Micky Dolenz of The Monkees is suing the FBI
Former drummer of The Monkees, Micky Dolenz, is suing the FBI in order to obtain any records it has on the band and its members.
Back in 1967, when The Monkees were breaking through, an FBI informant attended one of the band’s concerts on their first US tour and afterwards, they filed a report which alleged that the show contained “subliminal messages […] depicted on the screen which, in the opinion of [informant] constituted ‘left wing intervention of a political nature'”.
The report also described the messages as showing “riots in Berkley, anti-US messages on the war in Vietnam, racial riots in Selma, Alabama, and similar messages which had unfavourable response from the audience”.
The file on The Monkees was released into the public sphere in 2011 but in a heavily redacted format. In June this year, Dolenz – the sole surviving member of the pop group – filed a Freedom of Information Act request in the hope of acquiring the full file, but he failed.
Now, a lawsuit has been filed against the FBI via the lawyer Mark S. Zaid in another bid to access the unredacted file as well as any others relating to the band and its members.
“The Monkees reflected, especially in their later years with projects like Head, a counterculture from what institutional authority was at the time,” Zaid explained to Rolling Stone. “And [J. Edgar] Hoover’s FBI, in the ’60s in particular, was infamous for monitoring the counterculture, whether they committed unlawful actions or not.”
Zaid revealed that there might be another document concerning The Monkees that is fully redacted. “The redacted information may be peripheral to them,” he said.
The lawyer concluded: “Some of them likely reflect an informant’s identity, which was probably the person attending the concerts… Theoretically, anything could be in those files, though. We have no idea what records even exist. It could be almost nothing. But we’ll see soon enough.”
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