One of those beautiful, mellow pop songs that makes you think of long summer nights and lazy smiles with the people you love. Whenever someone complains about the prefabricated nature of the Monkees, I always want to play them this song and say “If this is what comes out of the whole deal, then you can build a million boy bands.” Not that all of them have Carole King songs to sing and such wonderful production to back them up, of course…
366 Songs 062: Porpoise Song
For a song that is, ultimately, a rip-off/cash-in of something that I’m not sure whether its creators completely understood (Psychedelia, with “porpoise” a stand-in for the Beatles’ Walrus), the Monkees’ “Porpoise Song” is surprisingly transcendent of its origins. Maybe it’s the wonderful arrangement (The organ holding everything down, the strings – very heavily influenced by “I Am The Walrus” – looming in the background and the guitar clanging on the left channel… And then that wonderful, almost orchestral swell at 2:56, with the bells chiming and tapes unwinding and and and… Oh, how I love the way this song is laid out, even if it is just “I Am The Walrus”‘ ending done slightly differently), maybe it’s the vocals (or, more importantly, the backing vocals – I don’t know why, but there’s something about the slight dischordance there that really works for me), or maybe it’s the lyrics that, when freed of the “porpoise” conceit, have an epic melancholy that I prefer to John Lennon’s freeform weirdness in the inspiratory song, but I find myself preferring this to “I Am The Walrus” for some inexplicable reason. Whereas the Beatles were angry and snide in their psychedelic masterpiece, the Monkees seem sad, confused and resigned (“Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye…”) in theirs, and that’s the kind of thing that’ll always win my attention, I shamefully admit.
366 Songs 009: No Time
Today has been far more packed than I’d anticipated, so instead of writing a real entry – or skipping a day within the first month, much as I was tempted to do – I thought I’d go for a song pun with this Monkees classic that always makes me think that Mickey Dolenz deserved far more credit than he actually got.
Nevermind the furthermore, the plea is self-defense.