If phase one was feudalism, and phase two was democracy, then phase three of The Monkees career is anarchy.  As much as the members of The Monkees wanted freedom from Don Kirshner, so did they also eventually want their freedom from each other.  And it’s not that surprising.  The four of them didn’t have a lot in common to begin with and were sort of thrown into this together.  As a result, each Monkee would go to their own studio with their own musicians and record their own songs that the new music supervisor, Lester Sill, would sift through to create the last few Monkees albums. 

But it wasn’t just Micky, Mike, Peter, and Davy that were each off on their own, recording their own version of “Monkee” music.  The record company, noticing a decline in sales from where they once were, started re-hiring old producers to try and recapture some of the old Monkees magic.  It was a tough time for Colgems, The Monkees’ record company.  Despite high ratings, The Monkees had become such a huge pain in the ass to NBC, that it was mutually decided that the second season of their TV show would be their last.  So no more free half-hour commercials for Monkees albums week on prime time.  The Monkees didn’t see this as a problem.  Bob & Bert had a plan to launch them as movie stars.  Hiring struggling actor Jack Nicholson (!) to write the screenplay, the Monkees’ feature length denut, Head, would take all the criticisms that the band/TV show had received and comfront them head head-on and upend everything.  Or perhaps, Bob & Bert wanted to blow up the whole phenomenon so they could start making real art like Easy Rider. 

Whatever the intent, the first task for this newly reconfigured Monkees was to record music for this trippy, meaningless, experimental film.  Mike wrote a song for the “live” portion of the movie, Circle Sky.  And that is actually just the four of them playing on the first track of the playlist.  He also produced a Harry Nilsson song for Davy to sing (Daddy’s Song) during the dance number.  Peter, who had only had one song co-authored by him up to this point, got two of the seven songs on Head, Long Title and Can You Dig It?  Carole King wrote and produced two songs for the movie as well, the theme song Porpoise Song and the elegiac As We Go Along. 

Lester Sill insisted on issuing a cover of The Coasters D.W. Washburn as a stand-alone single.  It was the first Monkees single to really flop, showing that Lester was as bad at picking hit songs as Don Kirshner was good at it.  Michael Nesmith finally went straight to the source, flying to Nashville to record a bunch of songs (including Good Clean Fun, St. Matthew, and Listen To The Band) that were far more country than rock.  Peter got disillusioned after the failure of Head and quit the band.  Colgems tried to squeeze every last dime they could out of their IP by releasing albums like Instant Replay and The Monkees Present that were a mishmash of leftover tracks from their earliest years and the new stuff that Mike, Davy, and Micky were recording as long as someone was bankrolling the sessions.

Finally Mike left too.  This just left Davy, the tambourine player, and Micky, who didn’t want to play drums.  There was no way to keep on pretending that this was still a band.  So in one last ditch effort, Colgems re-hired Kirshner lackey Jeff Barry to produce one last album for them.  Released in 1970, Changes was seen as the last ditch effort of a dying property that didn’t know when to quit.  But just as The Monkees (the recording conglomerate) was falling apart, The Monkees (the TV show) was returning to Saturday morning television, spawning a whole new generation of fans, who would eventually grow old and nostalgic prompting a Monkees revival that in itself would create another generation of fans.  And so, even though this really should be the end to The Monkees saga, there is still one last chapter to go.