Word: rafelson
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Building-type songwriters for hire, which included some of the finest pop-music talent America ever produced, were still cranking out songs by the yard in a last-gasp bid for teen immortality. The time was ripe for a naïve and yet monstruously successful hybrid, and Bob Rafelson knew...
...Rafelson, a jack-of-all trades hipster at Hollywood's fringes, and his partner Bert Schneider, decided to assemble a made-to-order rock 'n' roll band to star in a TV show. Rafelson claims he'd thought of it before "A Hard Day's Night," but whatever the case, the success of the Beatles movie, with the ur-rock video montage of "Can't Buy Me Love," greased the skids in a big way. Rafelson found himself deluged with applicants for the band, turning away the likes of Steven Stills before settling on the four lads who would succeed...
...couldn't last, and it didn't. The Monkees' golden age ended, appropriately, with the concept carried to its logical extreme, a Bob Rafelson and Jack Nicholson film called "Head" that was essentially about the destruction of the group. The Monkeees were not a Woodstock kind of band, and most definitely not a post-Altamont proposition. But for a brief span, they were a bona fide phenomenon, a brilliant, opportunistic creation that somehow also managed to encapsulate the giddy, innocent sincerity...