“Funky”: the one word that was too vulgar for The Monkees
A cultural oddity that has never really been surpassed, The Monkees were cultural icons of the 1960s despite, in many ways, representing everything that the counterculture era was attempting to escape from. Never was that disparity more apparent than in the bizarre rules imposed upon the band by their label.
When television producers Bob Rafelson and Bert Schneider first drummed up the idea for The Monkees, they were taking the core of their inspiration from The Beatles in A Hard Day’s Night; the only differences being that the Fab Four wrote their own songs, and weren’t manufactured via TV auditions.
Another chasm between The Monkees and the real deal was that, as the Beatles progressed past their teeny-bopper beginnings, into something much more experimental and confrontational, The Monkees were trapped within the confines of marketability.
By the time the show reached its peak in 1967, the realm of rock and roll had moved on to new, boundary-pushing, drug-fueled, politically active heights. The Monkees themselves were rubbing shoulders with the likes of Frank Zappa, but the made-up band were doomed to bow down to the wants and demands of their label, advertisers, and TV bosses. Even a hit as bubblegum as the chart-topping ‘Daydream Believer’ had to be watered down before it saw mainstream release.
John Stewart was the songwriter behind ‘Daydream Believer’, though his ode to the banality of suburban existence wasn’t originally intended for The Monkees. It was pure chance that the effort fell into the hands of television’s favourite band, a fact he once shared in a 2006 interview. “I was at a party with Chip Douglas, and he was now producing The Monkees. I played him ‘Daydream Believer’, he said, ‘I have to have a cassette of that immediately’.”
Sensing an opportunity for success, Stewart quickly rattled off a cassette demo of the song and delivered it to Douglas at his offices. “He called three days later and said, ‘Well, they want to do it, but they’re gonna change one of the lyrics,’” the songwriter recalled. An affront to any principled songwriter, Stewart was understandably annoyed at the suggestion of altering his lyrics, but there was one word in his original draft bizarrely deemed too vulgar for The Monkees.
“The original lyric’s ‘Now you know how funky I can be,’” Stewart explained, “and [Douglas] said, ‘RCA won’t let Davy say funky.’” Exactly why RCA determined that “funky” was too shocking a word for Davy Jones to utter has remained something of a mystery.
Perhaps, in the haze of stuffy 1960s conservatism, the label decided that a fresh-faced pop outfit mentioning a word with its roots in Black jazz and R&B culture was simply a bridge too far.
For his part, Stewart campaigned against the lyric change until he was informed that RCA simply would not allow the band to record the song in any capacity if its lyrics were not altered. Luckily for him, ‘Daydream Believer’ ended up becoming The Monkees’ defining anthem, and an inarguably iconic track of the late 1960s pop scene. Unsurprisingly, that success softened the blow of the strange lyrical changes.
