The Monkees - "Words" (forgotten song)

I read that Peter Tork, bassist for The Monkees, died today.  I have fond memories of coming home from primary school (maybe even middle school) and watching The Monkees TV show in syndication.  I was too young to understand that they weren't a quite a "real" band -- the music was catchy, the TV show was funny and did crazy things like break the fourth wall, which I realized was unusual even if I did not have the words to describe it.  This was pre-MTV, so seeing music on television was amazing.

Later I learned that they were the proto-boyband, assembled to mimic The Beatles and films like "Hard Days Night".  The Monkees were no longer cool.

Sometime after that, I learned that The Monkees eventually evolved into a real band, or at least pretty much a real band, songs like "Pleasant Valley Sunday" were back in rotation on the radio, Tone Deaf  covered The Sex Pistols covering "Steppin' Stone", and Michael Nesmith helped give us classics like "Repo Man" -- The Monkees were cool again.

I failed to blog about the death of Davy Jones in 2012, but I can't let Peter Tork's death go by without note.  It just so happens that my favorite song by them was 1967's "Words", the B-Side to their more famous "Pleasant Valley Sunday" (from their fourth LP "Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones Ltd."), although it did have a video from their TV show.  I'm not sure I've ever heard it on the radio, but it made an impression on me as a very young viewer: the chimes, Peter Tork's echoing co-lead vocal (he was the featured vocalist on only a few of their songs), the soft-loud-soft structure -- all of that was a lot for my uninitiated brain to process.

Yes, it's tempting to dismiss The Monkees as just a pale imitation of The Beatles, but is their sound any less modish than other contemporary "serious" bands, like Jefferson Airplane?  Songs like "Words" take me back to the 5th grade or so, coming home after school, and having a portal to the craziest, most irreverent sounds and images imaginable to me at the time.   Not long afterwards I would see and hear things like "Eleanor Rigby", and nothing looks or sounds the same after that, but The Monkees, because they were regularly on TV, was as good as it got in the days before MTV.

The Monkees - "Words"