A Conversation with Micky Dolenz – HuffPost 10.19.12

Mike Ragogna: Micky Dolenz, how the heck are you?

Micky Dolenz: I’m good, I’m good! How are you, Mike?

MR: Good, and I’m doing even better now that we’re talking with Micky Dolenz. Of course, everybody knows you from that group, Emerson, Lake & Palmer.

MD: [laughs] Spelled with two “e”s.

MR: [laughs] Oh, wait, make that The Monkees! Right, and let’s get that up front, too. Rumor has it you Monkees are getting together for a little tour?

MD: Yes, yes we are. We’re getting together for a little tour in November. It’s early days yet, but Mike and Peter and I are going out for a limited tour of twelve dates in November.

MR: Beautiful. Micky, obviously, because Davy Jones passed, things must feel a bit different now.

MD: What can I say? I knew the guy for forty-five years, it was a big shock, of course. The way that I describe it is like losing a sibling. You’re with somebody that long for those many years, you do become as close a sibling as you can. I don’t know if you have any siblings, but if you do, you’ll know what I mean. Everybody is still in a bit of shock. It’s not something you’re going to get over real, real quickly. Life just goes on, basically. You do the best you can. This whole tour came out of discussions about having a memorial for him and that evolved into a twelve-city tour. Even though this is not The Davy Jones Memorial Tour, he will certainly be remembered and there will be an homage.

MR: Beautiful. Okay, you’ve got a new album titled Remember. “Remember” is one of my favorite songs by Harry Nilsson, so let’s start there, with the title track.

MD: Harry was a dear, dear friend. We hung out a lot. I was there when he wrote a lot of tunes, and “Remember” is one of them. So when the album started coming together and I was talking to the producer about the variety of this material–which we’ll discuss–I mentioned that one. I always said I wanted to do it again because I’d been there, and, of course, it’s just a wonderful song. He thought it was a great idea, so he laid down some piano stuff and we chatted about it and it turned out really well. It turned out so good, and the sentiment of it was so spot-on. We looked at each other one day–I think the original working title of the CD was going to be something like Scrapbook or something like that–we just looked at each other and just said, “This is just too perfect. This is what the whole CD is about. Let’s take advantage of that and just call it that,” and there you go.

MR: It really is the perfect name for the album, especially considering the stories behind these songs, such as “Johnny B. Goode.”

MD: Yeah! Absolutely. Johnny B. Goode has been covered a billion times and I started doing it in my solo show because before The Monkees, I had a rock ‘n’ roll cover band, a couple of them, and we would do all the typical rock ‘n’ roll cover tunes of the time–the Chuck Berrys and the Little Richards and the Fats Dominos–and “Johnny B. Goode” was one of my little party pieces in my cover band when we were playing the local bar mitzvah or bowling alley cocktail lounge. When I went up to The Monkees to audition for the show, my agent said, “You have to prepare some music. You have to sing and play something.” That was part of the audition process everyone did, and so I got out my little guitar and I started going over some tunes that I was familiar with. “Johnny B. Goode,” like I said, had been one of my little party pieces when I did these gigs, so I sang it for my audition piece for The Monkees and that’s the song that got me the gig. Obviously, there’s a very warm spot in my heart for it. We have re-envisioned it, as you’ll notice. Over the years, I’ve started just goofing around, so it is slightly–in fact it’s not even slightly, it’s quite seriously revisioned. But it’s one of my favorite tracks on the CD.

MR: That leads us to “Sugar, Sugar.” I love this story, so I’m just going to shut up.

MD: [laughs] Yeah, well, as we started talking about doing this album, it came out of these stories. We were trying to decide what kind of album to do and he had some ideas about material and I had, too. Then I started telling him–him, by the way, being David Harris, the wonderful producer of this material. He started saying, “Oh, that’s a great story and we should focus on these stories, because not only is the material really good–the songs that you want to do–but the stories are kind of interesting, and it might be a theme.” That’s where the whole theme of this thing came around. I just kept telling him stories and one day, I said, “Well this is a real funny one, this story.” The Monkees were supposed to go back in the studio and record during the big battle that we were having for the music and just the battle to have some control over what was being recorded and what was being released. Up until that time, basically, we had none. We had absolutely nothing to say about anything. So, spearheaded by Michael…and Donnie Kirshner at that time was the head of the music department, the publishing company sort of running the train for the music. Sort of a big battle ensued, and the next song that was supposed to be recorded was “Sugar, Sugar,” but we kind of said, “No,” and I ran away to England where, by the way, I wrote “Randy Scouse Git,” about my adventures there. So we said, “No,” to Donnie Kirshner and I went to England and lo and behold, Donnie gets fired and they released the record sometime later with a cartoon group called The Archies. Donnie said, that way, he didn’t have anybody that could argue with him!

MR: Ha, nice. Let’s tell everyone Ron Dante was the voice on The Archies.

