Colgems 103
Producer: Douglas Farthing Hatlelid
Track listing: You Told Me / I’ll Spend My Life With You / Forget That Girl / Band 6 / You Just May Be the One / Shades of Gray / I Can’t Get Her Off My Mind / For Pete’s Sake / Mr. Webster / Sunny Girlfriend / Zilch / No Time / Early Morning Blues and Greens / Randy Scouse Git
June 24, 1967
1 week
With Sounds Like…, Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass broke the Monkees’ 31-week run at the top of the album chart, but it would only take the Monkees a week to regain the top spot, as their third album, Headquarters, became the third Monkees’ title in 33 weeks to hit the apex of the Top LP’s chart.
Although Headquarters‘s one-week stay at Number One paled in comparison to the chart-topping power of The Monkees and More of the Monkees, the group’s third album was its most important effort to date. “On Headquarters we put our foot down,” says drummer/singer Micky Dolenz. “Up to that point the powers that be were more or less dictating what to release. Mike [Nesmith] was always very concerned about this. He wanted to have his own songs recorded and released as singles, but the singles invariably ended up being a song by Neil Diamond, John Stewart, or Boyce and Hart. By then, we felt very confident that we could record as a group, so there was a battle for creative control, which we ultimately won.”
While the Monkees began as nothing more than a cast of characters for a TV sitcom, by March 1967 the group had evolved into a legitimate recording band, holed up in RCA Studio C in Hollywood. “We recorded together before that, but that was the first time we went in and did a concept album,” says Dolenz. “We buried ourselves in the studio for six to eight weeks. That’s all we did. We just recorded that album for start to finish. We lived in there. We slept in there. We had sex in there. It was really down and dirty.”
In the liner notes, the Monkees pointed out that they were indeed in control Headquarters: “We aren’t the only musicians on this album, but the occasional extra bass or horn player played under our direction, so that this is all ours.” As Dolenz explains, “Headquarters, in a way, was the first real Monkees album.”
With members of the Monkees writing or co-writing seven of the album’s 14 tracks, Headquarters showcased the group as songwriters in their own right. Some of the material originated out of in-studio jams. “For ‘No Time’ we just started screwing around doing old rock ‘n’ roll stuff,” says Dolenz. Although it was essentially a group composition, the band gave the songwriting credit to Hank Cicalo as a reward for serving as the engineer during the session.
Another original track, “Randy Scouse Git” was written the night after the Beatles threw the Monkees a party at London’s Speakeasy. “I had just fallen in love with the girl that would become my first wife, Samantha,” says Dolenz. “I was sitting in my hotel room and I just started musing about everything that was happening — the party, Samantha, and my experiences in London. There’s a lyric in the song about ‘the four kings of EMI,’ and that was obviously the Beatles.” The song became the only hit from Headquarters. It reached number two in the U.K., where it was issued under the name “Alternate Title,” but it wasn’t released as a single in the U.S. Says Dolenz, “In England, ‘Randy Scouse Git’ is kind of rude. Randy means horny. A scouse is kind of a rascal from Liverpool, and a git is a jerk.” Dolenz first heard the expression on Till Death Do Us Part, the British TV show that inspired All in the Family.
In an ironic twist, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, by “the four kings of EMI,” whose A Hard Day’s Night movie had been the inspiration for The Monkees TV show, would limit Headquarters‘ stay at the top spot to a lone week.
THE TOP FIVE
Week of June 24, 1967
1. Headquarters, The Monkees
2. Sounds Like…, Herb Alpert & the Tijunana Brass
3. Revenge, Bill Cosby
4. I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You, Aretha Franklin
5. Born Free, Andy Williams