Micky Dolenz Said The Monkees’ TV Show Was Like ‘Friends’
The Monkees’ TV show helped make rock ‘n’ roll a significant force on television. The Monkees’ Micky Dolenz compared the show to Friends. That might seem like a surprising comparison at first, but one of The Monkees’ albums was inspired by the Friends theme.
Micky Dolenz said ‘The Monkees’ was like ‘Friends’ because of its cast
During a 2022 interview with Variety, Dolenz discussed how The Monkees’ pilot almost wasn’t picked up. “That is, until [Monkees creators] Bob [Rafelson] and Bert [Schneider], the brains of the operation, rejiggered it,” he said. “Made it looser. I get the sense that Bob was the creative part of the partnership, with Bert being the business guy.”
Dolenz discussed Rafelson’s talents. “Bob encouraged us to be ourselves,” he said. “They did not want to hire four actors to play parts they made up. They wanted four different people with different energies and spirit, yet who had compatibility and charisma. Producers want that vibe — Friends had it, for instance.”
Micky Dolenz explained that the Prefab Four got out of hand on set
Dolenz implied that the chemistry between the leads of The Monkees was real. “They wanted guys who could sing, play, and be spontaneous,” he said. “And be happy to do that.
“Look, there were times where we [were] so excited, it got out of hand,” he added. “They had to shut down the set because the four of us were bouncing off the walls, and they were encouraging it. Bob had some real chaos to control, but he made it happen and made it work.”
How ‘Friends’ inspired relatively new music from The Monkees
The energy of The Monkees and Friends wasn’t the only thing they shared. During a 2016 interview with Rolling Stone, The Monkees’ Peter Tork said that Mike Nesmith was convinced the theme song from Friends, “I’ll Be There for You,” sounded like The Monkees’ classic album Headquarters. “I’ll Be There for You” bears some resemblance to Headquarters but also to The Beatles’ “Paperback Writer” and some R.E.M. songs that drew from the sonic palette of the 1960s. Regardless, “I’ll Be There for You” got Nesmith interested in making something new with his band. That creative energy led to The Monkees’ 1996 album Justus, the band’s first album in nine years and the first since 1969’s The Monkees Present to feature Nesmith.
The title of Justus was a reference to the fact that, for the first time, The Monkees wrote all the songs for one of their albums. No one was there in the studio with them, with the exception of an engineer. It’s incredible that the theme song from Friends helped the Prefab Four grow so much artistically.
Justus stood in stark contrast to the 1960s scandal where the press first learned that The Monkees didn’t play on their own records. That controversy led to a decades-long decline in the band’s reputation. However, The Monkees are more respected now than they ever were, partly because critics have a higher opinion of popular music than they did during the 20th century.
The Monkees and Friends are two shows where the cast had a great dynamic and that’s why we’ll be talking about them for decades to come.
