I should be on that train and gone

Continuing my trip back through the 1968 album charts.

10/03/68 : Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn and Jones Ltd. - The Monkees

Along with Elvis Presley, I have an irrational dislike of The Monkees because the BBC always thought they were a good thing to put on telly during the school holidays when I was a child - quite what thought processes were involved in such a decision is unclear, but you can be certain no actual child was involved.  However, like Elvis, I don't mind some of their music - I'm expecting a whole album to feel somewhat unnecessary though. 

It's OK - pretty unremarkable, but not unbearable.  It's a lot less frenetic than I was expecting - for the most of it, like The Move, it feels much more of a mid-60s sound than something I'd expect to see in the heady days of '68.  I did like "What Am I Doing Hangin' Round?" - it was nicely catchy.  "Daily Nightly" is an interesting one because they adopt a much more Doors like sound (or even The Velvet Underground) - I didn't mind it, but it's very incongruous when compared with the rest of the album.  And "Peter Percival Patterson's Pet Pig Porky" is just a very odd beast indeed.  All in all, it's a bit of a strange collection.

We're at #21 in the charts this week on their tenth week of an eleven week run - bizarrely, it spent eight of those eleven weeks in the top ten, with it peaking at #5 in its sixth and eighth weeks.  The top five this week were Bob, best-ofs from The Supremes and The Four Tops, TSOM and the Otis best-of, the highest new entry was The Beach Boys (which I remember being dreadful) and there are no new women involved this week.

Wikipedia has LOADS on the album (185 milliPeppers) with each track receiving a personnel breakdown and a list of any other relevant facts.  To be honest, there's not a lot of interest on there except that this album is another one of the first batch to use a Moog - Mickey Dolenz was surprisingly one of the first twenty people to own one.  It also tells us how successful the album was in the US with it selling over three million copies, making it their fourth consecutive #1 album.

"Customers also listened to" The Grass Roots, The Cowsills, The Easybeats and The Lemon Pipers - all of whom, I think it's fair to say, aren't quite as well remembered as The Monkees.  Oh well, never mind eh?  There were sparks of inspiration and skill here (some of which, unlike earlier albums, even involved the band members) but it's a bit inconsistent and just, well, weird for me.

03/03/68 - A very peculiar album
17/03/68 - An astonishingly successful album