Wednesday, January 3, 2018

Musical Interlude: Pleasant Valley Sunday (1967)

The Monkees peaked at #3 on the Hot 100 with Gerry Goffin & Carole King's "Pleasant Valley Sunday", released as a single prior to season 2 of The Monkees.

Take note of the following as you look at the video:

*--While Micky Dolenz is the lead singer, he didn't play drums on the track. A studio musician did.
*--While Davy Jones struggles with the bass, that's just for show. He actually sang backup and played the maracas.
*--Peter Tork actually did play keyboards on the track.
*--When MTV acquired The Monkees in February 1986, their first Sunday marathon used "Pleasant Valley Sunday" as the title, with excerpts played during each commercial bumper.

2 comments:

magicdog said...

I remember the MTV PVS Marathon very well.

This clip (along with "Love is Only Sleeping", "Randy Scouse Git" and "Daydream Believer") were all filmed on a Chicago soundstage in what would eventually become Harpo Studios (Oprah's place where her show was taped). Monkee fans refer to clips recorded on this soundstage as "The Rainbow Sessions" for the bright stripes.

It's also interesting to note that the Monkees were actually dragged into the studio to film the clips. They were on tour and they were on their day off when TPTB ordered them to go in and lip synch to a few tunes from the Pisces, Capricorn, Aquarius & Jones album. They wanted to showcase the songs in Season 2.

When their latest album, Good Times was released in 2016, a fan of the group made a homemade music video using a compilation of these clips for the song, "Birth of an Accidental Hipster". It's actually pretty good, and the editor managed to synch a cymbal crash from the studio clip to that in the song!

hobbyfan said...

I see that on YouTube, and I'll take a look. Seems to me the suits at Screen Gems were a little too pushy, and when the band decided to push back......!