Rescued from the Archives: Remembering Mr. Jones: Farewell to a Monkee
Originally appeared on NewsReviewsInterview.com on Feb. 29 & Mar. 1, 2012
When Davy Jones died on February 29, 2012, I dived into my interview archive and found the never-transcribed conversation I had with him at the TCA tour. I transcribed some of it that day, transcribed a bit more of it the next day, and…I never actually finished transcribing any more of it, I’m embarrassed to say, which means that I really need to find that file and finally finish! In the meantime, though, here’s a combination of the two posts I made for NewsReviewsInterviews.com, now combined into one.
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I met Davy Jones twice: once in California, once in Virginia.
The latter occasion was the most recent, and it was only a fleeting encounter, a quick backstage meet-and-greet before a co-headlining performance with Peter Noone at the Ferguson Center for the Arts, in Newport News, VA. I had done phoners with both gentlemen for The Virginian-Pilot in advance of the show, so my wife and I were granted a brief audience with them and had a picture snapped to commemorate the occasion.
In addition, although Jones wasn’t doling out any autographs at that precise moment (they did, after all, have a show yet to perform), he and I had discussed the matter beforehand, so thanks to the kind folks at the Ferguson serving as middle man a bit later when Jones wasn’t surrounded by fans, I’m proud to say that I possess an autographed copy of Jones’s autobiography, They Made A Monkee Out of Me!
As for the first time I met Mr. Jones, it was at the Beverly Hilton, during the Television Critics Association press tour. In attendance to support a PBS special that he was hosting, Jones agreed to a 15-minute sit-down. I’d hoped to do a lengthy Set List piece for the Onion AV Club, tackling his pre- and post-Monkees career as well as some highlights of his work with Messrs. Dolenz, Nesmith, and Tork, but the conversation didn’t go quite as I’d intended.
In fairness, I’d only just dipped my toe into the Set List waters, so I probably could’ve pushed Jones a bit more and, in turn, gotten him to wrap up answers sooner. Instead, I just let him go until he stopped. What I didn’t realize, however, was that Davy Jones is not particularly prone to stopping, a fact which–now that I’m aware of it –makes his sudden death even harder to accept than it already would’ve been.
When we sat down for our conversation, the first thing I asked him about was not the Monkees but, rather, the work he’d done when he’d played the role of the Artful Dodger in Oliver! To be specific, I wanted to know what came to mind when I mentioned the song “Consider Yourself.”
“You know something?” he asked me. “When I was in the stables in 1961, the agents came–there was other actors that owned horses, so that’s why they where there–and they took me to London. I rehearsed the song…”
At this, he burst into the first few lines: “Consider yourself at home / Consider yourself one of the family…”
Then he slipped into a brief impression of the encounter that went down after the rehearsal.
“All right, and what’s your name?”
In a heavy Manchester accent. “David Jones.”
“And where do you come from?”
“I come from Manchester.”
“Uh, excuse me, but…do you speak like all the time?”
“Yes, I do. You’re right there, I do.”
Jones grinned. “They gave me six weeks to go away and come back having learned a Cockney accent,” he said. “Me trying to sing in a Cockney accent…it’s like Mick Jagger trying to sing like he’s from the South!
“When Lionel Bart wrote the whole show,” he continued, “he had a singer/entertainer called Max Bygraves come to see him. I’m not sure if he’s still alive, but if he is, he’s living in Australia, as most artists do from England that have any success. Australia or America. They can’t afford to live in England. But Max Bygraves bought the score from Lionel Bart before it ever went on the stage for 300 pounds…because he wanted ‘Consider Yourself.’ Oliver! was at the Wimbledon Theater, and Lionel and whoever he was with went to see Donald Albery at the New Theater, on Shaftesbury Avenue in London, and he wanted some money to take the show from the Wimbledon to this theater…and they gave him 300 pounds. They moved it, and it was an instant hit.
“Soon after that, David Merrick came over, saw the show, took it to America with Georgia Brown and all the cast, including their Oliver and Artful Dodger, toured it for six months, and then to it up to Toronto. He came over to see the production in England, and he came backstage to me and asked, ‘Would you like to come to America?’ I said, ‘Who are you? Maverick?’ ‘Cause I didn’t know who he was. ‘No, Merrick. David Merrick. Would you like to go to America?’ ‘No, I’m not, I’m going back to the stables. I’m almost finished. I’m going back to be a jockey.’
‘Well, we want you to come over to America.’ And the reason why he asked me was to replace the current boy that was doing it (Michael Goodman) and to give Georgia and the rest of the cast lessons in how to speak, ’cause nobody could understand what anybody was saying! And me being from Manchester, I talked like this…”
In his best Dodger: “All right, Fagin, I’d like to say it’s nice to see ya, because I’m talking very slowly, ’cause I’m wanting to sound like I come from London.’”
He grinned again.
“That’s why I went there,” he said. “And that’s how it all happened. I went to Toronto, spent a week there in a room at the Royal York Hotel, and finally they put me in the show. The stage was three times as long as this” – indicating the table – “and the stage that I’d come from was no bigger than this” – indicating his coffee cup – “and it was amazing.
“But I was like an orphan. No one would speak to me, no one would accept me. Except for Georgia. So we went to New York, we opened without reviews in the newspapers, ’cause they were on strike. David Merrick called up Walter Winchell, