THE MONKEES - INSTANT REPLAY @ 55

 

 

Marking its 55th anniversary today is the seventh studio LP from The Monkees, Instant Replay, which was released on February 15th, 1969. With the crescendo of Monkeemania rapidly diminishing in the band's rear view mirror, it's an album that saw the group grasping at the past in order to try to give themselves a future.

By the time Instant Replay hit the record shops, it had been 11 months since the group's fame making TV series had been cancelled, and the group were also in the wake of a feature film that had died a pitiless death at the box-office, followed by a similarly disastrous TV special, both of which had only befuddled and alienated remaining and dwindling fans of the band. Ravenous critics were also salivating at the chance to trash the band some more. Their previous album, The Birds the Bees and the Monkees (1968), had managed to do well despite just missing the #1 US LP spot after their first four LPs had all smashed to the top, and Daydream Believer had been a #1 hit in December of 1967. But the band were running on fumes in terms of popularity, and Peter Tork had bailed shortly after the thud of the TV special hit the airwaves.

Trying to help regroup and reignite their popularity, Brendan Cahill, the band's former road manager and new music coordinator, encouraged the remaining members to pilfer some of the unreleased recordings that were created prior to their infamous "palace revolt", which saw original music director, Don Kirshner, ousted in order to give the band full creative control of their music. There were still unreleased tracks from their initial 1966/67 sessions that were felt might be enough to spur some chart action, so along with a plethora of newer tracks recorded since The Birds, The Bees and the Monkees, the trio began to assemble a pastiche of an album, mixing older songs along with the newer recordings that were waiting in the wings. It's because of this approach that Peter York still managed to make a guest appearance, by virtue of having worked on one of the older recordings. Of the older tracks, Tear Drop City, a Boyce & Hart song, was selected as the first single, but it failed to chart above #56 in the US. In the UK, the band's fortunes were even more in decline. The album itself managed to still crack the top 40 in the US, peaking at #32, but the writing was surely on the wall.

Though they no longer had a weekly TV series, Mike, Micky & Davy continued to attempt to keep themselves in the public eye by making guest appearances on various TV shows, including sharing a square on Hollywood Squares, and performances on the Johnny Cash & Glen Campbell variety shows, respectively. It still wasn't enough to prevent the inevitable deflation of their career by the end of the decade, and only two more albums would follow, with Mike leaving after the next, before their complete dissolution in 1970.

But like all things connected with the band, a renaissance was in the future, a process that would repeat itself virtually every decade since their initial rise to mega-stardom. In 2011, Rhino Handmade issued a super-deluxe expanded edition of Instant Replay, just as they'd done with many of their other records, packing it with unreleased extras, alternate takes, unfinished demos and other ephemera of the era. While it may not represent the group at their peak, there are still plenty of deep cuts lurking on this album to reward stalwart fans who may be looking for neglected gems.