Today a bunch of books arrived from Amazon. Some of them were very high toned, literary, informative — pretty much all over the map.
But I confess I spent the afternoon reading the book about the history of the 1960s phenomenon The Monkees. I picked the book up, expecting to read a few pages, and found myself completely gripped. Icouldn’t put it down until I was done.
There is something deeply sad and powerful about their story. Four talented young men caught up in a strange whirlwind that nobody quite understood, a whirlwind that end up tangling them up with the entire world. They were given the illusion that they owned the world, yet they all ended up becoming strangely captured and emprisoned by that very power.
Reading the story of these four lives over the forty five years, I found myself thinking of Gollum and the Ring. If there is a moral to their crazy tale, it might be this: Beware of a gift that seems to offer you everything. You might find that rather than you owning the gift, it ends up owning you.
BOYCE and HART for the WIN!!
I used to watch The Monkees TV show when I was a kid. It was one of those shows that I’d watch when I wanted to watch TV and nothing better was on, when there were only 7 channels, not 700+. (BTW, remember when Davy Jones guest starred on The Brady Bunch? 🙂 I never took it very seriously or thought about it much. Sounds like there’s more back story there than I knew.
Title / Author of the book (or Amazon link)?
Passing an advertisement for a Hannah Montana promotion, I told my dad that she proved that there was no difference between being a rock star and playing one on TV. He said that no, the Monkees had proved that many years before.
The book is called Monkee Business.
Sharon: Oh, you have no idea. It’s quite a story.
Doug: Yes, and they were not even the first.
Sally: Sigh. 🙂
Doug’s post got me thinking about the phrase “I’m not an X but I play one on TV”. Googling “play one on TV” brings up a rich and interesting set of web pages about the history and variants of the phrase. Also, I learned a new word, snowclone, of which this is one example (another is “X is the new Y”).
My favorite variant: “I’m not an actor but I play one on TV” 🙂