The Monkees’ Wild Ride: From TV Band to Rock Legends with “I’m a Believer”

Today’s featured foursome The Monkees was cast as a fictional TV band, hired to sing and paid not to play. They were expected to follow the script, but their career would be anything but scripted. It’s the unlikely saga of four actors turned rock stars who then fought to control their musical destiny. Along the way, they scored some of the most iconic hits of the 1960s (outselling the Beatles on a few occasions)... including The Last Train to Clarksville, a secret protest song that snuck past the censors and came from their main rival’s misheard lyrics… another called (I'm Not Your) Steppin' Stone that was a forgotten B-side that became a garage-rock classic, and the #1 hit I'm a Believer that one of the singers called absolute Crap, begging the band not to do it… in fact he was so upset that he had to be kicked out of the studio, and yet another song where the wrong lyrics were sung due to bad penmanship. In this episode, we’re tracking the wild ride of The Monkees, a band that started out pretending—and ended up proving they were the real thing… NEXT on the Professor of Rock.

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