NPR: Revisiting Head, 50 years later
Petra Meyer looks back at the Monkees’ bid for relevance, and its unintended consequences: “Five decades haven’t dulled its anger, its color, its sadness, its blazing weirdness.”
PETRA MEYER, NPR: I don’t think, as a teenage fangirl, that I realized exactly how bitter, how cynical, how teeth-grittingly furious the Monkees’ 1968 movie Head is. How it starts with — more or less — a suicide: Mickey Dolenz running in a panic through a municipal ribbon-cutting ceremony and taking a leap off of a shiny new suspension bridge, tumbling through the air and crashing into the water to the stately chords of “Porpoise Song” while the rest of the band watches in consternation from the railing. How it ends the same way, except this time it’s all four of them jumping. How the Carole King-penned lyrics that play over both scenes go “a face, a voice/an overdub has no choice, an image cannot rejoice.”
Audiences at the time didn’t exactly get what was going on, either. While we’ve been spending this year exploring the lasting cultural legacies of 1968, today I’d like to finish out the year by introducing you to a film that surfaced briefly and then sank like a costumed dummy falling into a California canal. …
