![]() ![]() ![]() They were deemed more important than Kirshner, so Kirshner was out the door. The band members were pressuring the show’s producers for more musical control, and they were pissed off about one more song that had no real input from them. For Kirshner’s part, he got fired from the show after releasing the Neil Diamond-written Monkees single “ A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You” without authorization from the show’s producers. The Monkees, Michael Nesmith in particular, resented the hell out of Kirshner, the executive who spent years preventing them from being in charge of their own musical destinies. In 1968, the Monkees TV show was cancelled, and the Monkees themselves made Head, a surreal and perplexing movie that Jack Nicholson co-wrote. They started making their own decisions, pivoting to bugged-out psychedelic pop music. They fought and fought for their independence. They wanted to be a real band, and they did not like the way they’d become a punchline in the music world. Kirshner hardly ever let the actors who’d been cast as Monkees play on records, and those records often ended up being truly great. Those same TV producers hired the producer Don Kirshner to oversee the Monkees’ music. TV producers had assembled the four fresh-faced actors in 1966, casting them in a sitcom about the struggles of a go-nowhere band. The Monkees were not a real band until they became one. In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present. ![]()
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