::m o n k e e m a n i a ::

At the time the Monkees met Jack Nicholson he was an up and coming B-movie actor. Bob Rafelson had met and hit it off with Nicholson so well he decided the Monkees should meet him as well. Bob even said "This is the guy I want to write a movie we're gonna do." The original title of the movie was not going to be "Head," they were going to call it "Changes." Each Monkee had expressed that it would be a bad idea to make a ninety-minute Monkees episode, and so they all pilled in Mike's limo and met up with Bob, Bert, and Jack in Ojai. There they got stoned for three days straight and rambled into tape recorders. Out of that came the movie. One amusing fact is the only thing that Mike wrote was the piece where the Arab rides up on the horse to Micky and says "Pssst" and then rides away.

The idea of "Head" was that they had to break out of the black box which represented life, according to Davy. "We all had different ways of getting out. Mike's way was to talk his way out, because he's the business man. Peter, Hare Krishna, water beds, brown rice, was to sort of levitate yourself out of the box. Micky was a jokester, and I had to fight my way out because I was always feisty. Being shorter than most, I always had to push my way forward. I had to let people know I was there." The idea of the black box came easily to the Monkees since at the end of the first season and the beginning of the second of their show the producers encountered a slight problem. The smell of pot kept drifting onto the set while they were trying to film. Therefore, a black box was constructed for the Monkees to do drugs in while they were not performing. Nicholson helped Peter understand the speech given to him by the guru. Jack had written it from the only guy that he thought made any sense out of all the guru types, because he says that you should only follow him and if you like what I have to stay then follow the truth as you understand it. Jack loves "Head" because he feels it is intense and severe, and exposes what all rock stars went through but never talked about. "We tried to show the Monkees as victims," Rafelson said. "The energy had run its course with their old audience. We tried to reconfigure them for the most mature audience who had previously rejected them. 'Head' was the exposure of the whole myth: 'Let's come out and tell the truth about having manufactured these guys and manipulated them.' "

Rafelson didn't know how to sell the movie since the Monkees were no longer on television and their record sales were slowly declining. A Professor of Communication at Fordham University recommended that Rafelson not tell the public that the Monkees were in it at all. Rafelson wanted it to open at the Hudson Theater in Union City, in New Jersey, but the executives opened it instead at El Cinema on 65th Street and Columbus Avenue in New York. At that time no English-speaking film had ever been shown there before.

Both Rafelson and Nicholson were becoming more and more worried that the movie's anonymity would effect the popularity of the movie so they decided to publicize the movie by walking through New York saying "did you see this remarkable picture called 'Head?' It's amazing!" At one point Nicholson attempted to put a sticker that said 'Head' on it on a policeman's helmet. He and Rafelson were arrested. As a result of the severe anonymity the movie was a failure.

Mike Nesmith and the rest of the Monkees toured together for the 30th Anniversary Tour many years later. They toured through Europe together, but Mike dropped out when the returned to the States in order to write a new movie. Whether or not there will be a movie has not yet been announced. There have been problems with contracts among the Monkees, Davy refused to sign his, and the date for release given to the public keeps getting pushed back. The latest bit of information floating around, though it may just be a rumor, is that Sony has bought the rights for the new movie and the filming will begin in October.

The interview with Dwight Yoakam in the June 1998 issue of Tower Records' "Pulse!" magazine gives more info. The subject comes up when Yoakam is discussing the tunes on his new album, which include "the churning neo-rockabilly stomp of 'Only Want You More' [which] receives an alternate reading, 'Maybe You Like It, Maybe You Don't'.....the variant version takes its title from a treatment for a new Monkees movie, written by his friend Mike Nesmith. Collapsing with laughter, Yoakam explains, 'It ends up with [the Monkees] being in a spot where things that don't go on, that are only reported in tabloid journalism, actually DO go on. Like Martians abduct people, Elvis does live. I was gonna end up maybe playing Elvis. Elvis is worked up, because he's been locked in exile so long he's still alive, but he hasn't been able to perform for 20-some-odd years. He's desperate to do anything, and he's begging the Monkees to let him sit in, as pathetic a scenario as that is...At one point he's worked up a little bit of "I'm A Believer", and in an embarrassed way he says, "I'll do a little bit of it for ya, m-m-m-maybe you like it, maybe you don't.' " Rumor has it the new movie will be a sequel to "Head," although how you make a sequel to "Head" I don't know, and will be called "Tales." Still, the chance that the Monkees are not making a movie at all is still very probable.

Sounds from Head: