The Monkees occupy a curious place in the history of pop. In equal parts derided for setting the mold for the artificial boyband via their manufactured, television-based origins, and in other quarters celebrated for seizing control of their own narrative, and writing some genuinely life-affirming pop classics.
While some dubbed the Californian four-piece, the ‘Prefab Four’, many are likely unaware of a particularly innovative breakthrough they were responsible for.
Amazingly, the Monkees were the first pop group to include a synth - specifically a Moog Modular III - on record. The early Moog machine was brought in during the recording of their fourth studio album, Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones Ltd.
Multi-instrumentalists Micky Dolenz and Mike Nesmith incorporated high register noises and frequency-exploring synthetic expulsions atop the tightly constructed Daily Nightly.
Dolenz was particularly keen on exploring the new universe of aural pathways that the futuristic contraption revealed; “His Moog part on Daily Nightly was, I thought, brilliant,” said the band's bassist Peter Tork in The Monkees: The Day-By-Day Story. “Another example of his intense creativity when he was into it. I thought he made the Moog stand up and speak. Micky just went out there with this stuff, it was about screeches and swoops.”
The spiralling, uncontrolled noises of the new future-ready instrument added a strange, reality-bending aura to an otherwise fairly conventional slice of sixties pop.
The Moog also deployed on the album’s concluding cut, Star Collector. Though in that instance it was performed by their on-hand synth expert, Paul Beaver, who added some spritely lead lines. The resulting sound was essentially proto-synth-pop - a full two decades before its heyday.
Prior to The Monkees' getting hold of the Moog, the use of electronic instruments on record had been the field the more obscure, avant garde end of the aural art scene.
In terms of the history of recorded popular music, though, it's true to say that there had been various synth precursors appearing as far back as Vera Lynn’s We’ll Meet Again in 1939. The bittersweet wartime tearjerker incorporated a Novachord - a very early electronic keyboard.
Fast-forward to 1962 and as the B-side to their iconic Telstar, The Tornados got busy with a Clavioline on the track Jungle Fever.
By the mid-sixties, the possibilities of electronic instruments were starting to intrigue a generation of innovative music-makers, seeking new frontiers of sound - and looking to blow everybody's minds.
Just a year prior to The Monkees’ application of Moog, The Beach Boys embraced the Electro Theremin during the making of the hugely innovative Pet Sounds. The dawn of the synth age was about to begin.
It was the invention of Moog’s synthesiser that really revolutionised electronic instruments.
Created in 1964 by Robert Moog, the very first Moog synth was a modular-based interface that solidified the stock elements that all future and modern synths would sport.
Oscillators (three), a filters (the classic Moog 904A low-pass filter, 24dB/octave, 904B high-pass filter and 904C filter coupler) and ADR envelope (sustain was controlled by a ‘gate’ signal) were all present in Dolenz’s Modular III synth, and its keyboard-based controller proved a far more accessible route in than some of its more complex electronic precursors.
The synth would eventually be compacted down into the stage-ready MiniMoog in 1970, but for now, the Moog Modular III was a large, primarily studio-based instrument.
Moog’s original shipping records reveal that The Monkees were the 19th recipients of said synth. It was on the 15th September 1967 that both Micky Dolenz and Mike Nesmith giddily let loose with their futuristic contraption on the in-development Daily Nightly.
“I just heard about the Moog and saw one and said ‘I gotta have one of those’”, Dolenz recalled to Under the Radar. “It was tough to use. First of all, they were monophonic, you could only play one note at a time, which made it tricky to record but it took a heck of a long time to set it up.”
It must be pointed out at this venture, that just a few blocks away from The Monkees experiments at RCA Victor Studios, The Doors were crafting their beguiling second studio album, Strange Days at Sunset Sound Recorders.
The ever-curious Jim Morrisson also had access to the Moog and used some of its vibrant flavours to augment the title track’s more darkly-hued psychedelia..
While The Doors’ sophomore did technically hit shelves slightly earlier, it was The Monkees’ Billboard chart-topping release that really foregrounded this state of the art instrument in the context of a pop song.
To stress that point, Daily Nightly (and the Moog itself!) also appeared on The Monkees’ television show, allowing millions of casual music and pop fans to see as well as hear the bizarre qualities of a synth for the first time. Little did they know how central to the future of music the bizarre contraption (which must, to the assembled viewing public, appeared like a whacky looking, space-age prop) would be.
The Monkees' use of it certainly pricked up the ears of The Beatles, who themselves would go on to incorporate the Moog IIIp modular into their final album, Abbey Road in 1969. From there, well, the rest is history.
But, the Monkees got there first.
In 2009, Dolenz remembered to the Los Angeles Times, that, “I threw a party for John Lennon one night, and he sat there at the Moog for four hours making flying saucer sounds.”
It's an ironic twist, that the band assembled to imitate Britain's pop cultural titans, would leapfrog them in when it came to this most sea-changing of instrumental innovations.
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