Hey Hey, They’re Boyce & Hart: The Wild Ride of the Guys Who Wrote ‘Em - MusicFilmWeb (original) (raw)

Tommy Boyce (bottom) and Bobby Hart in their pop star days.

In 1975, the first quasi-Monkees reunion brought together the ’60s pop phenomenon’s main vocalists, Micky Dolenz and Davy Jones, and the songwriting team of Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart, who produced the first two Monkees albums and composed several of their biggest hits, including “(Theme from) the Monkees,” “Last Train to Clarksville,” “I Wanna Be Free,” “Valleri,” and “(I’m Not Your) Stepping Stone.” Legally barred from using the Monkees name, they billed themselves as Dolenz, Jones, Boyce & Hart: The Guys Who Sang ‘Em and the Guys Who Wrote ‘Em.

The story of the guys who sang ‘em is well-known: a couple of actors and a couple of musicians get cast in a sitcom playing a band, become teen idols, and actually end up as a band, releasing some of the best and most adventurous pop music of the late ’60s. The new music documentary Boyce & Hart: The Guys Who Wrote ‘Em is the first comprehensive telling of the story of the music pros who, as much as Monkees creators Bert Schneider and Bob Rafelson, were the guys behind the curtain, a prolific songwriting team credited by AllMusic.com as “the architects of the Monkees’ sound.”

It’s a tale that tracks a tumultuous decade in rock and pop, from the fringes of the late ’50s LA music industry through fabled New York song factory the Brill Building, the heyday of Sunset Strip psychedelia, and a ride on the bucking back of a global pop craze. Pre-Monkees, Boyce & Hart wrote (together or with other partners) hits for Fats Domino, Chubby Checker, Little Anthony & the Imperials, and a host of others (along with the theme song to the deathless soap opera Days of Our Lives). Post-Monkees they stepped out as a duo, releasing several chart singles, becoming musical spokesmen for lowering the US voting age to 18, and sharing a Las Vegas stage with Zsa Zsa Gabor before a very bad break severed their partnership, if not their friendship.

Tommy Boyce killed himself in 1994 after suffering a brain aneurysm. Two decades later Bobby Hart narrates their story in The Guys Who Wrote ‘Em, which world premieres May 1 at Chicago’s CIMMFest (of which MFW is a media partner). Directed by filmmaker, writer, DJ, and celebrated tweeter Rachel Lichtman and co-produced by Andrew Sandoval, a Monkees biographer and Grammy-nominated producer of reissue and compilation albums, the film is woven entirely from archival photos, old TV and proto-music-video footage, and Hart’s voluminous home movies, and features voice-over recollections from surviving Monkees Dolenz, Michael Nesmith, and Peter Tork. (The movie was in the first stages of pre-production when Davy Jones died in February 2012.) Hart and Lichtman will be on hand for the Chicago show, ahead of which they answered a few questions from us.

MFW: How did the film come about?

Bobby Hart: Andrew and Rachel came over to see me and pitched the idea of doing a Boyce & Hart documentary for theater release. I had been approached a number of times before, but this was different for me, because these were two people I knew where not just filmmakers and ’60s music historians – they were really fans of the Monkees, and even of us, as a corollary to the Monkees. I could see that their hearts were in the right place and it wasn’t going to be just another cookie-cutter documentary.

Rachel Lichtman: Bobby had known Andrew for many years and was aware of his reputation. At that point Bobby had seen the 2011 Monkees tour that I had done all the visual design for, so I think, Bobby, you might have had a sense of how, artistically, this thing might come off.

BH: That’s true. I could see there were skills on both sides.

So you had a relationship with the Monkees that predates your relationship with Bobby.

RL: Yes. I had contributed to the liner notes for the Head [soundtrack] reissue and began working with the Monkees and Andrew Sandoval on the 2011 tour. I designed all the visual backdrops on the big screen, and every song kind of had its own little vignette. Andrew and I had talked during that tour about the idea of doing this documentary. It’s a piece of the puzzle that really had not gotten it’s due, in my opinion. [Boyce & Hart] were very successful, but I don’t think a lot of people, including Monkees fans, really are aware of the breadth and depth of who they were. Not just as songwriters, but as performers and activists – all these different aspects of their career.

Do you go back as a fan as well?

RL: Absolutely. My first awareness of Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart was when I was probably 4 years old, listening to Monkees records and just staring at the label, and of course their names are all over it. I was a huge fan of the Monkees growing up. I caught them in syndication on a local channel when I was a kid.

BH: Who reads writer credits at 4 years old? [Laughs]

RL: Well, I guess me. In those days, you know, you used to stare at a record when you listened to it. I would just read every name. I was really, really obsessed with the Monkees. All my nieces and nephews are also Monkees fans now, and they do the same thing. There’s just something timeless about all the songs and those records.

Bobby, why were you and Tommy not Monkees?

BH: We were signed to Screen Gems/Columbia music, and they signed us in all categories – as writers and producers and artists – but we had had hits as writers, and that’s what they wanted us to do. When we got sent over to meet with [Monkees creators] Bert Schneider and Bob Rafelson about this new television pilot project, we were there as producers and writers, not as performers. We never really were seriously considered to be cast in the show.

