Serious Contenders: Monkees, "Pleasant Valley Sunday"

If you were casting for a fake TV rock band, you should be so lucky as to cast four guys who were as entertaining as The Monkees. If you were selecting music for a marketable product, you should be so lucky as you find material as great as the stuff that was presented to them/recorded under their name. The Monkees were a real band in every sense except one: the technical sense.

I love the Monkees. Around 2000, their show was on every weekend and I'd watch it anytime I could, and I had their two-disc Anthology best-of, which I listened to constantly over the winter that year. The set came with a booklet that, in tiny print, detailed the story of their transition from manufactured boyband to genuine(-ish) artists. The fact of the matter was that their way of doing things was ridiculously common in pre-Beatles America (and even post-Beatles. Go count how many Beach Boys play on "Good Vibrations.") But I'm not here to give a primer on notions of authenticity. I'm here talk about music.

The Monkees were more nakedly a product for consumption than even the Beatles, whose consumer appeal was by chance rather than design. The Monkees was a project designed to sell records. And a lot of their music sounds just like that: The kind of songs you'd write if you were a pop songwriter hired to write "American Beatles" music. But of course, these were top sognwriters writing great songs: "Last Train to Clarksville," "Not Your Steppin' Stone," "I'm a Believer" are all that. Remember, Elvis' "Hound Dog" (originally Big Mama Thornton) was written by the same types of people. When a song grabs you, as it's designed to do, you don't need to think about its origins.

What I like about "Pleasant Valley Sunday," why it, and not one of those other tunes, is the "Serious Contender," is that it shows the freedom to play around that the songwriters had. Gerry Goffin and Carole King wrote this song, seemingly as an American version of Paul McCartney's "Penny Lane," but while that is a dreamy fantasy that celebrates suburban comforts, "Pleasant Valley" is sarcastic and critical. Micky Dolenz is underrated as a vocalist, and I think possibly his acting chops helped him express the meanings of lyrics better than other singers of the time did. Mike Nesmith does indeed play that insane, tangled lead guitar (double-tracked and linked with Chip Douglas' bass, which Davy Jones enthusiastically pretends to play.) Peter Tork is indeed banging on that piano and "Fast" Eddie Hoh handled the drums. At the end, it explodes indo a wonderful psychedelic flourish, injecting some unreality, some escapism, under the skin of the dull suburbanite scene.

This is a great song, the type of which the Monkee catalogue was surprisingly full. The songwriters (occasionally the Monkees themselves) often used their pleasant, plastic boyband appeal to present much more complex, interesting, music than they were required, which I feel holds up very strongly today. It doesn't matter where it comes from or who is behind it: when you've got something that works, it lasts.