HEAD

Movie Title: Head
Studio: Columbia - Screen Gems
Director: Bob Rafelson
Starring: Davy Jones, Peter Tork, Micky Dolenz, Michael Nesmith, Annette Funicello, Sonny Listen, Frank Zappa, Ray Nitschke, Timothy Carey, T. C. Jones, Carol Doda, Victor Mature & more
Original Release: 1968

Depending on what kind of Monkee’s fan you were at the time, Head was either the beginning of the end, or the end of the beginning. And, if you’ve seen this movie, you know that that is a perfect opening line for this review.

I’m sure the Monkee’s teeny-bopper fan base at the time saw it as the beginning of the end. The TV series had already been cancelled, and there were rumors circulating about a breakup.

If you were indeed, a ‘head‘, or knew what a ‘head’ was, then you viewed Head as the end of the beginning. The beginning of the Monkees tuning in, turning on and dropping out. It was a sign of the times, so to speak, that the Monkees knew exactly what they were doing and exactly what they were doing was thumbing their collective noses at the establishment. Head came across as a very hip inside joke among the anti-establishment crowd.

I was a little too young, and a little too small town at the time to appreciate all the references and the hidden, and not so hidden, meanings that are in every scene in this movie. I was fifteen when it was released, it wasn’t until I saw it at the student union during the Midnight Movie Madness series my freshmen year at college that I really began to understand what this movie was all about.

But, please don’t ask me what it’s all about, because it’s the kind of movie that if you see it and you have to ask that question, you’ll never really know anyway.

By now, everyone knows the Monkees didn’t start out as a real band, they were actors in a television series about a band. The Monkees existed simply because the Beatles existed. And, the Beatles existed because they made a ton of money with rock and roll music, and with a couple of movies, A Hard Day’s Night and Help. The Monkees were Hollywood’s version of The Beatles. Lots of bands have been manufactured since, even the Sex Pistols were manufactured to cash in the punk scene, but that’s another story and another movie.

At least the Sex Pistols wrote their own material and played their own instruments, which is more than the Monkees did when they first started.

The TV series was created by Bob Rafelson, who also directed Head. The script was co-written by Rafelson and Jack Nicholson (yes, that Jack Nicholson) who also has a cameo along with a whole bunch of other people including Dennis Hopper, Annette Funicello, Sonny Listen, Teri Garr, Toni Basil and a bunch of others who appear either in snippets of original film clips or news segments.

Head was (and still is, in my opinion) a unique film in that it not only pokes fun at the establishment, but also at the antiestablishment movement. The scenes where the Mahareshi speaks are not only funny, but there’s a message in there as well, sort of like Lennon’s Sexy Sadie…"what have you done? Made a fool of everyone…"

Head is episodic and both MTV and Saturday Night Live owe a great deal to this movie. There is no plot, no storyline, no connecting the dots between any of the scenes, except for the beginning and the end, and it is totally played for laughs in much the same way as the Monty Python films from years later.

The soundtrack to this movie contains some of the best Monkee’s music ever…I still listen to it today. Songs like ‘Can You Dig It’, ‘Circle Sky’ and of course 'The Porpoise Song (Theme from Head)' stand up against anything that was being released in the psychodelic rock world at that time.

Even though I was only fifteen and didn’t understand half of what went on in this movie, I remember leaving the theater and walking over to the Bonnie Bird Café with my friends and when the waitress asked me for my order, I said…"I’d like a glass of cold gravy with a hair in it please."

It was a joke we repeated over and over again for years.