The Monkees are currently touring Australia on the back of their fine new album Good Times! A multi-media experience, the show sees Micky Dolenz and Peter Tork backed by a band who perfectly capture the 1960’s west-coast pop sound. The Monkees’ set list has few peers and the show includes a lot of hits, material from the margins and a smattering of new material. Micky Dolenz is still in possession of one of the finest voices in the history of American rock and pop. As the Monkees’ mark their 50th anniversary, backstage in Brisbane, Dolenz sat in a very comfortable chair to talk with Sean Sennett about the band that started life on TV, and then found their way into the hearts of a generation or three, and where they are now.

Good Times!, is possibly the best comeback record made by any of the great pop bands of the 1960’s. It’s  a remarkable achievement. 

Thank you. We’re just walking around in a daze. You can’t predict these things. You never know. You do your best and you think you make the right decisions. The way I look at it, the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts. You can’t take it apart, reduce it in any scientific sense or anything like that.

One of the producers when asked about the success of the show over the decades said, “We just caught lightning in a bottle.” I think that’s what happened with Good Times!. It was this series of serendipitous events, relationships. We started talking about 50th anniversary and what are we going to do. An album obviously came up. Are we going to write it all ourselves or will other people write? Are we going to produce, or will they produce?

Simultaneously Andrew (Sandoval – manager/archivist) had found a bunch of unfinished tracks that were more than demos but not finished. Some had vocals on them, most didn’t. Some had some guitar parts, some just had a piano and drums. When we went through a lot of it, we found about four or five that we thought could be resurrected or finished. They were multi tracks that we were able to split everything out.

One of them was “Good Times” the title track. And I take credit for naming the album Good Times!. And it was sung by my friend Harry Nilsson, who I had become very good friends with, until the day he died. I thought ‘Wow, I could do a duet with my friend Harry Nilsson and how incredibly cool would that be!’ Everybody loved that idea.

Then we found one (“Love To Love”) that Davy (Jones – who passed away in 2012) had a vocal on that was going to be released one day  Neil Diamond wrote it and then we found the Carol King tune (“Wasn’t Born To Follow”) that Peter (Tork) sang. That sort of started the ball rolling and then the record company  introduced us to Adam Schlesinger. And I’d known who he was because of Fountains of Wayne. When they made movie that he did the soundtrack for, That Thing You Do, everybody kept saying it sounds just like the Monkees. I’m like ‘Yeah, I know that.’

I met up with him and he was fantastic. He got it and loved it and obviously had totally the right sensibility. And then the record company and Adam started reaching out to people, saying would anybody like to write a song – and, all of a sudden, these people came out of the woodwork. I’d heard of Andy Partridge (XTC) and I’d heard of Noel Gallagher and Paul Weller. And I was familiar with Weezer    and Death Cab For Cutie, but I wasn’t that familiar with the music, except my daughter and wife were freaking out. My daughter especially was like ‘Wow! You got aDeath Cab For Cutie’s song’.

This material just started coming in, all this amazing material. We were spoiled for choice. Then we ended up with 13 or 14 songs. It all happened very fast.

When I first heard the record and it opens with the title track, it’s just incredible … the vibe between you and Harry. It’s like you’re in the room together, which is remarkable given he cut his vocal in ‘68. Likewise, when I got to “You Bring the Summer,” you sound like you recorded your vocal in 1967.

I know. Adam Schlesinger, you have to hand it to him. It’s his bag, that kind of music anyway. I don’t know how he did it myself. But I know he went and rented a studio way out in nowhere. Took me an hour and a half to get there every day. I said ‘Why?’ But, this studio has all the original equipment. He even has a stash of wire roundstrings and old drum kits and old guitars and old keyboardsand old Marshall amplifiers … and Rickenbackers, all the original equipment.

You can fake a bit of that with electronics nowadays but it ain’t the same as having the original equipment. So it’s like you could have recorded that whole album in one day. It was like the same day. It was amazing. Time just  … 50 years …. I’ve been thinking about it recently that the equivalent, you were saying a comeback album after 50 years; the equivalent would have been in 1966 with the Beatles, Monkees, Stones, the Who and everybody  if an act had come out and had a top-20 album, and a best-selling tour from the year 1916. That would have been Al Jolson or Enrico Caruso having a top-20 album. It’s bizarre.

Your voice… when you’re singing a Monkees’ track, are you in character or is that 100% you?

