Monkees' Davy Jones Dead at 66

[sleepy]

Heart attack.
There is a thread at vpforums.org, but I thought I'd post the news here because Ike recently posted a Monkees video in the Saturnalia thread.

According to Yahoo he had chest pains last night and was admitted to a Florida hospital this morning.

 

[Isaac Sauvage]

66 years old. that's a little earlier to go, but maybe years of high living took their toll internally. sure didn't look like it externally, though- he looked great from the pics i saw and in the brady bunch movie.

i read through the monkees WP entry during the saturnalia thread and it was pretty interesting. particularly memorable was the fact that the band was sort of built to self-destruct because the members were cold-picked by execs as opposed to starting as friends and bandmates. another angle that was cool is early on the way they wrested musical control away from the execs.

let's hope the other david jones lives a longer life. i.e., stage name david bowie.

 

[sleepy]

Oh yeah, the band was fabricated strictly for the t.v. series and songs were written for the show by the likes of Carol King and Neil Diamond. The story goes that the band learned to play their instruments at the time of the show's casting. After they mastered their gear, the actors then became the musicians while Nesmith became a songwriter. But a lot of this story is mythology.

I would suspect that each of them had prior musical experience. For instance, Davy Jones was on Broadway in Oliver! as The Artful Dodger.
He was on the same episode of Ed Sullivan as The Beatles first appearance.
The cast of Oliver!, including Jones, performed a musical scene from the show.
EDIT: This was in 1964, more than a year before The Monkees were cast from tryouts.

I mentioned over at the .org that I went to Federated Electronics in Hollywood in '77 to pick up a couple of SQ Quad decoders (4 channel matrix surround decoders) and saw Davy Jones shopping for a TEAC reel to reel tape deck. He was very nice but kept to himself and I respected his privacy.

 

[Isaac Sauvage]

yea, it's pretty clear they were already musical. you don't sing as beautifully as they did on a song like "rio rio chio" unless you've been doing it for a while. ditto for the instruments, although of course some people are extremely fast learners.

IIRC the WP entry detailed how most of them were already in bands when they were picked by the execs...

 

[sleepy]

Yeah, I pretty much think so.
It's like Glen Cambell. He arrives in '65-66 with "By the Time I Get to Phoenix", but he was/is also a studio musician who played lead guitar on Tequilla by The Champs in 1956.

It's like Bread or The Eagles, again, prior to success as a band, they were studio musicians. So was Michael McDonald (backup singer and keyboardist for Steely Dan), and before that, Fagin and Becker (Steely Dan) also played session work.