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tragically, that would be cut short. Despite his humiliating experience on
the Monkees tour, Hendrix didn’t nurture a grudge against the Prefab
Four themselves. In September 1970, he even attended a party in London
for Mike Nesmith. It was the last social appearance he would make before
his death a few weeks later as the result of an accidental overdose of sleeping
pills.
The Monkees, meanwhile, continued to chafe at their public image
as an ersatz rock band. As Hendrix biographer David Henderson has
written, Hendrix’s departure from the tour compelled Tork to confront
his own misgivings about the Monkees’ lightweight pop and clowning,
which eventually led him to be the fi rst to quit the group. When the TV
show was canceled in the spring of 1968, the band’s members actually
seemed relieved. They subsequently released Head, an arty, experimental
movie made with the help of their former TV producer Rafelson and his
then-obscure writer-actor pal Jack Nicholson, which was intended to explode
their cutesy image once and for all. Perhaps one of the most diffi cultto-
watch films ever made—in one scene, for example, the Monkees are
portrayed as dandruff being combed out of actor Victor Mature’s hair—
Head was savaged by critics and became a box-offi ce fl op. Nevertheless,
the Monkees unwittingly made another, more significant contribution to
1960s cinema. Rafelson used $300,000 of his profi ts from their TV show
to help finance a low-budget epic about two ex–drug dealers riding motorcycles
on an ultimately fatal existential quest. Easy Rider became a huge
hit and helped launch an era of breathtaking creativity on the big screen.
“We were on TV playing a band and then wanted to become a
band,” Dolenz explained years later in a newspaper interview. “It’s a bit
like Leonard Nimoy really becoming a Vulcan.”
But they can’t be faulted for having tried. And in time, the Monkees
actually achieved lasting notoriety, albeit of a humbler sort. Unlike
Jimi Hendrix, they never got close to ascending to the pantheon of the
guitar gods. But in the minds of millions, they remained the same shaggyhaired
free spirits, a fond reminder of a time when the younger half of the