Davy Jones - Artist or Artful Dodger?

With the death of Davy Jones some of us of a certain age are reflecting on that short time in our youth during the 60s when Monkee mania flourished.



 

Looking back at the Monkees, it’s possible to see them as an example of human synergy, with the group being greater than the sum of its parts with the Monkees pop group outperformed even its best individual members. 

And that’s surely how it was intended to be, with each manufactured Monkee being chosen to represent a different aspect of the human character. Davy was always the cute brown haired one, Micky the zany curly haired one, Mike the dark haired intellectual silent one, a la George Harrison, and Peter, the zany blond one with an occasional scientific bent.

It was a fail-safe formula that worked well and was used to great success  in Simon Fuller’s construction of the Spice Girls: Scary – dark and frizzy, Baby Spice, the Davy Jones of the group etc .



Monkees- Pleasant Valley Sunday



However after now reviewing a video of Pleasant Valley Sunday, it’s hard to believe that within the group, a synergy existed at all.

Marble chewing Mike Nesmith is undoubtedly doing a good job of miming with a 12 string Gretsch to a Beatle inspired guitar riff, though it doesn’t sound like a 12 string to me, while Peter Tork seems to be confidently hammering the piano with fingers hitting the keys at all the right moments.

Micky Dolenz sings and plays the drums reasonably well too and everything seems to be moving along fine until we see Davy. Unfortunately Davy has been lumbered with bass playing duties as Peter is busy on the keyboards.

To be fair, Davy does attack the bass with gusto, dancing around with confidence and eyeing the other group members, but without much success at eye contact. With regard to his playing, there is a shot of Davy changing chords in time with the music, which is good, but often he tends to stop, reconsider, then start again, strumming the bass as if it’s an acoustic. Interesting stuff, bass presumably wasn’t his forte.  

So what did Davy Jones contributed musically to the Monkees? For a long time I thought Davy was the singer, he had all the right qualifications- floppy sleek hair, boyish grin and a fistful of big maracas. But then I realised that of course the majority of Monkee hits, Last Train to Clarkesville, I’m a Believer and Pleasant Valley Sunday were all sung by Micky Dolenz.

Davy’s contribution to the Monkees was not really a musical one, he started life as an actor, playing the role of Artful Dodger in the West End and Broadway for which he was nominated a Tony award. But besides his acting skills, what he added to the Monkees was firstly a raw cuteness and lovable innocence mixed with an endearing hybrid English accent, part Lancashire, part London, part posh.

Monkees - Daydream Believer

Secondly he sang Daydream Believer, which I still hum to myself every time I shave in the mornings. Thirdly we mustn’t forget he played a fine pair, well actually two pairs of maracas, clutching them in just one hand, a mean feat and not one to be frowned at.

We all realise that it is sad that Davy has died, but for those of us who never knew him it’s sad because he is another symbol of our finishing youth and a reminder that time moves on relentlessly.

So with that thought in mind, if you are a writer and have still not returned your contract to The Guitar library, don’t be a Davy Jones, do so now, or it might just be too late!

Rebekkah Brookes Plus Ten More Clever Horses

As a result of the enquiry into the News of the World phone hacking scandal it has emerged that in 2008, the Metropolitan Police gave News of the World editor, Rebekkah Brookes, a horse on loan. Here are ten other lucky or not so lucky horses:

1.  Incitatus - Caligula's horse, treated like a Prince during his lifetime and venerated as a God after his death
2.  Comet - Supergirl's pet horse who as boyfriend Bill Starr, dated both Supergirl and Lois Lane
3.  Trigger - a horse who could walk 50 paces on his hind legs
4.  Shergar - kidnapped in 1983 by masked gunmen, but never found
5.  Lucius - an ass turned into human form then initiated into the cult of Isis
6.  Clever Hans - a horse who could count and tell the time
7.  Kerry - a horse that saved it's owner from an enraged cow
8.  Tonk - a horse praised for saving a boy from a grizzly bear
9.  A solid gold rocking horse - purchased for £400,000 by Beyonce and Jay-Z for their baby, Blue Ivy Carter.
10.  Quick Draw McGraw (aka El Kabong) - a guitar playing horse famous for hitting his opponents on the head with a Spanish guitar, while shouting Kabonga.

