The Best Monkees Songs: 10 Pop Classics To Go Ape Over

9: Can You Dig It (from ‘Head’, 1968)

Head – The Monkees’ sole feature film – was, at the time of its release, greeted with disdain from all sides. The group’s young fans, who watched the TV series, were confused by the movie’s surrealism and stream-of-consciousness style, and upset at the break with the band’s fun-loving image. But the audience The Monkees were hoping to court – those countercultural heads who appreciated Frank Zappa (who has a cameo in the film) – still saw the band as square teen idols who were simply playing with hippie imagery. Head was a box-office failure and, for years, was regarded as a grand folly.

Its soundtrack reflected the film’s psychedelia and was pockmarked by snatches of dialogue from the movie. Can You Dig It, written by Peter Tork with lead vocals by Micky Dolenz, was based on Tork’s interest in the Tao Te Ching (a text central to Taoism) and is one of the record’s outstanding moments. The minimalist yet earnest lyrics capture the spirit of the age, and the non-Western rhythmic feel to Can You Dig It proved that the best Monkees songs could sit alongside other exploratory pop masterpieces by The Beatles and The Turtles.

The Head album was reissued in 1994, which prompted a reappraisal of the movie. It still garnered a good deal of head-scratching, but audiences now tended to understand it both as a deconstruction of the fame game and an absurd Pythonesque moment in time. As for the band, they were split on Head’s merits, but knew why they had undertaken such a brazen venture. “We all wanted to do something different than a 90-minute version of the show,” Dolenz said in 1994. “Which, in retrospect, would have been a lot more commercial. But then again, we wouldn’t have this strange little cult movie, which I’m very proud of.”

8: Star Collector (from ‘Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones Ltd’, 1967)

By their fourth album, The Monkees were getting comfortable with increased control over their sound and image, a process which had begun on their previous album, Headquarters. The cover of the record speaks to this: the band are pencil-drawn and faceless, and The Monkees’ famous guitar-shaped logo is buried within abstract flowers. “The agreement was, we’d write three songs and produce them ourselves,” Micky Dolenz said in 2023. In the end, members of the band got credit on four songs, with a variety of other songwriters creating material that was sympathetic to The Monkees’ desire to explore new musical and lyrical avenues.

Star Collector was written by legendary songwriting duo Gerry Goffin and Carole King. It closes the album, and is a dismissive take on groupies (a very adult theme for the young band, and again indicative of how uncomfortable they were with their public personae). Another example of how inventive the best Monkees songs were, the track also prominently featured the Moog synthesiser, then a very new musical innovation. The Moog on Star Collector was played by Paul Beaver, who was one of North America’s first electronic-music pioneers (and a sales rep for the instrument). Dolenz also experimented with the Moog on another of the album’s tracks, Daily Nightly.

7: Randy Scouse Git (from ‘Headquarters’, 1967)

The sheer incongruity of The Monkees, a group as associated with California as The Beach Boys were, calling a song Randy Scouse Git was startling. Written by Micky Dolenz (a Californian by birth) from a phrase he picked up while watching British TV, he claimed he had no idea of its bawdy meaning. “I liked the phonetic sound of it, that’s all,” he said in 1967. One of the best Monkees songs from a transitional period for the group, it was a snapshot of a London party thrown in honour of The Monkees, where The Beatles, The Mamas And The Papas and Dolenz’s future wife, Samantha Juste, were in attendance.

Headquarters, The Monkees’ third album, was the first on which the band played instruments and explored self-composed material. “Right from the get-go, Mike Nesmith was very frustrated as a singer-songwriter. He’d been promised when they were casting him that he would have the chance to record his own material,” Dolenz remembered in 2023. “The record company people thought [Headquarters] would be a total bomb, and, of course, it wasn’t. It was up there at No.1 on the charts for a long, long time, only to be knocked out by Sgt Pepper. So that’s the short story. It was Nez driving the train and getting us all on board.”

6: (I’m Not Your) Steppin’ Stone (from ‘More Of The Monkees’, 1967)

(I’m Not Your) Steppin’ Stone was a song that had done the rounds before ending up in The Monkees’ hands. Written by Boyce and Hart, it had previously been recorded by The Liverpool Five and Paul Revere And The Raiders, but neither could touch the bitter pop rendition that sits among the best Monkees songs. About a social climber – and the folk she steps on to ascend – Micky Dolenz’s vocals have real bite to them.

But the album it came from, More Of The Monkees, provoked real fury within the band. They were unaware it was being released at all, hated the cover image (taken from an advertisement) and couldn’t believe the liner notes, written by Don Kirshner, which listed the songwriters in detail while barely mentioning the group.

Rather than despondency, such flagrant disrespect spurred The Monkees to publicly crack their carefully constructed moulds. “Sometimes this Monkee business gets so out of hand that you feel you’re more like a product instead of a person,” Michael Nesmith said in a 1967 interview, hinting at the puppetry behind the image. He also told Melody Maker that More Of The Monkees was “probably the worst album in the history of the world”. From this point on, Nesmith would galvanise his bandmates into demanding that the group must play on their own material and contribute to the songwriting process.

