Every now and then, you’ll hear a magnificent song you’ve never heard before – on the radio, maybe, or in a friend’s car – and be blown away by your new discovery. The song stays with you, and might even become a pop/rock classic, leaving you determined to hear more from the band that did it.
That song might be, say, “I’m a Believer”. Or “Sugar Sugar”. Or “I Think I Love You”.
And every now and then, when such a song hits you, it turns out... that band that did the song isn’t a real band.
This isn’t exactly a revelation, of course; it’s doubtful that anyone alive in the Western hemisphere over 40 years of age isn’t aware of The Monkees, and in touch with the fact that they were a fake band – the “Pre-Fab Four”, created for a television show in overt imitation of the Beatles.
And, of course, they weren’t the only ones. Four years after The Monkees debuted on NBC in 1966, rival network ABC launched their own fake band, the Patridge Family, a pop clan channeling the real-world Cowsills.
There have been a number of such fake bands over the years. Some we’ve all heard of, some we haven’t, but they all have one thing in common: they produced music that had a serious impact on pop/rock, in one way or another – music that’s well worth listening to.
The Monkees
Conceived in 1965 by two television producers, Bob Rafelson and Bert Schneider, the Monkees were the subject of a sitcom about a young rock band living in a two-story beach house in Hollywood. None of the 58 episodes produced between 1966 and 1968 were about anything in particular, but each included the band performing a new song – or, at least, lip-syncing to one.
Davy Jones, Mike Nesmith, Mickey Dolenz and Peter Tork were selected from among 437 applicants to play the Monkees – essentially playing themselves. They wore colorful, properly groovy clothing, rode around in a wild car, and zinged each other with one-liners like the cast of Seinfeld – and America ate it up, tuning in in droves for most of the show’s run.4 This loose, almost improvisational comedic style consciously imitated the Beatles’ films A Hard Day’s Night and Help!
Originally, the show was going to use an actual working band – New York folk rockers The Lovin’ Spoonful – but they were already signed by a record company, so that idea was abandoned. The casting call then went out.
Mickey Dolenz came to the series with television experience, having starred in Circus Boy a decade earlier. Davy Jones, the lone Brit, was already signed to Screen Gems, the show’s production company, so that was a no-brainer. He couldn’t play an instrument, but he had a radio-ready singing voice – as did Dolenz, who ironically could play the guitar but not the drums, and had to be shown how by Tork – who played the guitar, not the bass, which Nesmith played.
That didn’t matter much, because the early Monkees recordings used only the two lead singers; studio musicians handled the actual instruments. This resulted in backlash from the fans, and so the four actor/musicians (who really could play, just not in the positions shown on the show) rebelled, and insisted to music director Don Kirshner that they be allowed to begin recording the music themselves.
This happened on the third of five studio albums recorded during the show’s run. All of these albums went platinum, and all but one went to #1 on the Billboard chart.
The band also began writing their own stuff, though this was gratuitous; they had the best songwriters in the industry working for them already. Neil Diamond, Carole King, Tommy Boyce, Bobby Hart, Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller all turned in Monkees hits.
And those songs took over the radio. The Monkees racked up seven Top 20 hits in less than two years, three of them at #1:
“Last Train to Clarksville”
“I’m a Believer / I’m Not Your Stepping Stone”
“A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You”
“Pleasant Valley Sunday”
“Daydream Believer”
“Valeri”
“D.W. Washburn”
Though the show was canceled in 1968, it persisted in syndication for decades, spurred by a revival on MTV in 1986. The Monkees themselves continued to record, breaking up in 1970 – but then reuniting, in various configurations, for more albums, more tours, and several reunion events on television.
Jones died in 2012, Tork in 2019. Dolenz and Nesmith did a farewell tour in 2021, and Nesmith died shortly thereafter.
They sold, in total, more than 75 million albums.
The Partridge Family
ABC’s answer to The Monkees, the Partridge Family debuted in 1970 as a family of five musical siblings, raised by a single mom in Southern California. The premise was that the widowed mom needed some way to pull together college money for the five of them, and their musical talent – with the help of a shrewd manager – could make it happen.
Shirley Jones, of Music Man fame, played Shirley Partridge; her stepson David Cassidy played Keith Partridge, the oldest of her television brood. Then there was Laurie (Susan Dey), Danny (Danny Bonaduce), Chris (Brian Forster) and Tracy (Suzanne Crough). Dave Madden played Reuben Kincaid, the manager.
Wes Farrell, who had written for the Beatles, was the show’s musical director, and along with Tony Romeo and a gaggle of equally talented songwriters, equipped the show with as much Top 40 radio power as the Monkees had enjoyed. Like the Monkees, the Partridge actors found themselves largely shut out of the studio – until Shirley Jones, a Broadway-quality vocalist, convinced Farrell that her stepson was a fantastic singer and could easily handle the task.
