In 1986, I was eight years old and the perfect age when MTV resuscitated the Monkees career by showing a marathon of their old TV show. Dubbed “Pleasant Valley Sunday” after their song of the same name, and shown on a Sunday (how clever) the show found a new audience. Along with millions of others, I loved it, much to the surprise and delight of parents everywhere, who had grown up with the Pre-Fab Four. The appeal of the early Monkees records is unmistakable; remove the stigma that critics have attached to them, and there’s dozens of amazing pop songs in their catalog. It could be argued that they were the first American boy band. And if you buy that argument, then their late-60s rebellion against the very pop sound that made them famous makes a lot more sense. They were hoping to age with their audience, to grow musically while maintaining their current fans and simultaneously earning new ones. Nearly every boy band since has attempted this transformation, either as a group or as solo artists, with varying levels of success.
The notion that they were a fake band always was a bogus claim — the same session musicians who contributed music to the Monkees provided music to early Byrds and Beach Boys records, too, with no criticism from the rock press — but once that ball started rolling downhill in 1967, it was impossible to stop. The mature audience they coveted thought they were a joke, and solid albums like “Headquarters” and “Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones, Ltd.” were not as commercially successful as their first two blockbusters. Their TV show was canceled in the winter of 1968, and when their fifth album was released that spring, it became their first to not hit #1.
Though it had been just two years since their massive debut, the country was such a vastly different place in 1968 that it might as well have been twenty years later. The counterculture had taken over pop music, and it was hard to imagine a band less hip than the Monkees.
It was in this environment that the band made “Head”, a movie in which they hoped to destroy their images as a boy band and be taken seriously as artists. Its less a movie than a collection of loosely interwoven skits and situations, presented in a sort of stream-of-consciousness style that makes you feel as if you’re tripping on something. The plot, near as I can tell, is that there is no plot; it satirizes so many movie genres in so many different settings it leaves your head spinning trying to figure out what’s going on. Perhaps that’s where the title comes from.
Their teen fans didn’t get it. Anyone who considered themselves hip couldn’t have been dragged alive to a movie starring the Monkees. And so it bombed, rendering a second movie an impossibility, disappointing the band who’d hoped to be able to run subversive ads announcing the sequel as “From the producers who gave you ‘Head’.”
The TV trailer for Head was designed as a postmodernist piece, a minimalist close-up shot of a man’s head; after 25 seconds or so, the word HEAD was superimposed on his forehead as he smiled. Its a microcosm of the film itself: is it an innovative breakthrough in surrealist cinema, or is it merely a mess, albeit a fascinating mess?
I can’t answer that question, although I can tell you that when I first saw the film when I was 12, I considered it merely “terrible”; however, viewed last month, I found it to be utterly fascinating as art. Yes, art, because its not a movie in the traditional sense; its like a museum exhibit of film and artistic styles curated by a rock band. The cameos in the various skits are impressive: Frank Zappa, Dennis Hopper, Victor Mature, Annette Funicello, boxing great Sonny Liston, artificially-enhanced stripper Carol Doda, and Teri Garr.
The movie begins at the dedication of a bridge, and after a politician struggles with constant feedback with his microphone as he tries to give a speech, the Monkees interrupt the ceremony by running through the assembled officials, to the sound of various horns and sirens. For the next 75-odd minutes, a stream of consciousness follows, including but not limited to Davy Jones boxing Sonny Liston, the band members stuck in Victor Mature’s hair as pieces of dandruff, an exploding Coke machine in the desert, a spoof of war movies with a decidedly anti-Vietnam War slant, Frank Zappa at a psychedelic house party at the Monkees pad, and a giant vacuum cleaner sucking the band up like pieces of dirt. At the end of these segments, we see the band running through the streets…and eventually into the bridge dedication ceremony from the beginning of the movie, bringing the film to a circular nadir leaving you unsure where it started and where it began. Like I said, its bizarre, perhaps unlike anything you’ve ever seen.
The film was written by Jack Nicholson and directed by Bob Rafelson, the creative team that would create “Easy Rider” a couple of years later. Its rumored that the rough idea for Easy Rider — motorcycling across the country — was among the original plot ideas for Head, with the Monkees riding across America.
I’m fairly confident that had this movie been released as an underground film in 1968 with the Monkees uncredited, it would have been given a chance — and once viewed, it would have been embraced by the counterculture as an against-the-grain masterpiece of surrealistic filmmaking. As it stands, its merely a cult favorite that most people have heard of but few have seen beginning-to-end.