The Monkees Tale
By Eric Lefcowitz
Review by Ellen Barnhart

    What can I say about this book?  It makes me angry.  First off, I got mad because Ditty Diego says
Hey, hey, we are the Monkees
You know we love to please
A manufactured image
With no philosophies.
Whereas Eric-poo here quotes it as
Hey, hey we are the Monkees
To that we all agree
A manufactured image
With no philosophies.
"To that we all agree" comes after "You say we're manufactured"!  So make your choice and we'll rejoice in never being free.  This is just the beginning of a lot of piddling little innaccuracies, but those are the things that anger me the most, I think.  This guy is passing himself off as an expert, but he doesn't even know the name of the "great lost Monkee song" "All of Your Toys".  He calls it "I'm Just One Of Your Toys".
    The second most angering thing, or at least the thing I noticed second, is that this guy is really kind of a bastard.  He's so insulting to the later albums!  He calls Micky's "Zor and Zam" an unpardonable sin!  This guy is not objective.  (Okay, neither am I, but why would you market something to Monkees fans that is insulting?)
    The photo captions are often smarmy and unfunny, and the man grossly overuses the word "prophetic".  Yes, Mike is at the wheel of the car, yes, Mike later essentially took control of the group, why don't you drive the point in with a sledgehammer?
    He's trying to be funny and ingratiating sometimes, but a lot of this is just making me sick.  I haven't even read the whole thing, just bits and pieces, but I know a lot about the Monkees, and while I don't have the entire chronology or a lot of the facts, I have a general enough knowlege to spot the innacurracies and the frankly insulting behavior of this author.  So this was written in the Eighties, I'll give you that, and a lot more has come to light since then.  He gives off the air of issuing an exposé or something, and maybe he was, for the time, but the majority of this stuff has already come to light, often in a far clearer and more accurate form.

    The main problem with this book is filtering the good information out of the bad.  For my money (which it wasn't, I borrowed this book), I would buy "Hey, Hey We're The Monkees" instead.  It's all straight quotes and fantastic pictures, without an insulting, innaccurate, overlaid bias.

Question everything, Monkee girls and boys, because a lot of the information out there is wildly contradictory.  Who knows what's right and wrong?  All I know is that once I spotted a lot of easily correctible mistakes, I had no trust for the rest of this man's information, especially any that contradicted things I've read in other books.

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