El Kabong enjoyed hard hitting guitar music  His guitar was a Cuatro, a 4 stringed instrument tuned like a ukelele. It was an instrument used in a versatile fashion unique to him, so it's horses for courses, I guess!  

Christopher Plummer Oscar Winner Played with Two Large Breasts on the Piano

 

82 year old Christopher Plummer, who on Sunday night won his first Oscar ever for his supporting role in ‘Beginners,’ did not start out with the intention of being an actor.

Before achieving worldwide fame as Captain Georg Von Trapp, in the Sound of Music, Plummer spent his time dreaming of being a concert pianist while at school in Montreal. During those early formative years, Plummer once found himself accompanying the actress Diana Barrymore to an up market restaurant in Montreal. He recalled what happened next in his memoires, ‘In Spite of Myself’:

‘I boldly sat down at the piano, hoping to accompany Diana in a French song or two. She winked at me and took up the cue. As was her custom, she had decked herself out in a daringly revealing low-cut dress. In the middle of a song in order to emphasize a phrase, she made a sweeping theatrical gesture, miles over the top, when suddenly, not just one but two glorious breasts popped out in full view and stayed out for the rest of the number’.

Plummer’s musical career may well have continued if he hadn’t been pushed off the music stool by, ‘a big black guy with pants that were a bit too short for him.’ The black guy later turned into the legendary Canadian jazz pianist and composer, Oscar Peterson.

One other famous personality, whose record company had a penchant for a bare breasted women tumbling over themselves in disarray, as displayed on the cover of Electric Lady Land, and who was not unfamiliar with tinkling the ivories, was Jimi Hendrix.

Hendrix allegedly developed the track, ‘Spanish Castle Magic,’ around the jazz piano chord which follows the guitar riff played over the title.  With the help of producer Eddie Kramer pounding on the piano, the song eventually took shape.

Hendrix’s link with the piano and pianists in particular, does not end there. A large part of Jimi’s trademark rhythm style is undeniably influenced by another pianist with a similar name to his producer, Floyd Cramer.

A quick listen to the 1961 hit, ‘On the Rebound,’ and you can’t help notice a strong similarity to the hammer-ons as demonstrated by Hendrix, in tracks such as Bold as Love, Little Wing and Wait ‘til Tomorrow and Have you ever Been (to Electric Lady Land).

The attachment of Hendrix to the grand piano continued well after his death. In 2006 the Baldwin Hendrix Custom Grand Piano made its appearance on the scene.  

Bedecked on the outside with swirling psychedelic regalia and a huge squashed image of Hendrix’s head on the inside of the lid, this desirable limited edition was said by Gibson to, ‘fit beautifully into almost any home".  

Lucky for us piano playing was not Hendrix’s forte, when he died in 1970 he left us with a unique catalogue of work which has ever since profoundly influenced the playing of the modern day guitarist. Guitar playing comes in many styles, from gypsy jazz to 70’s rock, with each guitarist expressing their own unique view of life through the potency of the guitar strings. As Jimi said:

‘Nobody know what I'm talking about
I've got my own life to live
I'm the one that's gonna have to die
When it's time for me to die
So let me live my life the way I want to.


CUUPP6HGVAP7

2012 Me and the MPA Publishers Briefing, London

Would Sir Paul be there and would he recognise me, a Beatle fan for over 40 years? That was my first thought, quickly followed by, when is he going to sort out the variegated lead flashing at mpl, Soho Square?

There were five of us crowded into the lift with MPA executives rehearsing their scripts and witty introductions as we arrived on the sixth floor.

As for the presentation, it seems that we fishes are all working in a big sea and had better keep abreast of changes to stay afloat – sort of, what with Turkey defaulting and Spain and David Cameron up to no good.
Fellow music publishers exchanging hurdles, aspirations and successes was the highlight of the evening.

Be prepared to morph or risk turning to stone as the internet has well and truly come and free downloads are here to stay.  As my new friend Tom said, all our children are thieves so adapt and find a way round it or prepare to be archived.

Do we care about Whitney?

Do we care about Whitney? As the world slides into recession, somewhere in a hotel in America another star fizzles out in the great pop firmament, while from the comfort of our TV rooms, we idly observe another example of the rich and famous getting their just deserts.

The TV tells us the number one death for a rock star is still a heart attack closely followed in second place by drug overdose, while holding in there for the third week running, is suicide.

