To quote Dave Mason (A rocker who had a pop hit, but he was still a rocker):We just disagree. It’s not like The Monkees couldn’t rock (This recording/performance is them playing live. Music starts at 0:23. Great clip from a great, trippy little film): I can cite other examples, like “(I’m Not Your) Stepping Stone,” which they did not play on, or “Pleasant Valley Sunday,” which they did (Nesmith plays some tasty guitar and ending feedback). Pop, rock? Who cares? Punk bands have covered songs like “Stepping Stone” and “Circle Sky.” Maybe The Carpenters never rocked, per se, but I don’t see the issue. Again, call it “pop-rock” if you must.
as long as I have visited record stores, pop and rock , have been in the same bins (90%) now there are people Ariana Grande , who seem to get filed in the R&B section , but so were Madonna , Backstreet Boys , etc the Carpenters are always next to the Cars ABBA and ABC , right with AC/DC I have never known anyone , who considered it a massive difference Pop is short for Popular
Have you looked at what people bring up to checkout or talk to people at record stores, I noticed a guy today buying a Hanson lp and Jimi "Smash Hits", struck up a conversation with the dude. He came in to pick up the Hendrix and had no idea , that they issued any Hanson albums on vinyl . It was a simple case of by being near each other , he bought 2 albums instead of one. And I think the Hanson was 75 Bills
I didn't say that one can't appreciate artists of different styles, so I don't get your point. If one likes Olivia Newton John and Hendrix, I'm sure one understands that one is at the "rock" end of the spectrum and the other at the "pop" end of the spectrum - yet in the wrecka stow they can be grouped in the section that isn"t classical or jazz.
Then why was the billing of The Jimi Hendrix Experience and The Monkees seen at the time as being totally absurd? It was because they had very different audiences. Chas Chandler was horrified by the booking and had to invent a story to the press in order to get the band thrown off the tour. That sort of divide between rock and pop acts was well defined back then and I'm sure it is today. You wouldn't see a tour with Foo Fighters and One Direction on the same bill - however, festivals now see Kylie, Shirley Bassey and Tom Jones on the programme alongside noisy rock bands, whereas in the 70s for example, the two worlds didn't mix in such a context. Rock was one thing, pop was another. Anecdote: I was at the Reading Festival in 1977 and on the bill were Thin Lizzy, John Miles, Aerosmith, Graham Parker & The Rumour, Little River Band and Ultravox. In mid-afternoon, in betwwen acts, John Peel was the host, playing records and at one point he put on "Fernando" by ABBA. Great song but the crowd couldn't believe it and started jeering. Peel said "I know, I know, I was just seeing if you were all awake". Just to illustrate the difference between the (sub)genres even if they are in the same area in a record shop.
While the guys may not have played on the studio version of '(I'm Not Your) Stepping Stone' they really did a sublime garage band rock version of it in their 1960s concerts. Of course you know this, but there are some who should look it up online sometime. I just wish actual live footage of it existed, to see them doing it with the psychedelic lights and all... (Okay, there's the snippet from 'The Monkees on Tour' episode, but that really doesn't give the full effect of what it must have looked like.)
Talking about the Monkees and the Raiders, I guess the first question is what is "rock" band and what is not. These are my two favorites groups but they were pop acts. However, I would say that compared to pop acts, those with short lives in the 60's and 70's, the Monkees wrote as much if not more than many counterparts (many of those type pop acts are already listed already above) but perhaps not 90% of them. The Raiders however did write virtually all their songs beginning with Midnight Ride. With a writing trajectory more like the Stones or Beatles. I think only two tracks each on Midnight and Spirit were outside and for the next a five or six LP stretch they wrote everything. Lindsay wrote the bulk, on Happening LP they listed all six songs on each side and then just have M Lindsay at the bottom, no others credited, so he wrote that entire LP. But Revolution, Hard and Heavy and Alias Pink Puzz I believe are all band tunes with Freddy Weller and Keith Allison contributing just as Fang and Smitty did. The one exception was Goin' To Memphis which had some classic blues type numbers but even that LP featured a lot of Lindsay written tracks. After Collage (a rock LP) though it ended as Indian Reservation is virtually all covers including the massive title track hit.
