Davy Jones

Davy Jones (born December 30, 1945, Manchester, England—died February 29, 2012, Stuart, Florida, U.S.) was a British pop singer and actor best known as the front man for the American music group the Monkees, which had a brief run in the 1960s as a wildly successful made-for-TV foursome, followed by decades of nostalgic reunions.

Early life

Jones grew up in poverty, sleeping with his three siblings in a single bedroom. When he was 14, his mother died, and his father soon fell into a depression. Jones developed an interest in acting, and in 1961 he appeared in an episode of England’s long-running soap opera Coronation Street. Small in stature—he eventually stood 5 feet 3 inches (1.60 meters) tall—Jones briefly left acting to train to be a jockey. However, he soon gravitated to the theater. In 1962 he began appearing as the Artful Dodger in Oliver!, a musical based on Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist. When the production moved to Broadway in 1963, Jones came along with the cast, and he earned a Tony Award nomination for best featured actor in a musical. In 1964 he and his fellow cast members appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show, and the fans went wild—but for other guests, the Beatles.

Talking about the experience with The Palm Beach Post in 2004, Jones said:

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I grew up overnight. It opened my eyes to the hysteria, the fan appreciation. I thought: Is that what happens when you’re a pop singer? I want to be part of that!…It was my introduction to the manufactured image. The Beatles were the first band to be choreographed by a producer.

The Monkees

With the Beatles’ 1964 movie A Hard Day’s Night as an inspiration, producers Bob Rafelson and Bert Schneider held auditions in Hollywood for “four insane boys” to star in the TV show The Monkees and to form a band of the same name to put out albums and singles. Jones was cast along with three Americans, Peter Tork, Mike Nesmith, and Micky Dolenz (all in their early 20s). They played a zany group with unique personalities. Jones, the tambourine-and-maracas-playing front man, was considered the “cute one,” and he was arguably the group’s most popular member. Nesmith recalled years later that Jones was the first one selected for the show and that producers built it around him. Jones became so famous that an up-and-coming rock star with the same name changed his surname, becoming David Bowie.

The show debuted in 1966, and some critics mocked the Monkees as the “pre-Fab Four.” The New York Times later called the band “a smoke-and-mirrors incarnation of a pop group reminiscent of that mop-topped one from Liverpool, created for a benignly psychedelic American TV sitcom.” Nevertheless, the songs, written by such respected composers as Neil Diamond (“I’m a Believer”), John Stewart (“Daydream Believer”), and Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart (“Last Train to Clarksville”), became hits. Tork and Nesmith were accomplished guitarists, though studio musicians provided instrumentals for the first couple of albums. Countless baby boomers and others still remember the chorus from the show’s theme song:

Hey, hey, we’re the Monkees,
and people say we monkey around.
But we’re too busy singing
to put anybody down.

Jones worked at a frenzied pace, putting in a dozen hours a day on filming The Monkees, then singing songs in the studio, sleeping less than four hours a night. As he recalled in his 1987 autobiography, They Made a Monkee Out of Me (written with Alan Green), “I’d call my manager for a diet pill to get me going—then a beer at noon to give the pill a kick.” The show was an immediate hit, which enabled the band to successfully lobby for more creative control. In 1967 the Monkees released their widely praised albums Headquarters and Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones Ltd. That year the Monkees reportedly sold more records than the combined total of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. Also in 1967 the TV show won a pair of Emmy Awards.

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After the second season (1967–68), the Monkees demanded changes to the program, including celebrity guests in a variety-show setting. But NBC instead canceled the show. The band then appeared in the 1968 psychedelic movie Head, cowritten by a then unknown Jack Nicholson. The Monkees released a few more singles, but they were unable to revive the early magic before breaking up in 1970.

Jones returned to stage acting. He also had a memorable TV cameo, appearing in a 1971 episode of The Brady Bunch in which Marcia Brady (played by Maureen McCormick), who is president of the local Davy Jones fan club, tells her high school that he will perform at the prom. The episode features Jones singing the song “Girl” and agreeing to be Marcia’s prom date.

A second act

A new generation was exposed to the Monkees in 1986 when MTV began airing reruns of the show. Jones, Dolenz, and Tork took advantage of their revived celebrity by touring in front of sold-out arenas. (Nesmith appeared at only one concert.) The Monkees continued to tour for several decades, benefiting from baby boomer nostalgia.

Meanwhile, Jones appeared in a number of TV shows, including My Two Dads, Boy Meets World, and Sabrina the Teenage Witch. In addition, he toured on his own as a singer-songwriter, and in 2012 the 66-year-old Jones appeared at a New York City blues club less than two weeks before he died of a heart attack. At the time, he was married to his third wife; he had four daughters from his first two marriages.

Writing in Time magazine after Jones’s death, TV critic James Poniewozik recalled the controversy about the Monkees not playing their own instruments:

It seems quaint now, when not only have we seen generations of stage-managed teen stars—you can draw a straight line from ’60s Jones, and his haircut, to Justin Bieber—but we have an entire industry of music reality shows dedicated to the idea that TV not only can manufacture musical stars, but should.