5: Pleasant Valley Sunday (from ‘Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones Ltd’, 1967)

Carole King and Gerry Goffin were a songwriting team and a married couple but, by 1967, their relationship was in trouble. Pleasant Valley Sunday is a good indication of their dissatisfaction: having just moved to suburban New Jersey, the couple penned a vicious takedown of the small-town US life that they were struggling to fit into. (They would divorce a year later).

“On Pleasant Valley Sunday you’ve got Mike, who was really a hard-nosed character, and Micky, who’s a real baby face, and these two blended and lent each other qualities,” Peter Tork recalled. “The song’s not two separate voices singing together, it’s really a melding of the two voices. Listening to that record later on was a joy.”

4: I’m A Believer (from ‘More Of The Monkees’, 1967)

The biggest-selling US single of 1967, and an enormous worldwide hit, I’m A Believer still stuns in its immediacy. Among all the best Monkees songs, the freshness of its sound cemented the group’s appeal as young, wide-eyed lovables.

The song was written by Neil Diamond, who had been approached by The Monkees’ team – they had liked Diamond’s hit Cherry, Cherry and asked him for similar material. “I said, ‘Well, I don’t have anything like Cherry, Cherry, but I have an album coming out soon, and I’ll send it over, and take your pick,’” Diamond remembered in 2023. I’m A Believer was on this album (Diamond’s second, 1967’s Just For You); it was selected for The Monkees, and its place in pop history was made.

3: Last Train To Clarksville (from ‘The Monkees’, 1966)

Easily one of the best Monkees songs, the group’s debut single was an immediate success, topping the Billboard Hot 100. Its writers, Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart, consciously tried to compose a Beatles-style song, with even the title derived from a misheard lyric in Paperback Writer (Hart mistook that song’s title for “Take The Last Train”).

Yet the seemingly light lyrics have a darker heart to them, and may even have contributed to some state surveillance of the band by the FBI. The narrator (Micky Dolenz was on lead vocals) wants to meet his sweetheart in Clarksville because he doesn’t know if he’s ever coming home – something widely interpreted as a reference to going away to serve in the Vietnam War. The suspicion that this clean-cut band were against the Vietnam quagmire would gain further traction in 2011, when it was revealed that the FBI kept a file on The Monkees for alleged “anti-US messages on the war in Vietnam”. In 2022, Dolenz, along with his attorney, Mark Zaid, decided to sue the FBI over this dossier. “The Monkees reflected, especially in their later years, with projects like Head, a counterculture from what institutional authority was at the time,” Zaid said in 2023. “And [J Edgar] Hoover’s FBI, in the 60s in particular, was infamous for monitoring the counterculture, whether they committed unlawful actions or not.”

2: Porpoise Song (Theme From ‘Head’) (from ‘Head’, 1968)

The inscrutable Porpoise Song is another Goffin-King composition among the best Monkees songs, and is the group’s finest psychedelic pop moment. Appearing at the start and end of the movie Head, the song accompanies woozy, watery visuals enhanced by an overexposure photography technique known as solarisation. “It was really all about trips – going someplace,” Peter Tork said of the Head soundtrack. “You know, we used the word in those days very specifically. ‘Trippy’ meant not just spacey but actually involved in some kind of adventure as opposed to just plodding along.”

Barring one final project, the TV special 33 1/3 Revolutions Per Monkee (an even odder project than Head), this album was the final outing for the original line-up of The Monkees. A frustrated Peter Tork left the band in December 1968, buying out his contract at huge financial cost to himself. He revealed shortly after his resignation that it had been a long time coming. “I wanted to leave the group way back when the first season [of the TV show] ended, but they convinced me not to. I didn’t care about all the things that were happening, all the acclaim,” he said in 1969. “Actually, after the TV show was cancelled it was easier for me. Doing the TV show was the worst. Then came the movie, and I couldn’t forego the movie, so I did the movie. You know, there were moments here and there – lots of good, funny stuff happening throughout – but the only time that I was really happy was when we were recording the Headquarters album.”

1: Daydream Believer (from ‘The Birds, The Bees And The Monkees’, 1968)

The third, and final, No.1 for The Monkees is also the track that tops this list of best Monkees songs. Daydream Believer evokes leisurely and hazy love affairs, struck through with the Americana of “homecoming queen” and the fairy tale “white knight”. Although the song was not written by the group (its composer was John Stewart, whose lyrical inspiration was literally a whole day spent dreaming), The Monkees play on it, and Peter Tork created the famous piano introduction.

It’s the crowning achievement of one of the shortest-lived, but most fascinating, 60s groups of all. For a band to evolve from non-playing pretty boys for a TV show into the psychedelic agitators of Head, all within a little over two years, is truly remarkable. “As an actor and a performer, playing a part that gets continuously associated with you can be bad, and it can be good,” a reflective Michael Nesmith said in 2019, in one of his final interviews before his death in 2021. “In any case, it’s never not a fact and not a factor. It’s always a factor. And that’s always a fact. And since that’s the case, it becomes an old friend.”

Find out why The Monkees are more than manufactured pop primates.