Like all of us, rock stars create and cling on desperately to their own version of reality, if it’s not McCartney believing that singing into Nat King Cole’s microphone well give him more of the same, then it’s Elvis, Hendrix, Joplin and Jackson, driving their desire for love and adoration with a mouthful of booze and pills. As one star crashes and burns, we watch with amusement smugly sipping our gin and tonics, anaesthetised by our unreal reality TV, as another X-factor wannabe squeaks, ‘Please, Simon, it’s all I’ve ever wanted, let it be me, it’s what I live for ...’

The choice is still ours; well that’s what they tell us, it’s the people’s vote. Do we care? It’s showbiz, theirs is an unreal world, what’s it got to do with us?

So press the red button and we get Mark Bolan, the 20th Century Boy singing:

‘Friends say it's fine, friends say it's good
Ev'rybody says it's just like rock'n'roll’.

But press the green button and we get a blast from that 17th Century Donne of rock:

‘Any man's death diminishes me,
because I am involved in mankind.
And therefore never send to know for whom
the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.’

A ah huh!

Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, Mitch Mitchell ... and me!

A long time ago, I met Mitch Mitchell (Jimi Hendrix Experience drummer). We’d ear bashed Mitch the night before when our local group supported the group; it ws the year Hendrix had died and Mitch was now turning his hand to managing managing a group called Flying Fortress. It was a funny thing, the audience were mainly kids from our school, in tie-dyed T shirts and loon pants, and there was Mitch, his roadie, Wayo (a Jimi look-alike) dressed more for Woodstock than our local village hall.
Anyway, we wangled the invitation to his house for a jam, and the next morning got the bus arriving at 9 o’clock prompt. No one was up, we were surprised, how could this be? Perplexed we wandered around the grounds until we finally located his roadie who muttering something under his breath, swiftly deposited us in Mitch’s studio.
It was de rigueur for all 60s pop stars to have fancy cottages in the country, swimming pools and studios, and Mitch’s pink house, of course, was no exception. I remember how the studio walls gleamed,  a real studio. Inside it just got better. Flight cases, heaped in a pile greeted us as we entered. Mitch’s black Gretsch double bass drum kit was already set up and gleaming,  while at the end of the room stood Jimi's Marshall stacks, ready and waiting, complete with grooved cabinets where Jimi had driven his guitar across the front. JH EXP was stencilled in white on the back, it was a dream come true, somehow we’d joined the Jimi Hendrix Experience! 
Mitch's roadie threw back the lids of the flight cases and started tossing out Univibes and Fuzz Faces and black, curly guitar leads, it was real treasure trove. Snugly tucked inside was a brand new Telecaster, gleaming cream with a maple neck, not a Strat, a Tele. Jimi Hendrix had played one once, I’d seen a picture. I was given another Tele to play, one that given by Jimi to Mitch Mitchell as a present, which I suppose was lucky, considering Jimi was left handed.
Mitch’s roadie trundled off and me and my friend, who was a drummer, were left to jam all afternoon, playing our versions of Rainbow Bridge, loudly.  In all fairness I spent most of the time getting electric shocks from the amps that weren’t rated for English current, but somehow it didn’t matter, at the time it all seemed worth it.
As the afternoon passed,  there was still no sign of Mitch, we found out he'd gone off for a drive in his Mini, so we wandered about his house looking for food, but couldn't find any.
Later that evening he returned with the bass player, from Blind Faith, Rick Grech.  We were a little concerned as time was moving on and we were about to miss the last bus home. All the same, I decided to broach Mitch’s earlier suggestion of a jam. ‘Later, maybe,’ he said, followed by, 'I was going to get Eric, but he was asleep. ‘Eric? What? the Eric?  So why hadn’t he come? Had he heard about my guitar prowess and chickened out at the last minute, saying he felt a bit stuffed up and chesty with a cold? No, it turned out that Eric Clapton was still tucked up in bed - far too sleepy.
The jam session Mitch had planned for all of us, Eric included, never happened, Mitch did show us his new quadraphonic speaker system and we didn’t have to worry about the bus as we got a lift home in his Rolls Royce.One thing of interest I learnt was that most of Jimi’s guitars were now with Eric Clapton, including his Flying V, apparently he collects them well that's what he says, anyway.