The stage was set and with the help of the hit TV series,Don Kirshner's hit making machine, the financial blessing of Columbia Pictures-owned Colgems Records (and even more so its distributor RCA) and some super-heavy radio promotion,The Monkees were an overnight sensation.
Favorite cuts on this album include "Last Train To Clarksville," "Take A Giant Step," "Papa Gene's Blues,"
"This Just Doesn't Seem To Be My Day"(which I easily related to back in the sixth grade) and the comedic "Gonna Buy Me A Dog" featuring Micky and Davy.
And for you ladies out there I cannot forget "I Wanna Be Free" sung by Davy. At that time teen fan magazines pondered: "Are the Monkees on The Beatles back?" The answer is yes AND no thanks to John Lennon's controversial statement made just a month before.
The second album even better than the first with my favorite cuts including Boyce and Hart's "(I'm Not Your)Stepping Stone," "Mary Mary,""Your Auntie Grezelda" and the Neil Diamond-penned "I'm A Believer."
What I (and other fans worldwide) didn't know yet was that Mike,Peter,Micky and Davy only sang the vocal tracks and didn't play the instruments leaving the band dubbed by critics as "the prefab four." From that point on a rebellion took place against Don Kirshner's "creative control" by the group and singlehandedly won..at least for the moment anyway. As for Kirshner,he would go on and start his own record label employing the use of his prefabricated tennybopper pop to the likes of a cartoon band inspired by Bob Montana's legendary comic strip "Archie." which succeeded in 1969. On the downside,he
introduced "Toomorrow" in England in 1970 and flopped badly,but a ray of hope shined forth in the form of a pretty,sweet gal from down under named Olivia Newton-John...but that's another story!
Desperate to shed it's "prefab four" title, the group finally gets to show its creative self now with Don Kirshner out the door.This is their best album for that very reason from this fan's point of view.
Best cuts include "You Told Me," "Randy Scouse Git," "Shades of Gray," a humerous inpromptu outtake entitled "Band 6" and the group performing a "round" called "Zilch." The Colgems label also finally adopts an identifiable logo... a blue upper-case "G" surrounded by a red "C" inside a circle which would later be copped by Capitol Records in 1970 when they temporarily dumped their famous "dome" logo.The Gold Circle discount store chain in the late 1960s did the same thing.
"Pleasant Valley Sunday" was a hit single released around the time "Headquarters" was released thanks to Kirshner putting "his two cents worth in" for the final time but missed out on that particular album release..so it ended up on this album instead.Other favorite cuts include "Love Is Only Sleeping," "Star Collector" and Peter Tork's spoken word ditty "Peter Pervicial Patterson's Pet Pig Porky."
Unfortunately "Daydream Believer"(which was released around the same time as this album) had to wait until the next album release the following year.
