anything up to that point especially the music, and “Headquarters” came out very well.

So, you are doing spoken and musical tributes to each of the other Monkees?

Yeah. It’s not like a history of the group, so much as me sharing a little of who they were to me, their characters and their personalities. Then I say: “Ladies and gentlemen, Peter Tork!” and the video starts.

Are you doing the lead vocals that the other Monkees sang?

Well, no. But the fans know very well who sang what song, and it doesn’t make any difference because they want to hear the songs. So, when I do “Daydream Believer,” everyone knows David sang that. But it was the Monkees group that performed them, with me, Peter and Mike.

Is it true that Stephen Stills auditioned for the Monkees, but was didn’t make the cut because he had bad teeth?

I’m not sure about the teeth, but he absolutely did audition. I’ve heard the teeth thing before. But I’m not so sure about that, because anybody can get their teeth fixed. But he did audition and told his roommate about it. And the roommate — who was working as a dishwasher at a folk music club in Long Beach — was Peter Tork.

With the passing of time, what do the Monkees mean to you now that they didn’t 50 years ago or even 10 years ago?

That’s a good question. My feelings really haven’t changed about it. I’ve become a little more aware of the impact it had, and still has, on the cultural landscape of the United States and other places around the world. But I take credit for only one fourth of that. I was just one cast member. It was a TV show about a group. And there were three other cast members, and the producers, directors, songwriters and (studio) musicians. It takes a village. When I did the pilot for “The Monkees” I was in college, studying to be an architect. I didn’t quit school until the show got picked up, because I knew most pilots didn’t get picked up.

The Monkees and the TV show that spawned the group were looked down upon in the 1960s by hippies and the counterculture, and were dismissed as “not being cool” and as “the prefab four.” But over time, the regard for the group seems to have risen, along with its credibility.

That is extremely accurate. “The Monkees” wasn’t a band. It was a TV show about a band. If you understand that premise, everything else makes a lot more sense. It was a TV show, a comedy, about a band that wanted to be the Beatles but — in the TV show — never made it. Rock ‘n’ roll people took rock ‘n’ roll very seriously in those days, and the hippies just didn’t get us.

Were you a hippie?

Well, it depends on your definition of the term. If it meant you lived on a commune in a VW van, then no. But was I part of that generation and lifestyle? That’s a tricky question, and a good one, because: What is a hippie?

I wore the clothes of the time. And as Timothy Leary wrote, “The Monkees” TV show made it OK for kids in Middle America to wear bell bottoms and headbands and paisley. And their parents saw we were doing that and that we were not communists.