“Relieved”: the 1960s icon who refused to join Frank Zappa’s band
Having testified in front of the US Congress, been the subject of an assassination attempt, and shared stages with some of the most iconic musicians of all time, Frank Zappa was not an easy man to impress. Collaboration, however, was something that he always seemed to covet, enjoying a jam session almost as much as he enjoyed being rather contrarian.
An uninitiated admirer of Zappa’s discography could be forgiven for assuming that the songwriter was always at the forefront of America’s countercultural age. He did, after all, fit the bill of an archetypal hippie revolutionary; living on a commune-esque ranch in Los Angeles, experimenting with drugs and attempting to subvert mainstream expectations of rock and roll music. In actuality, though, Frank Zappa despised the counterculture movement and the emergence of the hippie era.
While his fellow musicians were dropping acid and jamming together under the flag of the Yippie movement, Zappa had little interest in participating. Instead, he yearned to embrace a different, far more mainstream aspect of American culture, in the form of The Monkees.
A fresh-faced band manufactured by television executives for the purposes of making money both from a TV programme and a few records, The Monkees weren’t exactly the poster boys of the counterculture age.
Nevertheless, Zappa was a fan. “He got The Monkees, understood what we were, and what we weren’t,” Monkees drummer Micky Dolenz once shared with Forbes. So much so, in fact, that Zappa had two cameo appearances over the course of the show’s run. Perhaps in an attempt to return the favour, the songwriter also requested that Dolenz join the ranks of his band, the Mothers of Invention.
“I had to pick myself off of the floor,” the drummer recalled of his immediate reaction to that offer. “Of course, I was incredibly flattered, like ‘Oh my God!’ But, he said that I’d have to get out of my recording contract with RCA, because his band was going to record.”
Unsurprisingly, RCA weren’t desperate to get rid of the cash-cow that was The Monkees so that the drummer could drive off into the sunset with a musical madman like Frank Zappa.
Expectedly, then, Dolenz couldn’t free himself from his contract. “I called the record company, and basically they said, ‘Absolutely not. You still have two albums to fulfil.’ So I told Frank, but there was definitely a part of me that was relieved,” he shared. “I don’t know if you know Frank Zappa’s music, but boy, I’d have been very challenged.”
Although it wouldn’t be difficult for Zappa to find a drummer willing to cut his own arm off for a chance to perform with The Mothers of Invention, it would have been quite a step up from Dolenz’s responsibilities within The Monkees, even if the filming schedule wouldn’t have been quite as tiresome.
While the idea of a Monkee jumping ship to the Mothers of Invention is a rather entertaining idea, and might have even made for a good plot in the television show, it also shows the originality of Zappa’s existence. During a time when groups were falling over themselves to be as subversive and novel as possible, the songwriter was busy trying to poach performers from primetime television.