That’s a good question. I don’t get asked many questions that I’ve not had before, and that’s one of them. Boy … you win the dining room furniture set. That’s a great question. It is a Monkee voice, and mostly me.  It’s me and it’s my voice, but the material sort of tends to dictate a bit about that. But they chose me for most of the leads…  who knows why …  more by default than anything. I had a more rock and roll/pop kind of voice.

I can give you an example of what I was singing before the Monkees. That would have been like.. I don’t know if you ever heard a song called “Don’t Do It” or “Huff Puff,” a single I recorded before the Monkees. Think Dr. John or Sam the Sham & the Pharoahs, Eric Burdon with The Animals, Van Morrison. That’s the way I was going vocally.  And I still do to this day when I get out on stage. You should get a copy of an album called Remember that I put out.

That is a lot of me in the vocals that I would do, but when I’m singing Monkees’ songs I know exactly what they want. I’m very happy to do it. They could have brought me “You Bring the Summer” and I could have said I want to sing it  like this. [Micky then adopts a Broadway voice that could literally move walls].

Wow – but it’s not the Monkees, right.

My wife called me on it a couple of weeks ago. I love that song “Sometime in the Morning”. Beautiful, Carol King. I started training for Broadway because I started to do Broadway shows. I started [here’s the Broadway voice] “I have to get the big notes”. You have to, for the parts I was playing. I did Aida the Elton John Time Rice musical. I was King Charlemagne and Pippin. I had these big songs.

I started doing that voice with “Sometimes In The Morning”, just because I could. Sings “Sometime…..”  and my wife came and said, “Honey, it’s not good. They want to hear the Micky voice.” That’s a very good question. Now I do “Sometime in the Morning”, as it should be.

There’s that moment in your autobiography (I’m A Believer: My Life Of Monkees, Music And Madness) where you’re sacked from your cover band, then the phone rings and it’s a call about joining the Monkees. That reads like a scene out of a movie. I guess in retrospect it probably was like that.

It’s so true. I vaguely remember getting sacked. I’d never been sacked out of anything except that. I think I got sacked once because I was parking cars at a restaurant and kept banging into things. That was the first time. They said ‘We can’t afford it’, and I understood. It was a cover band, playing bowling alley lounges, and making 75 dollars. These guys were trying to make a living on it. I was still living at home with my mom. I had money from Circus Boy.

What’s your recall like for the Monkees’ recording sessions? For example, “Pleasant Valley Sunday “… do you remember recording that song?

I don’t remember recording any of them, frankly, because it happened so fast. I remember images and things in the studio, and I can see the control room, but with recording  very seldom do I remember an actual moment because it was happening so fast and so much. I would do two or three lead vocals a night. We were filming the TV show 10, 12 hours a day.

Do you feel more attached to the music now or the TV show?

Probably but that’s only because we’re not doing TV. Some of the songs, like “Pleasant Valley Sunday,” “Stepping Stone,” that’s me getting to do a bit of screaming, and you’ll hear a couple of songs at our concerts that we did later on in the project that are a bit more rock, screaming stuff. My audition piece, as you remember from the book, is “Johnny Be Good”.

Is there another album’s worth of Monkees’ material in the can?

I wouldn’t think there’s a whole lot, but there wasn’t a whole album of this. Good Times! is only four or five of the old tracks. I think there may be another four or five, but we’re not even thinking about it right now.

That first trip to the UK in 1966 must have been spacial. You were at a Sgt. Pepper recording session. The Beatles threw you a welcoming party. There’s that classic photo of you and Paul McCartney at his house … hanging out. 

It was wonderful. I was a huge fan. And I’ve bumped into him over the years. I probably knew Ringo the best and I spent the most time with Ringo, and with John quite a bit in LA.

You wrote a big hit for the band, ”Randy Scouse Git”, on that trip to London.

Yeah. I wrote it over a few days, a period of a few days. It was about my stream of consciousness thing of meeting the Beatles, and Mama Cass was there. I met my first wife (Samantha Juste) there. It was literally stream of consciousness.

It became a big hit on from the Headquarters album where the band – along with producer Chip Douglas – took over studio control and either wrote or selected the songs for the album. Did “Randy Scouse Git” feel like a hit when you wrote it?

I never think of it like that. When I was recording this album, I remember going home and humming some of the tunes as I went home, but you never know. Your fingers are crossed and you hope you make the right choices.

What is the best Monkees’ album for you?

Besides this one? This is my top one now. I would say one of my top ones would be Headquarters. That was a real milestone for us. That’s when the other Monkee group were recorded. Pinocchio became a real little boy.

The Monkees are currently on tour. You’ll find the dates here http://tombowler.com.au/tours/the-monkees/ Good Times! Is out now through Warner Music.