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The Monkees
The Beatles of fake bands! No wait, that's The Rutles. Well, how about the Dave Clark Five of fake bands? Bert Schneider and Bob Rafelson created this band for the TV series, inspired by the Beatles' Hard Day's Night movie. One presumes the Beatles weren't available for a weekly series themselves. Peter Tork, Mike Nesmith, Micky Dolenz and Davy Jones formed the granddaddy of fake bands and one of the most successful, at least during the run of their 1966-1968 TV series. They gave the teenyboppers something to bob their heads and tap their toes to after the Beatles and other groups started dropping acid and making weirdo, undanceable concept albums. To their credit, the band seemed to accept their prefab image; the song "Ditty Diego - War Chant" from their trippy 1968 film Head parodies their famous theme song with lines like:
Hey, hey, we're The Monkees
You know we love to please
A manufactured image
With no philosophies.
Has their formula been as successfully repeated? The Heights, O-Town, and The New Monkees sure tried, but none has challenged the originals.
