THE MONKEES - GOOD TIMES @ 5

 

May 27th marks the fifth anniversary of the release of The Monkees 50th anniversary comeback album, Good Times!, which was released on this day in 2016.

It’s strange how a mere five years seems like a lifetime ago now. Back then, we were teetering on the precipice of the decent into hell that would be the Dumpo presidency. It didn’t seem possible, yet it happened and now we’re in this surreal pandemic dystopia looking down the barrel of potential social, economic and climate collapse. I remember when this album came out, it was a slap in the face to all the toxic pessimism that was rearing its head at the time. It was like the most revolutionary thing that you could do was to put out an album of unassailable joy.

There are simply so many inexplicably marvelous facets to this album, but it could easily have been something so much less than it was. It could have been nothing more than maudlin nostalgia and rehashed, recycled cliches of 1960s “summer of love” bullshit. Yet somehow, the right people came together at the right time to make this happen. They were able to unearth some foundational bits and pieces from the Rhino archives and then carefully stitch them together with contemporary extrapolations and augmentations which did far more than simply recollect the past glories of this cherished pop phenomenon. They effectively re-birthed it with an inexplicable sense of vitality and freshness that belies the half century legacy of the product.

Shortly after its release, Micky Dolenz summed up the extraordinary nature of its success by trying to imagine someone from 1916 revitalizing their career in 1966. The cultural gulf between those two eras is so clearly great from our contemporary retrospect that it starkly puts into perspective the idea of The Monkees reviving their essence so successfully for this sophomore decade of the 21st century. This was all made possible by a carefully assembled collection of creative professionals who not only understood what they were working with, but imbued it with a sincere passion and love that pushed it beyond mere marketing and consumer exploitation. They found the FUN in it again and infused every aspect of this project with it, from the first track to the last, including the clutch of bonus tracks that were sprinkled in various editions along the way.

For me, it became the soundtrack to my summer that year, a season which culminated with the opportunity to actually see The Monkees perform live for the very first time when they came to Vancouver’s PNE on September 4th of that year. What a painful irony it was that I would end up having to duck out of the last 15 minutes of the show due to medical issues which would end up resulting in my having to undergo heart bypass surgery on Sept 12th, the exact date when The Monkees TV show debuted on NBC back in 1966. That coincidence has never been lost on me and forever ties all of these events together into the strangest package. Fortunately, I’m still here to write about it and recollect the release of one of the best Monkees albums since their heyday in the late 1960s.