Your last chance to see The Monkees.

Somehow I've managed to amass a pretty large record collection without trying very hard. I've never had them all in one place at the same time. There might be 500 or 1000. I've never actually counted them. It's too many so I'm going to, uh, liquidate many of them. I was recently sorting some and found 5 or 6 different Monkees albums that i had forgotten I had.

As a kid I understood that the Monkees were another product of the Television industry's ability to synthesize any cultural phenomena and regurgitate it in 30 minute segments in the form of situation comedies, cop shows, westerns or any other genre for easy consumption. The laugh track was included to tell you which ones were the comedies. The Monkees had all the hallmarks. Well scripted, nice looking, well produced and reliably delivered to the awaiting audience that had learned to tune in each week and barring any high standards expected to be entertained.

The interesting thing about the "Monkees" is that the producers drew upon music industry resources to create some substance to bolster the show and the performers. The band member's talents were unevenly spread but that didn't matter when you had the very substantial talents of the professional writers and musicians who were making the music. And while it was pretty clear to the audience that this was the case they didn't seem to care. The TV show's target audience was kids and "teeny-boppers" (remember them?). The fact that some of the songs appealed to a greater and older demographic was unexpected and was the locus of the argument of just what the "Monkees" really were. Real or fake? TV creation just for kids or something more?

It's easy to dismiss the whole thing and say who cares. . The music is the thing that will probably resonate longest but even good music can be lost if no one has any interest in hearing it.

I was entertained by the show as a 9 year old and I can now see the handiwork of the best comedy writers of the time such as Buck Henry. It takes talent to write dumb sit-com material that makes a show a success. It took a lot of talented professionals to create the shows that we consumed effortlessly and took for granted.

And now i have hundreds and hundreds of records. Would someone like the Monkees albums?