‘Head’: The surreal swansong for The Monkees written by Jack Nicholson
Despite being created from highly cynical origins, The Monkees would go on to become hugely successful in their own right, eventually proving so popular they moved well past their origins as a thinly-veiled attempt to replicate the ‘Beatlemania’ phenomenon.
That’s exactly what the group was, though, with future Five Easy Pieces director and Easy Rider producer Bob Rafelson coming up with the idea for the band based entirely on the success of not just The Beatles, but their associated outings in A Hard Day’s Night and Help.
Although it only ran for two seasons and 58 episodes between 1966 and 1968, The Monkees was a huge hit that transformed the quartet from facsimiles into superstars. The ratings were high, it won two Primetime Emmys including one for ‘Outstanding Comedy Series’, before it was decided the series finale would be better served as a feature-length endeavour.
Whereas the TV series was more light-hearted and broadly comical in nature, Rafelson decided to draft in his friend and colleague Jack Nicholson to help him write the screenplay for Head, which the filmmaker would direct. To foster creativity, the soon-to-be acting superstar gathered with The Monkees at a California resort where they took copious amounts of drugs and brainstormed the idea.
In its finished form, Head doesn’t have anything resembling a plot to speak of. Instead, it follows the adventures of Peter Tork, Davy Jones, Micky Dolenz, and Michael Nesmith on a psychedelic adventure through Hollywood where they encounter various counterculture icons like Dennis Hopper, Frank Zappa, and Nicholson himself.
It was a startlingly ambitious and madcap way to end a light and frivolous small-screen sitcom, and fans of The Monkees weren’t quite sure what to make of it. It was largely nonsense for those who weren’t on the same narcotically-induced wavelength as the majority of the people who made and starred in Head, which led to some scathing reviews and a disastrous performance at the box office.
In the long run, it ushered in the gradual decline of The Monkees, who ended up splitting for the first time in 1970. As Tork explained to The Guardian, he found the experience and the finished film itself to be something of a nihilistic one. “Most people are dazzled by the psychedelia, and that’s fine, but for me finally the point of the movie is the Monkees never get out,” he said. “Which is to say Bob Rafelson’s view of life is you never get out of the black box you’re in. There’s no escape.”
Making a mockery of the fourth wall, carrying an anarchically aimless and meandering nature, Head somehow still conspires to fire shots at the music industry, the film business, the socio-political state of America, and even The Monkees themselves. It’s a very strange and exceedingly trippy film, and while it hardly did their careers a mainstream concern any favours, it was a hell of a way to bow out from the big stage.
