Mickey Dolenz says The Monkees was “heavily weighted toward improvisation” rather than musicality.
The 80-year-old drummer – who is the only surviving member of the I’m A Believer hitmakers, which included Mike Nesmith, Davy Jones and Peter Tork – has recalled the group’s beginnings on a sitcom of the same name from 1966 to 1968, and how that impacted the way the act were handled behind the scenes in the early days.
He told Shindig! magazine: “It wasn’t a band, and the producers knew that. As you see on the screen test, it was comedy and acting.
“We did one little jam. I suspect – but I don’t know – the music was not at the top of the list of their priorities.
“We had to be comfortable around music, but it was heavily weighed toward improvisation. They fact that I had the musical background, they saw me.”
Mickey had already grown up around showbiz, as the son of actors George Dolenz and Janelle Johnson, while he started his own career in 1956 on children’s TV show Circus Boy.
He said: “I knew The Monkees was going to be different. I was coming from a showbiz family, and so much was second nature by then. I’d been through the process.
“However, I didn’t get enormously invested in the whole thing. In late November ’65, I was still going to school and would have taken the week of.
“I was never that comfortable at improv when we did the pilot. We’d only just met each other. [But] there was a buzz about it.”
And the group felt something special as they progressed beyond being a fictional band on the small screen.
He said: “On the show, The Monkees never actually made it. Off screen, however, we sold out concerts all over the world.
“Mike [Nesmith] put it perfectly when he said, ‘When we first played, all by ourselves, it was like Pinocchio becoming a real little boy.’ “