MIND DE-CODER LIKES HEAD

An occassional guide to Mind De-Coder likes...

Bill Hicks used to have this routine about heavy metal acts, tired of the touring, tired of the making $40,000 a night, free drugs, free booze, stretch limos, penthouse suites, groupies blowing them from dawn to dusk – you know, that sort of thing – who would look for a way escape the endless rut of their existence by, in the case of Judas Priest in this instance, killing their audience by placing satanic messages hidden in the grooves of their records encouraging their fans to commit suicide. The Monkees did it a different away – they decided to kill their audience with a film that was so surreally bizarre, so self-indulgent and incomprehensible, it would immediately turn everyone who saw it against them and destroy what remained of their fan base in one blow; or, at least, that’s how the myth surrounding their only film, HEAD, goes.

What they actually made, however, is a lysergic Möbius strip of a film, consisting of seemingly meaningless scenes, often hallucinatory, loosely connected into a stream of consciousness ramble; it starts at the end, ends at the beginning; nothing is explained; and yet, after repeated viewings (I must have watched it 8 or 9 times now) a strange kind of sense is revealed wherein it becomes apparent that The Monkees are trying to escape their screen image and the studio manipulations that keep them that way – they’re not trying to kill their audience, they’re trying to kill themselves.

It doesn’t sound entirely promising, does it? And yet, as someone who’s a fan of The Monkees (I own the entire box set of their two TV series) HEAD contains all of my favourite Monkees moments – possibly because it’s nothing like the series at all. Rather than set out to reproduce a 90 minute version of the show, which is what everyone would have expected, they instead created an avant garde, format free, extension of the cinema verité experiments of the TV show that set about deconstructing film, the 60’s and what it meant to be a Monkee.

Directed by Bob Rafelson (co-creator of the television show) and written by Jack Nicholson (that Jack Nicholson, who according to legend, structured the script on LSD), the film largely originated one pot-fuelled afternoon when the band, Rafelson and Nicholson brain-stormed into a tape recorder all the main plot-lines and highlights of the film in which everything is thrown into the mix and nothing removed – juxtaposing images of war, fame, westerns and psychedelia, we see the band ripped apart by screaming fans, only to be revealed as mannequins; that famous execution scene from the Viet Nam war in which Major-General Nguyen Ngoc Loan shoots suspected Viet Cong prisoner Nguyen Van Lem in the head (you know the one I mean); Mickey blowing up a Coca-Cola machine with a tank, Davy punching a woman in the face; the band leaping to their deaths from a bridge (or are they escaping?); they frequently find themselves in a black box from which they cannot escape, and perhaps most out-there of all, they literally become the dandruff in matinee idol Victor Mature’s hair. They each get a song and a specific scene each and in each one, they try to deal with the fact that they are four real people in a real band that makes records for real people, but are also scripted characters in a fake made-for-television band doing nothing except exactly what the director wants them to - and that is pretty much the point of the film: no matter what they do to escape being ‘The Monkees’ they discover that their every word and deed was predetermined to the finest detail by the script of the movie they are in and the director directing it.

It bombed at the box office, of course, recouping just $16, 000 of its $790, 000 budget. What remained of their real fans were confused and alienated by the film, and the heads, those who would have enjoyed it most, and quite possibly got it, refused to see it at all on account of it starring “The Monkees” – TV’s manufactured band. It didn’t help that the film received poor-distribution either, and was badly under-promoted by a deliberately obtuse TV ad that consisted of a close-up of a man’s head who, after 30 seconds of staring blankly at the camera, smiles, and the word HEAD appeared on his forehead – there was no mention of The Monkees, no mention that it was even advertising a film – the film received abysmal reviews and marked, quite clearly, the downward trajectory of The Monkees. (I read somewhere that that the film was originally called going to be called CHANGES but was changed to HEAD by Rafelson and Nicholson so that for their next feature – Easy Rider – they could market it with the tag-line: ‘by the guys that gave you Head’, though this, like much else surrounding the film, may be part of the myth).

Inevitably it killed the group. This, arguably, may have been the point. Series two of the show was over and there is some suspicion that Rafelson may have been bored with the whole Monkees project, although he later claimed that he was surprised at the film’s failure at the box office. Davy Jones always took the view that at this point the band was being thrown to the sharks (well, alligators) but Peter Tork, the first to actually leave the band, believed the time had come to go it alone anyway. Micky Dolenz remains proud of it, and Mike Nesmith likes it. Over the years the film has taken on a cult status – Quentin Tarantino and Edgar Wright are both said to be fans, as are DJ Shadow and St. Etienne - and it still manages to shine a light on the 60’s in a way that few films of that era are still able to do.

The soundtrack to the film is brilliant – possibly their best album, in fact – although it suffered the same fate as the film. Containing six of their finest songs – including the exceptional Porpoise Song and As We Go Along – it was, like the film, sequenced by Jack Nicholson who included a collage of dialogue and sound effects from the film to create a sort of audio accompaniment to the movie – it didn’t scratch the top 40, their first album that failed to do so, but hung around for 15 weeks or so.

HEAD is funny, dark, satirical, superbly edited and clever but for me, the big thing about HEAD is that, if you’re lucky enough to have dropped some acid, or at the very least, you’re as high as they all were when they first came to formulate it, it looks and sounds great; a hallucinogenic romp through the heart of your childhood version of the 60’s – in fact, it’s a trip in and of itself and absolutely recommended for an evening in on your own. All together now:

Hey, hey, we are The Monkees

You know we love to please

A manufactured image

With no philosophies.