MD: Yeah, and by the way, a great song. It turned into a big hit, but that was the song that was sort of the watershed of the whole Monkee music thing. So Donnie said, “I’m only going to work with animated characters now because they can’t talk back.” It just made a good story so David Harris and I are talking about it and he says, “Listen, can I just try a couple of things with it? I think we might be able to get something out of there,” and I was incredulous. I was like, “You’ve got to be kidding me! It’s ‘Sugar, Sugar’! I mean, it’s a great song, but it’s not the kind of thing I want to do now.” He said, “Well, just trust me to give it a shot. That’s all I’m asking. Just let me play around with it,” which he was quite good at. “Give me a shot,” and I said, “All right, okay, go for it. See what you can do,” and now, it’s like one of my favorite tracks on this CD. Talk about revision.

MR: And it ties into “Randy Scouse Git.” So your producer had a lot to do with this arrangements on your new album?

MD: Yes, he did.

MR: I’ll just throw it out there. “Good Morning, Good Morning.” That also has a cool story.

MD: Yeah, “Good Morning, Good Morning” is another great track. Another one of my favorites. That comes out of that trip to England that I was telling you about where I ran away from home. I ended up in England and I ended up meeting Paul McCartney for a press opportunity and we took a photo. The next day, he invited me down to Abbey Road studios to listen to some tracking they were doing for their new album called Sergeant something. I can’t remember what that was called…Sgt. something.

MR: Sgt. Bilko!

MD: [laughs] Yeah, that was it, Sgt. Bilko. Anyway, they were working on the album and I went down and, I don’t know, I guess I was expecting some kind of freak-out/love-in/be-in funfest Beatlemania insanity thing, and it just was the four guys sitting there in the studio playing. I’d gotten all dressed up in my paisley bell-bottoms and my tie-dyed underwear. I must’ve looked like a cross between Ronald McDonald and Charlie Manson. John Lennon looks over and says, “Hey, Monkee Man, do you want to hear what we’re working on?” I was trying to be so cool, I was like, “Yeah, far out, man,” so he points up to George Martin who was in the booth, and he plays the track, “Good Morning, Good Morning,” and, of course, that song is burned into my brain forever after that point as you could imagine. Over the years, I kind of fooled around with it, just sitting around, playing my guitar, and I just came up with a different arrangement using different time signatures and things like that. David heard it and he thought that it would make a great tune. That’s how that one got on the album.

MR: Wow. Micky can you give us another song?

MD: Oh, you know, one of my absolute favorite songs on the album? It’s the one entitled “Do Not Ask For Love.” It’s an old song–well, “old” meaning “sixties,” written by Michael Murphy, the famous country songwriter and singer. We used to just sit around and sing it with him and hang out and have some fun. We actually did record it once. It came out on one of those unreleased Monkee things. We recorded it as a little pop song, but I always thought it would make this wonderful choral arrangement, and that’s how I did it. This is an arrangement entirely written by myself and David Harris. There’s no one else on this vocal except me and I think we counted once and we think that there’s up to forty vocals on this. Live vocals. Not at the same time, obviously, but forty overdubs without any electronic doubling or anything like that.

MR: Micky, what advice do you have for new artists?

MD: Get a good lawyer!

MR: [laughs]

MD: [laughs] I’m serious. Well, you know, I would hate to be a new artist trying to break right now into this business the way it is. There isn’t anywhere near the same mechanism and infrastructure of a music business that there used to be. Even though a lot of people criticized it at the time, there was a grooming and nurturing and a development process that the young artists and new artists could go through, and if you caught the attention of an A&R person–a powerful record music man or woman–you had a shot at being developed. These days, there are a lot of people out there and there are a lot of good people and good music, but sometimes, it’s raw. You hear somebody and you think, “Boy, if they could get a great A&R person working on them and working on their music…” and that’s what used to happen. The artists would go into a record company, they’d sign them and invest an enormous amount of money into the development of that artist–the grooming and the connecting them with other great artists, other musicians, say, or other writers. That, basically, doesn’t happen anymore because the record companies, for the most part, went out of business because of downloading and stealing music. They can’t afford to make those investments with all the artists. So I’d say that’s the biggest problem now is trying to find the very talented artists that are out there somewhere and then trying to find the money to develop them, to groom them, to nurture them and make sure that they don’t have to get a job at Burger King because they can’t afford to support themselves.

MR: Thanks. And Micky, when is Circus Boy: The Next Generation going to happen?

MD: [laughs] Not for a while.

MR: Okay, this has been such a pleasure, sir.

MD: Thanks a lot for your time. So your radio station? It’s solar-powered?

MR: Yes, I’m with the only solar-powered station in the Midwest, KRUU-FM.

MD: How cool is that?! Where is it?

MR: It’s in Fairfield, Iowa.

MD: Gosh! How many watts?

MR: Well, it’s online presence is over a million listeners a month, but it’s a low-powered station with about a hundred watts.

MD: But it’s okay, it’s solar-powered. How cool is that! I’m a science geek so I follow this stuff.

MR: Thanks Micky, I appreciate the kind words and your time and stories.

MD: Very cool. Thanks a lot for your time, Mike.