Courtesy of DavyJones.net

As a kid in the sixties, I LOVED watching The Monkees.  There was something about the fun that Davy, Michael, Mickey and Peter exuded from the TV screen that left their viewers and fans with no choice but to smile along with them.

Even after the show was cancelled from its Monday night line-up, the band (yes, they could really play their instruments) enjoyed a loyal following.  This was helped to a certain degree by the Saturday morning re-runs of theirs shows and the release of new albums.

The Monkees still have that loyal following and to help fill the need for a Monkee fix is Davy Jones, arguably THE heart throb of the band.  Because of his British accent and charm, along with the looks that made girls swoon, Jones commanded the bulk of the attention the band received.

I recently chatted by phone with Davy to learn more about what fans can expect from his Dallas area appearance with David Cassidy on February 6^th of this year.  Honestly?  I was expecting a by-the-numbers interview where in this icon of the Broadway, TV, and concert stages would try hard to tolerate questions that he’s had to have heard a million times before. 

I was wrong.  I laughed.  Hard.  I laughed a lot.  After the call, I felt like I maybe should have paid the price for admission just to have laughed as hard as I did. 

Jones started our conversation off by filling me in on a little historical background about the Monkees being followed by David Cassidy and The Partridge Family after Monkees’s show was cancelled.  This was helped along by the fact that both shows were produced by Screen Gems.

Davy said, speaking of David, “I had actually known his father, Jack Cassidy, back in New York, in the sixties as well as Shirley Jones.  I was on Broadway in Oliver.  He was all part of that little click with Jack Cassidy and Shirley Jones.  It was Judy Garland and Tony Newly; Dudley Moore, Joan Collins, Peggy Lee, Buddy Rich. 

“Oh my goodness!  It was like, Judy Garland was good friends with Georgia Brown.  Georgia Brown was Nancy in Oliver.  She put me under her wing like I was her little man.  I was only sixteen at the time.  We always use to go over to Judy’s apartment on Central Park West and they got into whatever they got into.  I wanted to be JUST like them.  By the time I was seventeen years old, I was well into gin and tonics, you know?

I’m thinking, “This is it.  I’m just like everyone else!”  It wasn’t until I saw Judy Garland go around the revolving door at the Russian Tea Room three times, trying to find her way out, that I realized, “I don’t think I want to be like that!”

“I sang with her at Carnegie Hall and that was cool.  It was all about the time that I was on the Ed Sullivan Show in ’64 – the night the Beatles were on.  I did a song from Oliver.  That was when I first thought, ‘Ah!  Music!  It’s good, all these girls!  I think I’ll have a piece of that (fame), actually!’ That’s why I got into what I got into.

“As I said, Jack Cassidy and Shirley Jones was all part of that click and it was like, ‘Goodness gracious, me!’  Years later, David shows up on the lot at Columbia Pictures, he’s in a TV series and his mum there.  And he’s like, ‘Oh, my goodness gracious!’

Obviously relishing the nostalgic memories of youthful innocence, Davy continues:

“It was all good – very incestuous, in a sense.  It’s all from the same little mold, you know?  We all hung out together back in the 60’s with the Grass Roots, the Turtles, the Association and the Beach Boys.  It used to be that we’d all be going to the same parties and, pretty much, dating the same girls. 

“All of a sudden, we’d be saying, ‘We’re going to knock you off the charts next week.  Don’t you worry!’  It was like – you wouldn’t imagine Bobby Riddell pulling a gun on Fabian, could you?  ‘Hey, man!  Get off the charts!’

“I approached David (Cassidy) and said, ‘Come on, man!  You and I!’”  He and I had been, like, vying for All Time Teen Idol Celebrity for thirty years.  So I said, ‘Why don’t go out as the Ultimate Idol?’

“So, Dallas is going to be good (where he appears with Cassidy).  And we also had a date in Staten Island or somewhere like that.  We talked about it.  I think that we’re going to work together.  It brings people in and gives them a lot of nostalgia.”

Sliding in a little humor, Jones humorously makes light of the ages that his high profile generation:

“He (Cassidy) sings, ‘I think I love me, what am so I afraid of?’ Tony Orlando sings, ‘Knock three times on the ceiling if you hear me fall”.  Peter Noone singings, ‘Mrs. Brown, you have a lovely walker’.  Roberta Flack sings, ‘The first time I ever forgot your face.’  And Willie Nelson’s on the throne again.  All this stuff is, like, ridiculous.  Ringo Starr sings, ‘I get a little help from Depends.’ It gets crazy.  Paul Simon sings, ’50 ways to lose your liver’ and Abba is singing ‘Denture Queen’.

I’m sure that these take this as all being in good humor . . . don’t they?

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