Mention The Monkees to most casual music fans, and sunny pop classics like “Daydream Believer” or “I’m a Believer” immediately come to mind. Yet tucked inside the band’s psychedelic 1968 cult movie Head is a blistering, guitar-driven powerhouse that sounded nothing like the music that made them superstars: Mike Nesmith’s fierce rocker “Circle Sky.”
By 1968, Nesmith, Micky Dolenz, Peter Tork and Davy Jones were eager to tear down the squeaky-clean “prefab four” image that made them television superstars. Teaming up with director Bob Rafelson and co-writer Jack Nicholson, the group conceptualized and wrote Head to highlight their perception of their own fame. “Circle Sky” served as the film’s musical centerpiece.
The track leaned closer toward punk and hard garage rock than anything playing on Top 40 radio at the time. Even more impressively, the version heard in the film wasn’t a polished studio creation.
Rafelson filmed the band performing “Circle Sky” live in front of a screaming crowd at the Valley Music Hall in Salt Lake City, Utah, in May 1968 and captured the group playing their own instruments at full throttle reported Andrew Sandoval’s The Monkees: The Day-by-Day Story of the 60s TV Pop Sensation.
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That fiery live recording was left off the original Head soundtrack album. Instead, a studio version was recorded in its place.
Paired with the movie’s box-office flop at the time, “Circle Sky” flew under the mainstream radar for years. However, it turned into an underground favorite traded among die-hard Monkees fans.
Head was a Monkees movie that many of their fans didn’t understand. Coming off the popularity of their lighthearted television series, viewers were caught completely off guard by a trippy, experimental film that swapped laughs for anti-war commentary and biting parody.
RELATED: Mike Nesmith Spent Decades Avoiding Monkees Reunions—Then He Changed His Mind
Rhino Records shared quotes from the band about the film. Dolenz stated, “Most of our fans couldn’t get in because there was an age restriction, and the intelligentsia wouldn’t go to see it anyway because they hated the Monkees.”
Davy Jones added, “We were pawns in something we helped create but had no control over. We should have made Ghostbusters, OK?” Mike Nesmith continued, “We thought that this was the beginning of our film career, and that this was really going to be a tremendous hit movie. Boy, did we get that one wrong.”
Finally, Peter Tork concluded, “The movie dropped like a ball of dark star. The simile of a rock in the water is too mild for how badly that movie did.”
Nearly six decades later, Head has been reclaimed as a counterculture classic, and “Circle Sky” stands tall as the ultimate proof that The Monkees were far more than a manufactured TV act. For anyone who still thinks of the band strictly as bubblegum pop, one spin of Nesmith’s heaviest track is all it takes to change their mind.
Related: 56 Years Later, Mike Nesmith’s 1970 First National Band Trilogy Remains Country Rock’s Greatest Hidden Gem
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