And so it was. Cassidy and Jones did their own vocals in the studio, backed by the Wrecking Crew, a fantastic ensemble of studio musicians that included guitarists Louie Shelton and Tommy Tedesco, bassist Joe Osborn, keyboardist Larry Knechtel and drummer Hal Blaine. [The Wrecking Crew included several dozen members over more than three decades, doing studio tracks for a diverse array of artists that included John Lennon, Glen Campbell, The Grass Roots, John Denver, The Carpenters, Nat King Cole, Simon and Garfunkel, and Nancy Sinatra. ]
Producing one song a week across 96 episodes in four years generated enough material for seven studio albums.
And on the radio, they had five Top 20 hits, including “I Think I Love You”, which went to #1 (and, at five million copies, out-sold the Beatles’ “Hey Jude”).
“I Think I Love You”
“Doesn’t Somebody Want to Be Wanted”
“I’ll Meet You Halfway”
“I Woke Up in Love This Morning”
“It’s One of Those Nights”
Four of their seven albums made the Top 10.
Cassidy enjoyed a wildly successful solo career, and did sold-out concerts on weekends, between episodes. He died in 2017.
Spinal Tap
And now a fake band created not for television but for the movies.
Well, not exactly; Spinal Tap – comedians Michael McKean, Christopher Guest and Harry Shearer – originally debuted on Saturday Night Live, in a skit. But when All in the Family’s Meathead Rob Reiner decided to try his hand at directing feature films in the early Eighties, he turned to the fictional Loudest Band in England for his subject matter.
The film, titled This Is Spinal Tap, is almost entirely improvisational, a mock rock-documentary – a mockumentary. The premise is that Reiner, who appears on screen throughout the film as a director trying to capture “the sights, the sounds, the smells” of a hard rock band on the road. Spinal Tap is, in this fiction, a washed-up hard rock band trying for a comeback with their woefully mismanaged album Smell the Glove.
Along the way, the band experiences promotional event fails, inadequate catering, industry indifference, disastrously undersized stage props – and get lost backstage. No cliché was left untouched: the mindless groupies, the bullshitting manager, intra-band rivalry, the Yoko girlfriend – all of them show up. (Oh – and one by one, each Spinal Tap drummer mysteriously dies.)
So spot-on is this portrayal of life on the road that dozens of actual touring bands, from Led Zeppelin to Yes to the Grateful Dead to Ozzy Osbourne to the Foo Fighters, have all sworn that Tap was channeling their own tours.
Half of Hollywood got in on the fun. The film, which Reiner and his actors largely made up as they went along, features cameos by Billy Crystal, Bruno Kirby, Ed Begley Jr., Howard Hesseman, Paul Shaffer, Fred Willard, Dana Carvey, Anjelica Huston, Patrick McNee, and Fran Drescher, to name just a handful.
And the music – all of it written and performed by Guest, McKean and Shearer, who are supremely talented musicians and more-than-competent vocalists – is astounding.
In the same sense that the successful forging of an acknowledged masterpiece is itself a work of art, the Tap actors created an album so authentic, so brilliantly written and played, it would have easily charted without help from the movie had the world not been in on the joke. The songs lampoon the early Beatles (“Gimme Some Money”), late Sixties folk rock (“Listen to the Flower People”), Seventies hard rock (“Hell Hole”, “Sex Farm”), and stadium anthems (“Tonight We’re Gonna Rock You Tonight”). They take a swipe at epic rock bombast with the gaudy theater of “Stonehenge”. Even when mocking the inanity of the era’s sad innovations (the use of three basses and no guitars on “Big Bottom”), the music itself is just magnificent, remaining listenable and memorable across decades.
The band followed up a decade later with a standalone album, Break Like the Wind, which featured a whole new batch of pitch-perfect Idiot Rock, from the lyrically incompetent “Majesty of Rock” to the sexist fake-out “Bitch School”. It put the band back on the talk shows, and they toured in the real world in support of the album.
Since then, there have been additional albums, tours, and reunion events, and no one who ever saw that long-ago movie has forgotten them.
“Spinal Tap blurred the line between reality and unreality like no satire before or since, and their 1984 movie This Is Spinal Tap isn’t just one of the finest examples of the art of mocumentary – it's one of the greatest films ever made.” ~Henry Yates, LouderSound.com.
The Rutles
And then there’s the mockumentary to end all mockumentaries – All You Need is Cash, featuring the Rutles.
The Rutles, conceived by Monty Python’s Eric Idle and Neil Innes, were mock Beatles, a parody of devastating accuracy that sends up everything about the Fab Four that can possibly lampooned. Like This Is Spinal Tap, it is a work of art, scathing in its portrayal, utterly authentic in its mimickry.
