The Monkees

It’s not that my sister and I didn’t have any friends; we did. But it was just that we generally preferred to stay at home with each other and do things our friends didn’t care to do,

like type out scenes from one of the many audio tapes of the old 1960s TV show, Mission: Impossible! or work on getting our Davy Jones accent just right.

One year we were The Monkees for Halloween. We had been obsessed with The Monkees 1960s TV show, which had been running as a look back in time TV show on Channel 20. It was 1986 and I’m not sure who else was watching TV 20 with Jim Gabbert in San Francisco except for us and some elderly people. Jim Gabbert ‘hosted’ most of the shows, which meant the camera cut to him during breaks and he shared some trivia in a studio set up like a bar while he ate pizza. I always wondered what he was doing there, eating pizza alone while the shows were going on. Saturday nights they aired 50s Dance Party, with older folks in poodle skirts who apparently won lottery tickets to be on the show and got to spend an hour remembering their teenage years, dancing to songs like Let’s Twist Again by Chubby Checker or Diana by Paul Anka for slow-dance moments. We thought the 50s Dance Party show was completely boring, but it was likely the same people excited about 50s Dance Party that were watching the other shows with us.

We had been watching The Monkees for a few years and listening to all of their records. I was twelve and my sister was nine. I was infatuated with Mike Nesmith and my sister’s favorite was Micky Dolenz. I had a secret crush on Davy Jones too, but never admitted it because he was too pretty, and of course neither of us liked Peter Tork. “Gross,” my sister would say.

We had built a pretend sound studio in my sister’s room by essentially sectioning off her big bay window with a lot of cardboard. Like, a lot of cardboard. We had cut a hole out at our head level and put Saran plastic wrap over it to act like a window. One of the pieces of cardboard had a flap that we could use as the door. It also had a RECORDING IN SESSION sign we had seen them use on the TV show. Sometimes the cardboard would sag, but we would reinforce it routinely with duct tape.

We had decided that a good way to make money that year would be to record our versions of all The Monkees’ albums. We had all the albums, even the obscure ones like Pisces, Aquarious, Capricorn and their new album Pool It! from their reunion tour in 1985. All we had to do was play the record on the record player and with our cassette player we would record us singing over the vocals on a blank cassette tape.

This was 1985. Karaoke versions of songs weren’t a thing yet, nor was the internet.

It took a lot of trial and error, but eventually we got the cassette mic just the right distance away from the speakers so that you could hear the music with only our vocals. (Really, we would have killed for a karaoke machine.)

Now, all we had to do was sing each song exactly like they did, including back up vocals. We switched off songs. I ended up with most of Davy’s songs, since my sister obviously took most of Micky’s and they were the two main singers. I got Mike’s weird songs and my sister had to sing Peter’s weird songs which she was unhappy about. She would conveniently say she had to go eat a snack when it came time to record Peter’s songs.

“But it has to be on the album; the album has to be complete,” I would get bossy.

“No one is going to miss Shades of Grey. Mom and dad won’t care,” she would snap back.

The reality was that our parents didn’t care about the tapes at all, but when they were done, we tried to sell them to our mom for a dollar each.

“You guys are just singing some Monkees songs on those tapes,” our mom was busy with laundry and she wasn’t giving us a dollar.

“But I sound just like Mike and Davy, and Claudia sounds just like Micky and Peter! You can play the real song and compare it – you can’t tell the difference!” My sister didn’t seem to care about mom hearing the tapes, but I was sure she’d be amazed if she did.

“What about doing something original? Also, there’s laundry to fold,” she ended the conversation.

Mom didn’t get it. We had spent hours each day in our “studio” perfecting the songs, re-recording ones on which you could hear the real Micky Dolenz in the background. We had piles of audio tapes and no one to give them to. That’s when we decided to go as The Monkees for Halloween. Since we already knew all the songs by heart, it would be easy. We would go door-to-door in costume and perform Monkees songs and then try to sell the tapes.

But there were only the two of us and there were four Monkees. My sister suggested her friend Arica could be Davy because Arica was short, and besides she was at our house all the time anyway. We didn’t know who else to involve in the idea, so for Peter we made a cardboard cut-out to bring with us. Peter was ‘waving’ and ‘smiling’ and he bent awkwardly in half at the knees where there had been a fold in the cardboard box we had used. We dyed four white shirts red and sewed six buttons on each one just like they looked on the album covers. I found a green knit hat and used concealer on half of my eyebrows to make them look like Mike’s. My sister combed her hair like Micky’s and when Arica came over, we used some of my mom’s eyebrow pencil to draw big eyebrows on Arica to try and make her look like Davy. But Arica had blond springy hair and it wouldn’t make a nice bowl cut like Davy’s; besides, she didn’t want to talk in a cockney accent, which was not helping. My sister called her Ri, which meant she was getting exasperated.

“Ri, you have to! You are Davy, so you have to talk like him!”

“But I sound stupid!” Arica was regretting agreeing to this.

We got mixed reviews that Halloween. Some people said, “Oh how cool! The Monkees!” which wasn’t what we were aiming for, but at least they recognized us. Some of those people were probably the ones watching the 50s Dance Party on TV 20. Other people, especially kids and teenagers who answered their doors, looked confused and said they didn’t know who The Monkees were.

We didn’t sell any tapes.