Last Train to Clarksville ....Daydream Believer ..... and a romantic moment accompanied by the Monkees

Now you can be quite sniffy about the Monkees, which were an assembled band for television, and featured as such on NBC television from 1966-1970.

1967

I first saw them sometime around 1966-1967 on the BBC when the show went out on an early evening Saturday slot.

I have to admit to my shame that I publicly followed the line that they were not serious musicians, but secretly I liked them.  Some of the songs have survived the test of time, and are still exciting to listen to while the story lines were funny.

But that is not surprising given some of the songs and scripts were written by accomplished and well known professionals, added to which some of the Monkees themselves became popular musicians.

I suppose my time with them will have been during 1966 and early 1967 when I was dating Jennifer who like me went to Crown Woods.  Jennifer’s father was in the army and she was one of the students who spent term time living in the Lodge which was attached to the school.

1969

So on some Saturday nights we spent a few hours in the common room watching the Monkees and other things before I was banished before lights out ….. or I suspect when she had enough of me.

Such is the twisty turny time of adolescent love.

Even now some of those Monkess songs take me right back to that period of intense emotions with the girl I thought I had fallen in love with in that room.

And in a year and a bit on after we had long parted it was where I sat some of my A levels, and during the efforts to construct an essay on King Lear or Disraeli my mind would wander back to the daft moments with Micky Dolenz, Michael Nesmith and Peter Tork and  Davy Jones of the Monkees and Jennifer.

Location; the 1960s

Pictures, the Monkees, 1967, and 1969, from the collection of NBC