Davy Jones R.I.P.

[steadyb]

[video:youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hm39e0w8fzw

[Tonysounds]

[video:youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ornP4eeCyBI

[agitato]

In addition to Davy's vocal on daydream believer, i also always loved the oboe melody towards the end of the track.

[whurly]

I'll always remember the Monkees episode where Davy is interviewing Charlie Smalls and asking him why he doesn't have soul. Smalls says Davy does have soul - it's just that his soul is on the one and three while Motown, say, on the two and four. Priceless!

[whurly]

Found it - starts about 5.20:

 

[video:youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6vQgGpJcrw

[Geoff Grace]

Yep. They were both David Jones, both singers, both famous, both English, both Capricorns, both men...

 

And steadyb is often not serious.

 

Best,

 

Geoff

[Bill H.]

It's so sad when someone this young (and so close to your own age) passes. It definitely hits home more.

 

I was already playing in a fairly successful band when the Monkees burst onto the scene, and viewed the "Prefab 4" very skeptically at first. I remember making fun at my kid sister who would scream her head off at their TV show. But I was soon won over because the show (and the music) was so infectious.

 

So were my parents. That show did a lot towards bridging the generation gap at our house, and I think that happened in a lot of other homes too.

 

The only Monkees song the band picked up was "I'm Not Your Stepping Stone" which we thought was a little edgier than their other stuff - if you can imagine that. I could probably still sing it by heart if pressed to.

 

Amazing how the mind of a teen soaks everything up like a sponge.

 

RIP Davy. You and your band gave us great music and fond memories.

[Jazz+]

Wiki:

 

Davy Jones was born at 20 Leamington Street, Openshaw, Manchester, Lancashire, England, on 30 December 1945. At age 11, he began his acting career, appearing on the British television soap opera Coronation Street, which was produced at Granada Studios by Granada Television in Manchester. In 1961 Jones played Ena Sharples' grandson, Colin Lomax,[1] the year Coronation Street was first broadcast. He also appeared in the BBC police series Z-Cars. However, after the death of his mother from emphysema when he was 14 years old, he left acting and trained as a jockey with Basil Foster.

 

Foster was approached by a friend who worked in a theater in the West End of London during casting for the musical Oliver!. Foster replied, "I've got the kid." Jones was cast and appeared to great acclaim as the Artful Dodger. He played the role in London and then on Broadway and was nominated for a Tony Award. On 9 February 1964, he appeared with the Broadway cast of Oliver! on The Ed Sullivan Show, the same episode on which The Beatles made their first appearance. Jones said of that night, "I watched the Beatles from the side of the stage, I saw the girls going crazy, and I said to myself, this is it, I want a piece of that."[3]

 

Following his Ed Sullivan appearance, Jones signed a contract with Ward Sylvester of Screen Gems (then the television division of Columbia Pictures). A pair of American television appearances followed, as Jones received screen time in episodes of Ben Casey and The Farmer's Daughter.[citation needed] He also recorded a single and album for Colpix Records, which charted but were not big hits.

 

From 1965 to 1971, Jones was a member of The Monkees, a pop-rock group formed expressly for a television show of the same name. With Screen Gems producing the series, Jones was shortlisted for auditions, as he was the only Monkee who was signed to a deal with the studio, but still had to meet producers Bob Rafelson's and Bert Schneider's standards.[4] Jones sang lead vocals on many of the Monkees' recordings, including "I Wanna Be Free" and "Daydream Believer".[4]

 

The NBC television series was wildly popular and remained so in syndication as well. After the band disbanded in 1971, Jones reunited with Micky Dolenz as well as Monkees songwriters Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart in 1974 as a short-lived group called Dolenz, Jones, Boyce & Hart.[4]

 

A Monkees television show marathon ("Pleasant Valley Sunday") broadcast on February 23, 1986 by MTV resulted in a massive wave of Monkeemania not seen since their group's heyday. Jones reunited with Dolenz and Peter Tork from 1986 to 1989 to celebrate the band's renewed success and promote the 20th anniversary of the group. A new top 20 hit, "That Was Then, This Is Now" was released (though Jones did not perform on the song) as well as a poorly received album, Pool It!.[4]

 

Monkees activity ceased until 1996 when Jones reunited with Dolenz, Tork, and reluctant member Michael Nesmith to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the band. The group released a new album entitled Justus, the first album since 1967's Headquarters that featured the band members performing all instrumental duties. It was the last time all four Monkees would perform together.[4]

 

In February 2011, Jones confirmed rumours of another Monkees reunion. "There's even talk of putting the Monkees back together again in the next year or so for a U.S. and UK tour," he told Disney's Backstage Pass newsletter. "You're always hearing all those great songs on the radio, in commercials, movies, almost everywhere."[5] The tour (Jones' last) came to fruition entitled, An Evening with The Monkees: The 45th Anniversary Tour.

