The Monkees Set Fire to Their Pop Image in Head

Nesmith was the most seasoned musician of the group. He had had songwriting credits on earlier Monkees albums, and was put off by the fact that he had no direct involvement in production. He felt the band’s potential was going untapped. Nesmith and Peter Tork, who also started as a singer and songwriter, put up a fight during the show’s run to be a more integral part of the creative process, which led to 1967’s Headquarters, the first album on which the Monkees played their own instruments. Still, their image as a mere product—the idea that they were no different from the Archies, another made-for-TV band—hung over them like a cloud. In an effort to prove themselves, the Monkees started touring as if they were a garage band, trading in their double-breasted maroon shirts for an all-white wardrobe that seemed to symbolize purity. Their live presentation became deeply self-aware: instead of bearing the Monkees brand, their drum set was simply labeled “DRUM,” an ironic bit of staging that’s replicated in Head.

The Nesmith-penned “Circle Sky” stands out among the tunes featured in the film. Nothing else on the soundtrack has its intensity. Peter Tork’s “Long Title: Do I Have to Do This All Over Again?” shares its use of brutal repetition, but the lyrics swim too deeply in the countercultural hedonism of the period. “Daddy’s Song,” written by Harry Nilsson, is a showcase for stage veteran Davy Jones as a song-and-dance man; it’s an upbeat, frothy tune in both its melody and lyrics, but it takes a visually psychedelic turn, with jump cuts of Jones and dance partner Toni Basil switching back and forth in their black-and-white costumes. The Carole King compositions “The Porpoise Song” and “As We Go Along” are tranquil and pensive, with the latter serving practically as a respite for the band members within the film. “Circle Sky,” on the other hand, has the raw quality of live performance, and it’s preceded in the film by a moment of stinging social commentary that would have been unthinkable on the Monkees’ TV show—and inconceivable in most films of that era.

In this scene, Rafelson and cowriter Jack Nicholson set out to lampoon the American culture of militarism by creating an absurd spectacle in which the Monkees lead a cheer of “War!” at a football game and then are dropped surrealistically into a battlefield with an unknown enemy. Reflecting on this moment in the film, Rafelson commented: “Wars in some sense are staged for the media if not created by the media. And I found that ugly and worth making fun of.” The band soon leaps from the trenches into a stadium tunnel, all of them dressed in white, ready to play for an adoring concert crowd. As they begin the song, it becomes clear that this set piece has a darker, more activist-oriented streak. Images of besieged Vietnamese people running from war zones begin to appear, including the infamous execution of Viet Cong member Nguyen Van Lem, interspersed with footage of an on-stage performance of “Circle Sky.”

Rafelson and his editors Mike Pozen and Monte Hellman cut between these incidents and the musical performance like a channel-surfing viewer might skip across programs with their remote. The use of the graphic war footage alone would have been enough to alienate the band’s core audience of teens and young kids. During the making of the television show, Rafelson had been strongly advised to avoid the politics of the day, so a moment like this can be read as Rafelson and the band flipping their middle fingers to their corporate overlords. The whole sequence is so of its period that it risks seeming dated, and yet it’s the strongest existing statement from the Monkees’ most outspoken members about their feelings of being caught at the intersection of art and commerce.

“Circle Sky” is the most country-rock song the band ever performed, with a Bo Diddley beat and a classic-sounding chord progression. Lyrically, it aligns with the film’s vibe of circuitous mania, which mirrors how the band was forced to cycle through their familiar repertoire while keeping up appearances. “It’s a very extraordinary scene / to those that don’t understand / but what you have seen you must believe / if you can, if you can,” Nesmith howls, practically daring listeners to confront the reality of what they’re seeing in spite of the surreal backdrop of pandemonium. But then the illusion breaks apart. Fans storm the stage, and the Monkees turn into mannequin figures. This eerie turn anticipates Michelangelo Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point, which also depicts the frenzy of a plastic consumerist world where everything is for sale.

Head was a financial and critical disaster upon its release. Though they seemed to be writing their own career obituary with this film, the Monkees would go on to perform concerts and variety shows in the years after, even though their time in the limelight was more or less over. They had been so widely seen as a symbol of the corporate forces killing popular music that their attempts to wield creative freedom were received as too little, too late. But their legacy endures to this day, partly because of the fascinating path they took from being a mass-market commodity (responsible for some of the best pop songs the 1960s had to offer) to being self-saboteurs.

In the canon of Monkees classics, “Circle Sky” may not be as antiestablishment as “(I’m Not Your) Steppin’ Stone,” or as soaring as “I’m a Believer,” but it captures the gnawing sensation of being caught in creative stasis, a bind that Nesmith, who passed in 2021, steadfastly fought against. He was an artist, and “Circle Sky” was his fire-spitting anthem. Along with its presentation in the film, the song reflects the catch-22 that the group found itself in at a strange juncture in pop and political history. “Yes, it looks like we’ve made it to the end,” Nesmith sings at the song’s close, before strumming the final notes with a sense of resignation. No matter how hard they try or what they play, the Monkees are not being heard.