For most of their career, people called The Monkees a fake band.
They were put together for a TV show. They didn’t write their own songs. Their music was handed to four young men who looked great on camera. That was the argument. It was made loudly and frequently, and it followed the band for decades.
Here’s what that argument missed: the people writing their songs wereNeil Diamond, Carole King and John Stewart.
Any one of those three belongs in a conversation about the greatest pop songwriters of the twentieth century. The idea that their songs somehow became less impressive because The Monkees were singing them has never made sense. The Beatles did cover songs throughout their early career, and nobody called them fake. The Monkees had better writers and got treated completely differently.
Sixty years later, three of the four original members of the Monkees are gone, and the last remaining one is still out on the road performing every word. The songs speak for themselves.
“Last Train to Clarksville” came first, in 1966, written by Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart, the duo who became The Monkees’ most consistent hitmakers. It was the band’s debut single and their first No. 1, introducing their harmonies and their energy to an audience that had no idea the songs would still be playing sixty years later. The Four Tops recorded it. Even Pam Tillis recorded it. The song outlasted its critics.
“I’m a Believer” has one of the best origin stories in pop history. Neil Diamond wrote it, but he didn’t write it for The Monkees. He originally wrote it for Eddy Arnold, the country legend, with something completely different in mind. Arnold never recorded it. The song ended up with The Monkees instead, and the rest is history.
But there’s a subplot. Michael Nesmith, the most musically serious of the four, heard “I’m a Believer” and told people it wasn’t going to be a hit. He was completely wrong. The song spent seven weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in late 1966 and became one of the defining singles of the decade. The man who said it wouldn’t be a hit was on stage singing it every night to sold-out crowds.
Thirty-five years later, Smash Mouth recorded it for the Shrek soundtrack. Kids who’d never heard of Micky Dolenz were singing along to every single word.
“Daydream Believer” was released in 1967, written by John Stewart of the Kingston Trio. It spent four weeks at No. 1. The fact that a folk singer from the Kingston Trio wrote a pop No. 1 for a TV band that Anne Murray then turned into a country hit twelve years later tells you everything about how far outside any particular box this song has always lived.
Related: Linda Ronstadt Hired Two Unknowns for 1971 Disneyland Concert — Accidentally Assembling One of Rock’s Greatest Bands
“Pleasant Valley Sunday” is the most surprising one on this list. Written by Carole King and Gerry Goffin, it came out in 1967 as a demure piece of social commentary about suburban sameness. King and Goffin wrote it as outside observers of American life, which is why it has an almost journalistic quality: rows of houses, charcoal burning everywhere, nobody caring. It’s a portrait of life, not a complaint.
The same Carole King who’d go on to write Tapestry, one of the best-selling albums ever made, wrote this song for a band that critics were calling a fraud.
The Last Monkee Is Still Singing All of Them
Davy Jones was the face most people pictured when they thought of The Monkees. Peter Tork was the one who fought hardest for the band to play their own instruments. Michael Nesmith was the one who said their biggest hit wasn’t going to be a success.
The Sydney Morning Herald / Getty Images
Davy Jones died on February 29, 2012. Peter Tork died on February 21, 2019. Michael Nesmith died on December 10, 2021.
The songs outlived all of them.
Micky Dolenz is the last remaining member of the band. He’s currently on the “60 Years of The Monkees” tour across North America, performing the hits in chronological order alongside his own stories about what it was like to live inside one of the strangest and most debated careers in pop history.
The tour ends with a special show in Los Angeles on September 12, 2026. That date isn’t coincidental. It’s exactly 60 years to the day since The Monkees made their first appearance on NBC.
“What I want to do, as the 60th anniversary of that wonderful moment is upon me,” Dolenz said, “is to look back and share with the fans the sheer joy of what we accomplished, and what it all still means to so many.”
In 1967, The Monkees put four albums at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 in a single calendar year: their debut, More of the Monkees, Headquarters, and Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones Ltd. The Beatles never even did that. And nobody has since.
The songs that made it possible were written by Neil Diamond, Carole King, John Stewart, and Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart. Not one of them was a Monkee. And yet sixty years later, everyone still remembers every word.
That’s definitely not what a fake band sounds like.
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