Few songwriters are as associated with a single act like the duo of Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart are with The Monkees. They co-wrote at least nineteen songs for the prefab four (with three more co-written with others; a few more songs of theirs ended up unreleased) with their contributions scattered over nearly fifty years' worth of recordings. While only two managed to reach number one in Canada, they also wrote the group's iconic theme song and supplied such much-loved tracks as "I Wanna Be Free", "(I'm Not Your) Stepping Stone", "She" and "Words". With the obvious exceptions of Mickey Dolenz, Davy Jones, Mike Nesmith and Peter Tork, no one was as essential to the Monkees' story as Boyce and Hart.
Interfering svengali Don Kirshner unceremoniously let them go as part of an unsuccessful power play in the spring of 1967 but it wasn't long before The Monkees welcomed them back into the fold. Their compositions tended towards lead vocals by either Dolenz or Jones (Tork shared lead on "Words" with the former as the lone exception) and the two actors/singers were so fond of them that the supergroup of Dolenz, Jones, Boyce and Hart was formed in 1975, with a self-titled album and lengthy tour of the United States and Asia the following year. Elsewhere, Boyce and Hart's writing credits are surprisingly scarce. For the purposes of this blog, their only real contribution of note is "Come a Little Bit Closer" for Jay and the Americans. Still, it sort of makes sense: they had struggled as young songwriters since the late fifties and it's understandable that they would've wanted to hold on to their cash cow once it belatedly arrived.
The pair also did some recording of their own. While Kirshner would make unfounded claims that they would use studio time allotted to The Monkees to work on their own material, he might have had a better case had he accused them of squirelling away their best stuff instead. Judging by how it holds up alongside, say, "P.O. Box 9847" from fifth album The Birds, the Bees and the Monkees, it seems as if they kept sure-fire mega-hit "I Wonder What She's Doing Tonight" in their back pocket. It would be interesting to hear a Monkees' demo of it but there's no evidence the group ever tried it out. (It almost certainly would have cropped up on either their Missing Links series of archive albums or the subsequent box sets and deluxe editions that have been released over the years had Boyce and Hart ever donated it to them) That said, it's hard to say what they would have done with it: while it is easy to imagine Dolenz giving a stirring vocal, otherwise there's the inescapable sense that they wouldn't have quite pulled it off.
To be fair, even matching what Boyce and Hart did with it would have been nigh on impossible. From its kick off, "I Wonder What She's Doing Tonight" is an adorable creation, one that never puts a foot wrong for its two minutes and forty-one seconds of running time. It's the sort of pop song that never lets up, never loses the listener's attention and never gets tiresome no matter how much this humble blogger plays it to death. (Notably, my wife hasn't once complained which is a far greater stamp of approval than all my words of praise could ever do for it!) I've been obsessed with it: I gave a couple classes this afternoon and had Joe Osborne's brief bass solo running through my head the entire time, I walked the dog an hour ago and found myself singing snippets of it as well as Marvin Stamm's superb trumpet solo. Even Boyce's calls of "come on now" and "all right, Bobby, let's go" make it that much better.
Perfectly capable singers and musicians, along with being accomplished songwriters, it's a wonder why Boyce and Hart weren't able to cut it as a long term pop combo in their own right. ("I Wonder What She's Doing Tonight" proved to be their only major hit and it didn't even manage to do much outside of North America) Sadly, they didn't look like stars. Dolenz and Jones were both born to be on stage and even the more serious and musical Nesmith and Tork had an ease with audiences and cameras that their colleagues behind the scenes plainly didn't have. They look like members of a backing band who vaguely resent all this showbiz bullshit even while the singer they play with is happy to lap up all the attention. The energy and verve with which they performed their recordings failed to make them adequate performers.
I tend to think of people like Boyce and Hart as being perpetually in the background. Yet, like George Gershwin, Cole Porter and most of the Brill Building generation, they had aspirations to be recording artists in their own right. We've already seen Barry Mann and Neil Sedaka make the jump — as well as Roger Cook and Roger Greenway under the guise of 'David and Jonathan', though they made the head scratching decision to be the songwriting duo who had a hit with a cover version (and a bad one at that) — and there will be a few more in this space to come. But none made the leap as well as Boyce and Hart, even if their success proved fleeting. As if the stuff they were providing The Monkees wasn't brilliant enough, this song that they set aside for themselves was on whole other level indeed.
Score: 10
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