It would be the same as Lars von Trier directing a biopic about a boyband, and everyone would just nod sagely and say "how intertextually pre-ironic". But when the original of the boyband species, The Monkees, appeared in the film Head, their career came to a slam-on-the-brakes stop as no one was able to understand the drug-addled, psychedelic, Fellini-esqueness of it all.
For a long time Head had a sub-cult classic status, favoured only by a stoner audience, but with this latest avalanche of pre-fabricated music over the past few years, the film is now finally being acknowledged as an audacious achievement - as much a parody of arthouse film as the murder machine that is the boy/girlband phenomenon.
The Monkees won the first ever Pop Idol competition. As a cynical American music industry move to replicate the success of The Beatles, their career script had been written out for them long before they were formed. The idea was simple - capture the knockabout antics of A Hard Day's Night for the indigenous market. Don't worry about the songs or if they can play them - that will be taken care of. Two TV producers placed an ad in Variety magazine for "four folk and rock musicians to appear in a TV series".
Applicants who were turned down included Stephen Stills and Harry Nilsson, with Michael Nesmith, Micky Dolenz, Davy Jones and Peter Tork winning out.
The idea for the band was that they would be actors first and musicians second, but something went dreadfully wrong. The people drafted in to write what should have been anodyne background songs for the band were of too high a calibre - Carole King, Gerry Goffin and Neil Diamond. As a result, songs such as I'm A Believer and Last Train To Clarksville made The Monkees an excellent fun pop/rock band. And even the TV show was a lot better than it should have been - introducing slightly arty effects, especially in its super-fast editing.
This confused everybody, not least the band, who got ideas above their boyband station and decided to tour - if only to show people that they could play their own instruments and be like a real band. To prove some chip-on-the-shoulder point, they got Jimi Hendrix to be their support act.
In a final attempt to wrest control away from their string-holders, they decided to make a motion picture that would be an audacious post-modern (yes, even in those days) commentary on the nature of the boyband business - how they were required to be deaf, dumb and blind cogs in a commercial machine.
Head was designed to align them, suddenly and dramatically, with the counter-culture, the psychedelic experience and the de rigeur anti-Vietnam war protests. Co-produced and co-written by a pre-Five Easy Pieces Jack Nicholson, the film placed them firmly into Nouvelle Vague territory. In many ways, the film is one big non sequitur. Full of narrative confusion, a cut-up style of filming and pastiches of differing film genres, it's a sort of an anti-Spinal Tap. Its undulating plot is supposed to be an indictment of the way the band themselves were merchandised to the public but the point gets lost in a haze of experimentation and absurdity.
Clips of an old Karloff-Lugosi film are juxtaposed with the main action on a seemingly random basis as a gang of pop-culture icons - Victor Mature, Annette Funicello and Frank Zappa - make idiosyncratic appearances.
By far and away the most surreal moment of the film is when a live Monkees performance complete with Monkeemania audience screaming is intercut with disturbing footage from the Vietnam War.
Problems with the film's distribution meant that few got to see it on its release in 1968. The few of their fans who did get to see it reacted with an uncomprehending sense of horror, while others thought that while being "admirably trippy", it was just still The Monkees monkeeing around.
In these days of Pop/Fame/Idols/Academies it all now makes perfect sense.
An act of cultural sedition.
The Head DVD is on Warner Vision
bboyd@irish-times.ie