But in fact, during their brief stint as a regularly recording group (on Buddah in the early 70s), Sha Na Na recorded mainly originals. This minor hit wasn't doo wop at all:
Lindsay had started his solo career by the time Indian Reservation came out, and his records were outselling the Raiders by that point. Lindsay didn't write his solo stuff, that was outside writers. Lindsay solo was trying to be like Glen Campbell or Tom Jones, more of an MOR guy. I read someone describe Lindsay as a "talented mimic", and I think that was true. He was talented, but definitely a follower, and kept changing things to what he thought would work at the time. Anyway, I think Indian Reservation was supposed to be solo, but Lindsay and Revere were trying to save the Raiders concept, so those songs came out as Raiders even though they were all covers. I think the Raiders would have been considered Rock through around 1966 and Pop thereafter. The Raiders came out of the same scene as the Kingsmen and the Drake/Fang/Smitty version definitely had a garage sound. That was Rock of that time. Eventually the counterculture happened, and acts needed to decide if they wanted to get with the counterculture. There was a whole other side that had accepted Rock as the new pop music, but didn't want to go along with the progressions of the counterculture. The Monkees in fact had been created for people who simply wanted a new version of the 1964 Beatles without the progressions. Then later you had bubblegum and MOR and all sorts of stuff that catered to that market, that maybe dipped into some progressive stuff, but was more pop than not. The Monkees were always pop. The Grass Roots were about on the same level as the Monkees. All of the Grass Roots had come from other bands, they could play. They wrote a few songs on all of the Grass Roots albums. But never any of the singles. Plus they had to use backing musicians on the road after a while because their singles had so many overdubs. But as far as writing goes, they were about there with the Monkees.
Santana: I would put them in the "rarely wrote their own songs" catagory. At least the first two albums. They had such a unique sound that their songs seemed like originals (to me). It was years later that I started to hear and read about the original versions of some of Santana's most popular songs.
The live (‘67?) version on the Listen to the Band box set has great, garage band energy. Not the greatest recording, given the era (Sort of like The Beatles at Hollywood Bowl original album), but it shows the guys could rock.
The initial post is slightly confusing - or maybe it's just me - because it talks about 'rock bands of the late 60s-present' and then 'bands of the rock era' and it's not clear if these are two different groupings. Also when does the late 60s begin!
I genuinely cannot believe that in 20-damn-21, there are still people who insist that pop and rock are separate things. Rock is merely a subset of pop music. Always has been, always will be. Also, The Hollies relied primarily on outside songwriters outside of a relatively brief period between, like, 1966 and '69.
No, their albums were nearly all group-written until they stopped recording regularly at the end of the 70s.
That's sort of a retrospective opinion. There's really not much of any difference stylistically between the music of the Monkees or Raiders circa 1965-66 and the music the Beatles were doing at the same time. In 1965-66, the Monkees and the Raiders would have been considered rock 'n' roll groups, just like the Beatles. In the late 60s, with the advent of the term "rock music" and the sort of stylistic changes that accompanied it, people started drawing a distinction. But certainly at the time, no one would have said the Beatles were rock and the Raiders were pop. And of course, as @Jay_Z noted, the Raiders took a shift towards more of a bubblegum/pop feel after their original line-up changed in 1967. So too did the Monkees (at least Davy and Micky) when they started producing tracks independently of each other circa 1968. But in 1965-66, I don't think anyone would have viewed the Raiders or Monkees as a different genre than the Beatles. Based on a quick count, the Monkees wrote 33% of the songs they released in the 60s. That's not a huge amount, especially considering that about a third of the songs they wrote were co-written with outside writers. There were certainly some bands that wrote less of their own material than that, but 90% seems a ridiculous overstatement.
To put it another way, The Monkees didn't write any of their hit songs (except 'Randy Scouse Git', which wasn't issued in the USA). There's a simple formula here: The more songs The Monkees wrote, the less popular the group was.
Michael Nesmith wrote (and produced) "Mary, Mary" which was a hit in Australia (reaching # 5 in Go Set Magazine chart). Worldwide release? Absolutely not. But a hit record nonetheless. As far as the more they wrote, the less popular they were, that's a bit of a falsehood: I mean Nesmith was writing and producing from the get-go, and he had compositions on all four of their #1 albums, so there's that... It's really not so much that when they started writing more, the sales went down, it was a case of them being seen as 'teen idols', and as such the staying power of 'teen idols' is usually short, no matter how talented they may be. It was just a natural progression that they'd fall out of favor and someone new would 'take over' as it were. That said, the fact that they're still drawing crowds as a concert act here in 2021 shows that they really did end up having staying power.
Yes, I'm sure the 12-year-olds lining up to buy More of The Monkees were asking the record-store clerks, "Does this Monkees record have original songs by Michael Nesmith? Because I don't care about The Monkees' TV theme-song, or 'I'm a Believer'... I want Nesmith country tunes! What? It has 1.5 songs by him? Okay, I'll buy it!"
