Wikipedia and the Monkees
Lately, when I do a search for something, more often than not one of the links will be to an article in Wikipedia. I've actually gotten quite fond of it and found it to be very useful.
I was very skeptical of it at first... the idea that anybody could 'correct' or add info to an entry seemed to me to be insane. And from what I've heard, at first they had a lot of problems with that. I don't know all the ins and outs of it, but apparently they have editors and safeguards in place now to prevent people who hold a grudge or who are just mischievous from screwing up otherwise accurate entries.
One thing I like about it is that it's very 'pop culture' oriented. You will find entries for subjects that you'd never find in a normal encyclopedia. Obscure actors, films, TV shows, rock bands, albums... they're all there along with the normal fare: history, famous politicians, countries of the world. It's really very impressive, at least to the extent I've seen and used it.
SO... I was looking up something and I saw this pic of a much older group of Monkees, older even than their mid/late 80's reunion after MTV had aired all the original episodes and revived interest in the group. The other odd thing was that Mike Nesmith was in the photo. I looked it up and it started coming back to me... in 1996, to mark the 30th anniversary of the band, they regrouped for a new album, Justus, a TV special on ABC, and a few concert dates here and in England. And it apparently was all Nesmith's idea. He produced the album and wrote the TV show.
I remembered watching it. It was really very clever, the premise being that the original Monkees TV series had never been cancelled and this was the 781st episode. So all the old sets were there, the guys were still playing their assigned roles except now they were all middle-aged men. There were set-pieces for four songs off the new album (one for each Monkee) and the whole thing was quite enjoyable.
And I remembered buying the album as well. Perhaps I had forgotten about it because it was, well, forgettable. It had one good song as I recall by Micky Dolenz and that was about it.
Neither the TV show nor the album was terribly successful, though the handful of concerts drew wildly enthusiastic crowds, both here and in England.
So it was nice to discover, or re-discover, another little footnote to some pop music history I've always been interested it. Thank you, Wikipedia.
I was very skeptical of it at first... the idea that anybody could 'correct' or add info to an entry seemed to me to be insane. And from what I've heard, at first they had a lot of problems with that. I don't know all the ins and outs of it, but apparently they have editors and safeguards in place now to prevent people who hold a grudge or who are just mischievous from screwing up otherwise accurate entries.
One thing I like about it is that it's very 'pop culture' oriented. You will find entries for subjects that you'd never find in a normal encyclopedia. Obscure actors, films, TV shows, rock bands, albums... they're all there along with the normal fare: history, famous politicians, countries of the world. It's really very impressive, at least to the extent I've seen and used it.
SO... I was looking up something and I saw this pic of a much older group of Monkees, older even than their mid/late 80's reunion after MTV had aired all the original episodes and revived interest in the group. The other odd thing was that Mike Nesmith was in the photo. I looked it up and it started coming back to me... in 1996, to mark the 30th anniversary of the band, they regrouped for a new album, Justus, a TV special on ABC, and a few concert dates here and in England. And it apparently was all Nesmith's idea. He produced the album and wrote the TV show.
I remembered watching it. It was really very clever, the premise being that the original Monkees TV series had never been cancelled and this was the 781st episode. So all the old sets were there, the guys were still playing their assigned roles except now they were all middle-aged men. There were set-pieces for four songs off the new album (one for each Monkee) and the whole thing was quite enjoyable.
And I remembered buying the album as well. Perhaps I had forgotten about it because it was, well, forgettable. It had one good song as I recall by Micky Dolenz and that was about it.
Neither the TV show nor the album was terribly successful, though the handful of concerts drew wildly enthusiastic crowds, both here and in England.
So it was nice to discover, or re-discover, another little footnote to some pop music history I've always been interested it. Thank you, Wikipedia.
posted by gbj at 3:49 PM
2 Comments:
Yeah, Mike Nesmith's mom invented Liquid Paper; she died a few years after the Monkees ended and he got about $25 mil; at least, that's the story I've always heard. Hence, he felt no need to involve himself in the 80's reunion. Given his stubborn nature and continual put-downs of said Monkees, he might not have anyway (kind of like Lennon right after the Beatles' bust-up). But apparently the 1996 deal was a different matter... maybe he had come to look back at things a bit more fondly and so took it upon himself to make the album and the TV show. The Wikipedia piece as I said reminded me that I'd seen it... it was right around the time of the Beatles Anthology series so I'm sure that probably overshadowed it in my memory.
Anyway, I agree, Wikipedia is rapidly becoming one of my favourite places to go for all that kind of info.
Ditto here -- really distrustful of it at first but I use it quite a bit, too, often getting some background information before going off to more conventionally-designed sources. There are advantages and disadvantages to it being set up the way it is. I'd love to see that reunion show.
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