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.
