I used to watch The Monkeys as a kid. I knew they were a manufactured group, but also found they had a generous amount of innocent silliness and, as the theme music said, they didn’t “put anyone down”. Good for them, I used to think.
As a testament to the zeitgeist of the times, their first release, by Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart, was an anti-war song. And some of their other pieces were, albeit gentle, critiques of American life at the time. They could have done a lot worse.
edited to add: Micheal Nesmith’s mother invented Liquid Paper.