 

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/52/David_Jones_1965.JPG/180px-David_Jones_1965.JPG

[SVG]

When I was a kid, we went to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in LA to see Davy Jones in Oliver (as Oliver, not as the Artful Dodger). I was pretty impressed that a pop star could also act in as big a production as that. This was during the heyday of the Monkees. Even back then we knew that the Monkees was nothing more than invented Hollywood pablum. We always saw them as a second rate group, which made Davy's performance as Oliver even more impressive.

 

Stephen

 

 

 

 

.

[Jazz+]

The songs were first rate.

[Synthguy]

Boyce and Hart were great songwriters with a good pop sense, but it took the Monkees to bring it together properly.

 

Even as a "created" group, they confounded critics by being able to write and play their own material, and good stuff at that. They have a few "firsts" to their credit. They were the first pop-rock group to use a Moog synthesizer, a Modular 55, which belonged to Mickey Dolenz. And their TV show essentially defined the music video a decade before MTV.

 

Rest in peace, Davey. Many of us will miss you, and your infectious, youthful humor and exuberance.

[Joe Muscara]

We always saw them as a second rate group

The songs were first rate.

From allmusic.com -

 

Don Kirshner, a music business veteran who was a top executive at Colgems Records (a label affiliated with Columbia/Screen Gems), was appointed music coordinator for the series, and Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart, a producing and songwriting team, signed on to handle much of the day-to-day chores of creating music for the show's fictive band. A casting call went out for four young men to play the members of the group, and Rafelson and Schneider's choices for the roles were truly inspired. Michael Nesmith and Peter Tork were musicians with solid performing and recording experience who also had a flair for playing comedy, while Micky Dolenz and Davy Jones were primarily actors but had also dabbled in pop music and had strong vocal abilities. As the show went before the camera, Kirshner had Boyce and Hart take the four leads into the studio to begin recording the songs that would be featured on the show each week. While initially the cast was only going to provide vocals for material Boyce and Hart had already recorded, the producers were impressed enough with Nesmith's songwriting skills that they chose to use a few of his tunes and let him produce them. With this, the Monkees took their first step toward evolving into a proper, self-sufficient rock band.

 

[snip]

 

The Monkees' early recordings found them working with a stellar team of songwriters (including Neil Diamond, Carole King and Gerry Goffin, and David Gates along with Boyce and Hart) and musicians (such as Glen Campbell, James Burton, Hal Blaine, and Larry Taylor), but Nesmith and Tork in particular were eager to show off their own talents (Nesmith was responsible for some of the Monkees' most distinctive tunes), and all four were stung by the negative publicity they'd received as rock critics declared they weren't a "real" band and couldn't play their instruments (Nesmith and Tork certainly could, and Dolenz and Jones would become capable instrumentalists, but they weren't allowed to play on their earliest recordings). When the Monkees were presented with copies of their second album, More of the Monkees, in January 1967, Nesmith and Tork were furious -- it was filled with material recorded for the TV show and the bandmembers had no input into its packaging or sequencing. This led to a standoff between the four Monkees, who demanded autonomy over the music they performed, and Kirshner, who didn't want to disrupt the hitmaking machine he'd helped create. Eventually, Rafelson and Schneider sided with his stars (who could not be readily replaced) and Kirshner was fired in the spring of 1967. (Kirshner would later coordinate the music for the Archies, who as cartoon characters lacked the power to rebel against their producers.)

[Tonysounds]

Before becoming a Monkee, Nesmith had already had chart success with songs he wrote for the Paul Butterfield Blues Band (Mary Mary) and Linda Ronstadt (Beat of a Different Drum).

 

To me, this is the most telling part of the Monkees epitaph:

 

Nesmith's last Monkees commitment was a commercial for Kool-Aid and Nerf balls, in April 1970 (fittingly, the spot ends with Nesmith frowning and saying, "Enerf's enerf!"). With the band's fortunes continuing to fall, Nesmith asked to be released from his contract, and had to pay a default: "I had three years left... at $150,000 a year which he had to pay back. He continued to feel the financial bite for years afterwards, until his inheritance from his mother's Liquid Paper fortune in 1980 eased those concerns. "

 

From Wikipedia "NESMITH"

[Jazz+]

"Dolenz and Jones would become capable instrumentalists, but they weren't allowed to play on their earliest recordings)"

 

What instrument did Davy Jones become capable on? I only ever saw him play a tambourine and maracas.

 

Answer: Searched some photos expecting to see him behind a keyboard but he was with guitar.

[Marzzz]

They were the first pop-rock group to use a Moog synthesizer, a Modular 55, which belonged to Mickey Dolenz.

[video:youtube]http://m.youtube.com/index?desktop_uri=%2F&gl=US#/watch?feature=mhee&v=dfmQ6w7RW7k

[Jazz+]

Were they on drugs?