139/365 Last Train to Clarksville

’Cause I’m leavin’ in the morning
And I must see you again
We’ll have one more night together
til the morning brings my train.
And I must go, oh, no, no, no!
Oh, no, no, no!
And I don’t know if I’m ever coming home.

Awhile back, Deloney got me thinking about the Monkees again. I don’t remember exactly what he was writing about, but it could have been this very song. As he seems to be a write-and-destroy-type guy, I harbor no illusions that I could find his words again.

Between that and then hearing some short excerpt from some Monkees song on some commercial, I picked up a greatest hits CD. That’s when I discovered that not only were some Monkees songs really good—some were really awful. At least to my ears.

There’s a handful or so I will always love, and they were among the most popular: the Monkees theme, “I’m a Believer,” “Steppin’ Stone,” “Randy Scouse Git,” “Pleasant Valley Sunday,” and “Daydream Believer.” All very respectable songs. And “Last Train to Clarksville,” of course, one of the Boyce and Hart songs, a knockoff of the Beatles’ “Paperback Writer” written especially for the TV show.

I was 4 years old when “The Monkees” aired on TV, and I quickly developed a massive crush on Davy Jones. It may be the first crush I can remember. I find that embarrassingly predictable now, as he’s so not my type. In fact, based on looks alone, I would now find him the least interesting of the four. But I also had childhood fascinations with Glen Campbell, Andy Williams, Flip Wilson, and Tommy Smothers. Were they crushes? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. The only thread I can find is that from an early age, I had a thing for music and comedy.

A college friend of mine had more than a passing thing for Davy Jones. As an adolescent, she’d procured his autograph, and she carried it with her at all times. This woman—around whom men turned to jelly and who married first a man, then a woman—was someone who carried Davy Jones’s autograph. One day, sometime after college, I believe, her purse or wallet was lost or stolen, and the autograph was gone. The woman she’d married took it upon herself to get another one—I think she actually wrote to Jones to explain the situation. If I have all the details right, Linda did in fact get Kim a replacement autograph. The two eventually broke up, but I’ll bet Kim still has her bit of Davy Jones.

Funny thing is, even though at 4 and 5 I thought Davy Jones was soooo cute, he sang lead on only one of those songs I listed above. It’s Micky Dolenz’s voice I love.

There’s something so successful about “Last Train to Clarksville,” how the tune is able to convey an urgency that the words alone are not, at least not for me as a cynical adult, who wants to say to the guy, Yeah, well, why don’t you just make another choice? She’s important enough for smoochin’ and coffee, but apparently not important enough to stick around for.