Where Are They Now: The Monkees

Here they come...walking down the street. The Monkees were the Naked Jonas Brothers Band from Montana of their day. Okay, that was a cruel. The Monkees expressed a thousand times more humor and intelligence in just one episode than it is likely the Naked Brothers Band, the Jonas Brothers Band and Hannah Montana will express throughout their Nickelodeon careers. At the height of Beatlemania in the late 1960s some clever writers and producers managed to find a network executive who was interested in expanding the concept of the 1960s sitcom and create a prefab rock group that weekly engaged in the same kind of offbeat and often surreal humor made so popular by that Fab Four from Liverpool in their movies A Hard Day's Night and, especially, Help!

The Monkees were, in case you don't remember: Mike Nesmith, Peter Tork, Davy Jones and Micky Dolenz and at their height they were actually outselling the Beatles. In fact, for a brief period of time The Monkees actually outsold the Beatles and the Rolling Stones combined. There is a standard rumor that the members of the Monkees could not play musical instruments at all. That is a bald-faced lie. In fact, Peter Tork was capable of playing a variety of stringed instruments quite well. All four members were musically inclined, although none of them had ever played drums before. The members of the Monkees actually did all their own performing during live shows, but a constant battled with highly overrated musical kingpin Don Kirshner kept them from being recorded for the live tracks. Eventually, a feud developed between Mike Nesmith and Don Kirshner that would erupt into a full scale rebellion.