By 1968, the squeaky-clean image that made The Monkees household names was starting to feel less like a launchpad and more like a cage.
Mike Nesmith was done playing by the rules of prime-time TV, and he made that crystal clear on the band’s 1968 album The Birds, The Bees & The Monkees. Tucked away on side two was “Writing Wrongs”—a five-minute, organ-drenched trip into dark experimental rock that threw out the two-minute pop playbook entirely.
Complete with spooky piano riffs and a jazz-rock break, it was a massive flip-off to the manufactured bubblegum series that created The Monkees. Nesmith took a hammer to the band’s clean-cut reputation, trading easy radio hooks for a dark, five-minute trip nobody saw coming.
According to U Discover Music, Nesmith’s work regularly pushed the Monkees out of their manufactured mold. The website wrote, “If you grew up on Monkees records, the Nesmith songs would blow your mind on a regular basis. How many alleged bubblegum bands ever recorded a proto-prog mini-epic (“Writing Wrongs”) with a long keyboard break?”
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The Birds, the Bees & the Monkees would be the last album released by the original four-member group, which included Nesmith, Peter Tork, Micky Dolenz, and Davy Jones.
According to Ultimate Classic Rock, “Writing Wrongs” was unlike any other song the band had previously created. The website said the song “features a darker, ominous vibe accompanied by heavy pounding drums and moody organ. Then, out of nowhere, the song changes course midway, soaring into a weird jazz odyssey that borders on proto-prog before returning to the heavy thud that dominated the first half of the song.”
The website’s song assessment concluded, “Clocking in at more than five minutes, ‘Writing Wrongs’ is the last thing you’d expect from a ‘manufactured pop group.” It was raw, experimental, and completely tore up the script they were supposed to follow.
In an interview with Rolling Stone, Nesmith said he the band were “kids with our own taste in music and were happier performing songs we liked, and/or wrote, than songs that were handed to us. It made for a better performance. It was more fun.”
He continued, “That this became a bone of contention seemed strange to me. I think, to some extent, to each of us.”
“Writing Wrongs” was far from the only time Nesmith was light-years ahead of everyone else in the room. He went on to help invent country rock with the First National Band, created PopClip, the television show that directly birthed MTV, and even executive produced cult cinema classics like Repo Man. Stepping outside the lines was simply in his DNA.
By risking his pop stardom to record a bizarre, dark prog-rock track in 1968, Nesmith wasn’t just rebelling against a TV contract. He was proving that the Monkees members had true artistic vision.
Related: Mike Nesmith’s 1966 Monkees Track Was One of the Very First Country-Rock Songs
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