John Lennon becomes Ron Nasty; Paul McCartney is now Dirk McQuigly; George Harrison is Stig O’Hara, and Ringo Starr is Barry Wom.
And the songs are such brilliant parodies, so evocative of the original Beatles work, that Innes (who wrote the songs) was forced by ATV to credit some of them as Lennon-McCartney-Innes. Even so, all of the Rutles tunes are out there on CD and YouTube.
They match up as follows:
“I Want to Hold Your Hand” / “Hold My Hand”
“Help!” / “Ouch!”
“All You Need is Love” / “Love Life”
“Get Back” / “Get Up and Go”
“Penny Lane” / “Doubleback Alley”
“A Hard Day’s Night” / “I Must Be in Love”
“I Am the Walrus” / “Piggy in the Middle”
“Don’t Pass Me By” / “Living in Hope”
Etc.
George Harrison, a lifelong fan and support of Monty Python, was in on it with Eric Idle from the beginning. John Lennon loved the songs, refusing to return the tape he was loaned to acquire his approval. Ringo Starr found the parody joyful, with the caveat that some of the sadder stuff “hit too close.” Paul McCartney was the sole sourpuss among the Beatles, giving Eric Idle the cold shoulder in response to the whole thing, until he found out that his wife Linda loved the movie – whereupon he lightened up and changed his tune.
The Rutles released a second album, Archaeology, in 1996 – a parody of the Beatles’ Anthology. A second mockumentary film, Can’t Buy Me Lunch, was released in 2005.
"The Rutles sort of liberated me from the Beatles in a way,” said George Harrison. “It was the only thing I saw of those Beatles television shows they made. It was actually the best, funniest and most scathing. But at the same time, it was done with the most love."
The Archies
Adults of a certain age will remember the era of Saturday morning cartoons, a ritual enjoyed only by Boomers and Gen Xers, phased out in the Nineties. It was a glorious era, filled with Scooby Doo and the Road Runner and Coyote and the Pink Panther and the Land of the Lost. And it included, straight out of the comic books of that era – the Archies.
The conceit was that Archie, Jughead, Betty, Veronica and Reggie formed a band in high school, and on every episode of the cartoon – which, of course, depicted the wacky, zany life of care-free teens in Riverdale – there would be a song, played by Archie’s band.
Unlike the Monkees and the Partridge Family, of course, this was a band that couldn’t have any real overlap, as the TV Archies weren’t just fictional, but entirely celluloid. Even so, there needed to be real people writing and recording the songs at the behest of Don Kirshner, who had pulled the Monkees together. That studio band included vocalists Ron Dante and Toni Wine, Hugh McCracken (who played with Paul McCartney) and Dave Appell on guitar, Chuck Rainey on bass, Buddy Saltzman on drums, and Ron Frangipane on keys.
The Archies’ most famous song is, by far, “Sugar, Sugar”, which went to #1 on both the Billboard Hot 100 chart in 1969 and the UK Singles chart. It sold six million copies worldwide.6 Wilson Pickett did a cover version.
The fake Archies released five real albums and 12 singles during the cartoon’s run. Apart from “Sugar, Sugar”, only “Jingle Jangle” made the Top 10.
Stillwater
Finally, there’s one most people have never heard of – Stillwater, a fake band featured in Cameron Crowe’s nostalgic 2000 love letter to Seventies rock, Almost Famous.
The film, which is a gem, is a semi-autobiographical tale of a young teenage rock journalist trying to score a cover story for Rolling Stone in 1973. The teenager, William Miller, ditches high school and jumps on the tour bus of Stillwater, a B-string band trying to break through. As his mother (Frances McDormand) laments his wayward sojourn back home, William gets hired by real-life Rolling Stone editor Ben Fong-Torres, meets real-life rock critic Lester Bangs, who becomes a kind of sympathetic mentor, falls in love with a groupie named Penny Lane (Kate Hudson); bonds with the band’s guitarist, Russell Hammond (Billy Crudup), and is looked after by lead singer Jeff Bebe (Jason Lee) and the other members of Stillwater.
The movie is a must-see, but also a must-hear: the actors playing Stillwater actually recorded the songs (written by Cameron’s then-wife, Nancy Wilson of Heart) themselves, with help from Wilson and Peter Frampton and several others. The soundtrack album went on to win the 2001 Grammy for Best Soundtrack Album. The song “Fever Dog” is a perfect snapshot of early Seventies FM rock, almost eerily evoking Led Zeppelin.
And, in a heartwarming postscript: in a scene where the band is getting back on the tour bus one morning, with everyone mad at each other, a song comes on the bus radio – Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer”, one of the era’s defining songs. One by one, everyone on the bus begins singing along, until the chorus arrives, whereupon the entire band and crew – and William and Penny – are belting out the song at the top of their lungs, their joy and friendship restored...
Σχόλια