“Tommy's got his guitar. I'm snapping my fingers. Tommy just started out; ‘Here we come, walking down the street’, 'cause that's what we were doing”: Bobby Hart on the evolution of the Monkees theme

There were four Monkees but a large part of what made the band and their music so beloved was the songwriting duo who fashioned a fair proportion of their best material: Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart.

It was Hart – who has died aged 86 – and Boyce who wrote Last Train To Clarksville, (I’m Not Your) Steppin’ Stone, She, Valleri and, most memorably of all, the Monkees theme, which practically every person over 50 in both the US and UK is able to recite word for word (the show was still being repeated on British kids TV as late as 1984).

Boyce and Hart had met back in 1959 and had already had a couple of hits to their names – Chubby Checker’s Lazy Elsie Molly and Come A Little Bit Closer by Jay and the Americans – when in late 1965 they had a meeting with Bob Rafelson, the aspiring film maker who had had the original idea for a TV show about a fictional pop band.

In a later interview with the Monkees fansite Sunshine Factory, Hart explained what Rafelson had in mind: “(It) was basically A Hard Day’s Night, Beatles on American television, a lot of madcap visuals, and we got it right away, and we convinced him right in that first meeting that we knew exactly what the counterpart musically should be, so he gave us the job of coming up with the theme song and two other songs that they needed for the pilot of The Monkees.”

Incredibly, the songwriters hadn’t seen a script for the show and had no idea who had been cast when they came up with the theme. “We knew it was going to be four guys with long hair,” Hart later told Classic Bands’ Gary James. “We knew there was not going to be a mother or father or an authority figure on the show. We knew that nothing like this had been on network television before. So we had some guidelines we wanted to accomplish as far as making them seem unthreatening to the parents of these kids that were going to fall in love with them.”

“I can't tell you exactly why, but we were walking down the street at the time, to a little park where we were going to write. Tommy's got his guitar. I'm snapping my fingers. Tommy just started out; ‘Here we come, walking down the street’, 'cause that's what we were doing. But there was a method to our madness. When we finished the lyric, we knew the certain elements we wanted to include in there.”

Hart and Boyce envisioned a drum roll, similar to the Dave Clark Five's Here We Come Again, that would usher in the chorus of ‘Hey hey we’re the Monkees’: “That one almost wrote itself. Of course, they all did, you know.

At this stage, the show’s musical supervisor, Don Kirshner, was refusing to let the four Monkees play on their own records – that was Boyce and Hart’s domain.

Crucially, rather than session musicians, the pair decided to use their own group, the Candy Store Prophets: “It was a different sound than we would've gotten if we had used The Wrecking Crew guys, the regular studio guys that played on almost everything else,” Hart told Classic Bands. “We loved those guys and we did use them on other sessions for other artists, but The Monkees, it really was a garage band and one that Tommy and I played with in one form or another for four or five years.”

From the 1967 album Headquarters onwards, the four Monkees were not only playing on but were also writing their own material, so Boyce and Hart were less busy on the project. They launched themselves as artists and had a US top ten hit towards the end of 1967 with I Wonder What She’s Doing Tonight.

But they kept their hand in with the Monkees, too, and aside from the Head soundtrack, contributed to all of the band’s albums up to the final contractual obligation record, 1970’s Changes.

In the mid 70s the pair teamed up with Davy Jones and Micky Dolenz to release an album under the name of, er Dolenz Jones, Boyce and Hart (they couldn’t use the Monkees name for legal reasons) and toured extensively for 18 months.

By then Monkees nostalgia was in full flow and to be truthful it’s never really ended. The band, in various iterations, reunited regularly right up until Mike Nesmith’s death in 2021. Occasional reunion albums, a succession of greatest hits packages and TV repeats on both sides of the Atlantic ensured that the Monkees had long outpaced their cynical beginnings and Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart’s songs played a huge role in that.