RL: Having said that, I think Bobby and Tommy really reflected the lifestyle that the Monkees lived on the television screen – living together and writing together, dating girls, all that stuff. They lived up in the hills and had a cool, groovy lifestyle. I always felt that they sort of were the Monkees, in a sense.

Well, Mike Nesmith says in the film that as far as he was concerned you guys essentially were members of the band.

BH: In a way, we were. Pragmatically and logistically, [the makers of the TV series] knew that these guys were going to be on set working 12-hour days and they needed another team across town in a recording studio doing the same thing but making the music.

Was it ever a source of tension for you and Tommy, being guys who had tried to have singing careers before the show and hadn’t had that level of success, for these guys to show up and get that level of success – not just instantly, but on the back of your songs?

BH: Are you kidding? It was a wonderful opportunity for us. It changed our lives, financially and in a lot of other ways. It paved the way for us to be performers, which we’d been trying to do individually for 10 years or so. When they were able to take control of their careers more and produce their own records, we were able to accept offers from record labels to be artists.

How did being part of that juggernaut affect you creatively? Was it harder, strictly from a songwriting perspective, to be two guys struggling for a break in the Brill Building, or having to write hits on command for what was the biggest band in the world, for a little while?

BH: There’s no comparison. Our year, year and a half in New York writing with the Brill Building people, I was living in a flophouse. I was struggling to get a $50 advance every now and then to live on. It was heavy times. Tommy and I had our first hits back there, but the lifestyle was very, very different than when we came back out here and signed with Screen Gems. We had about a year from our signing before we actually had to go in and record with the Monkees. We’d been stockpiling some really good songs. We had already written “I Wanna Be Free” and “(I’m Not Your) Stepping Stone” and a number of the other songs. So it wasn’t like a lot of pressure, this was just a wonderful opportunity.

There’s still a bit of a notion that their music was a confection. It gets described a lot as “bubblegum pop.” I think that’s often intended now as a compliment, but is it a compliment for you?

BH: I agree with you, it’s come back around to being a compliment. In fact, the title of my book, which will be out the first of next year, is Psychedelic Bubblegum. I’m using it to its best advantage, to try to describe a period of music.

“Psychedelic bubblegum” is a perfect phrase for Monkees music. A lot of it does have a sunniness and poppiness, but there are trippy and psychedelic touches to a lot of the songs.

BH: The whole music business was changing. The first half of the ’60s was a whole different thing, it was all New York-driven. Just at the time when we came west, back to California, we had all these influences, and we were always watching – what’s the next sound? We were loving putting sitars and feedback guitar on stuff that would’ve been just plain bubblegum without it [laughs].

Lot of tricky time signatures in some of those songs too, and changes in musical tone and tempo.

BH: We were having fun experimenting. It didn’t always work.

Rachel Lichtman

When bands like the Sex Pistols and Minor Threat were covering “Stepping Stone,” was it a surprise to you? Or were you guys like, of course, we wrote it, we knew it was punk.

BH: I wasn’t really into the punk scene, so it was probably two or three years after that somebody said, “Did you ever hear the Sex Pistols’ version?” and gave me a copy. It was kind of shocking but I took it as a compliment and loved having all the different versions of it. In researching for the book I looked it up – there were like a dozen punk groups that covered that song.

RL: What was considered bubblegum music at the time, now we can look back and see that it influenced glam and punk throughout – not just as covers, but influenced the sound. Bubblegum swung the pendulum back away from overblown, overproduced AOR to the roots of early rock ‘n’ roll, girl groups, and teen pop, utilizing the catchy hooks and arrangements for a simpler, brighter sound. Bobby and Tommy’s records were very – as you say, the time signatures, they were more advanced. They weren’t like Archies songs, or what would end up being used on television primarily. Not only the Monkees but a lot of those Partridge Family songs are incredible songs. There’s value to that music.

The sense I get from the film is that Tommy was much more assertive, he was the go-getter. Was it harder for him to deal with difficult times in the post-Monkees period, and do you think that had anything to do with how his story ended?

BH: I think it’s yes to the first question and no to the second. He definitely always saw himself as a star, reveled in it and relished it when it was happening, and later, when it wasn’t so much, it probably was more difficult for him than it was for me. I didn’t take it as seriously as he did. On the death part of it, I don’t believe it affected that. That was totally because he had the [aneurysm]. The blood vessel in his brain broke. He called me up and said, “My brain exploded!” [Laughs] That’s how he would explain it. They saved his life with a 12-hour surgery, but they told him that no doubt, this would happen again and he would probably end up being a vegetable. He wasn’t willing to wait around for that.

What song that you guys did together do you feel the closest to now?

BH: There’s a bunch of them, of course. If I had to pick one I might single out “I Wanna Be Free” because of the way it was written. It’s one of the few songs we didn’t write because we had a deadline and needed a song for a certain project. It was just a quiet night at the Boathouse, the place that we were roommates in the Hollywood Hills. It was written just because Tommy was feeling like he wanted to write this song. I came up out of my dungeon room and he was in the middle of it and needed some help, and we finished it up in about a half hour. And it’s probably been covered by more recording artists than any of our other songs.