I remember rushing through trick or treating one Halloween because I wanted to be home in time to catch that night’s episode of The Monkees. In those days, adults gave kids substantial candy bars—none of this “fun-sized” crap—so you know that, for me, the zany antics and catchy tunes of that made-for-TV quartet was must-see stuff.
I got to thinking about that Halloween after learning the other day that Davy Jones had dropped dead of a heart attack in Florida at the age of 66. The first thing that hit me was how much the world has changed since The Monkees’ hey-heyday, since the news came to me not via the newspaper or radio or even Yahoo! news, but in an e-mail message from Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates, where my friend-since-high-school David Bulla now lives and teaches. He'd thought, correctly, that I’d want to know.
Contrast that 2012 global connectivity with my life in 1967, or maybe it was 1968. I would’ve been 9 or 10 years old on that Halloween. I hadn’t been much of anywhere in the United States at that age, let alone outside the country. Nowadays, kids and their globe-trotting parents have lapped my paltry trifecta of foreign borders crossed by the time they’re out of kindergarten. Davy Jones seemed exotic to me in my youth simply because he was from England.
On the other hand, though, on the not-so-mean streets of Berkeley Heights, New Jersey, back then, I was a free agent. I went from house-to-house that Halloween—as I had before and would for a few years yet—without any parental supervision or tab-keeping, save my mom and dad’s reasonable assumption that I was somewhere within walking distance of our house, and that I’d come in from the dark as soon as I’d gathered sufficient loot.
Compare that with what I see now every Halloween in my role as distributor of fun-sized candy bars to kids in my Bethesda, Maryland, neighborhood. (In my defense, it’s hard to even find packages of full-sized candy bars anymore, and I always tell the kids to take two or three of the smaller ones.) I spy the younger kids’ parents waiting for them out on the street while their sons and daughters beg for treats on my front porch, and I imagine that most of the older kids are within easy and perhaps mandatory parental reach by phone, text and possibly GPS.
Why? Because the world is a much more dangerous place now than it was 45 years ago. Because we’re aware of all the potential evils lurking behind every picket fence. There now are an array of criminal laws on the books, after all, that bear the names of children who were abused and killed by predators. Parents are more or less duty-bound to check the Web on October 30th to see where the sex offenders in their neighborhoods live, then guide their children’s routes accordingly.
When I was a kid, the Halloween movies hadn’t even been made yet. Sure, you’d hear stories about razor blades in apples, but those came across as urban (or maybe suburban) myths. And anyway, who was giving out apples on Halloween? People who wanted their house to be egged, that’s who. And what kids were eating apples dumped into their trick-or-treat bags? Those so hopelessly lame that they’d probably core and section the apple first, and in so doing dislodge any concealed danger.
The second thing I thought about when I heard Davy Jones had died was sparked by my friend David’s recollection in his e-mail about how he and his older sister had seen The Monkees in concert at the Greensboro Coliseum, with Jimi Hendrix relegated to warm-up act. The absurdity of rock ‘n’ roll’s greatest guitarist playing Robin to the Batman of the Prefab Four, who couldn’t even play their own instruments, was matched in my mind by something else that has long amused me. The fame of the diminutive Davy Jones that began in 1966 forced another young David Jones, also an Englishman, to change his professional name. That artist, a musically brilliant and socially influential gender-bender who later would become rock royalty to Davy Jones’ amiable jester, would henceforth be known as David Bowie.
In a related vein, it struck me as fitting that Jones, an actor by training, had died an unremarkable if sadly premature death in Florida, where he’d lived among millions of other senior citizens who'd moved there for the warm climate and low taxes. As opposed to the substance-abusing deaths of all the men and women for whom rock music had been an end rather than a means—a graveyard populated by the likes of Janis Joplin, the aforementioned Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison and Sid Vicious.
But then, finally, came the third thing I thought about when I learned that Davy Jones was dead. And that was that he’d left a pretty impressive legacy and had died in an enviable way. Most critics have come around to conceding that The Monkees—whether you think of the moniker as describing four men making music or the cardboard façade of a corporate hit-making enterprise—were responsible for some of the best pop songs ever recorded. Jones maintained until his dying day his charisma on the nostalgia circuit, where he was adored by "mature" female fans and respected by their husbands. He went only from boyishly handsome to deceptively youthful looking, with no progression to unrecognizable coot. He succumbed quickly, without a long and painful decline. (In fact, I’ve since read his booking agent’s observations that “there was not an ounce of body fat on the guy” and “he couldn’t have been in better shape.”)
Mike Nesmith, the one Monkee with true musical talent, seldom joined the reunion tours and might have been expected to issue a terse, polite statement, in keeping with the distance he’s always placed between himself and the phenomenon he’d once fronted. But even Nesmith weighed in with a lengthy, heartfelt tribute. It read, in part, “David's spirit and soul live well in my heart, among all the lovely people, who remember with me the good times, and the healing times, that were created for so many, including us. I have fond memories. I wish him safe travels.”
I joked to someone the other day that, if indeed there’s a Heaven with St Peter at the gate, I hope he’ll overlook the fact that Mickey Dolenz was the lead vocalist on “I’m a Believer” and welcome Jones to the afterlife based on song title alone. I’ve no idea if Jones was a believer in the Christian sense, although the fact that he was married thrice suggests to me that he at very least was a man of faith.
At any rate, I’ve got to echo Mike Nesmith on this one. I have fond memories. And I wish you safe travels, Davy.
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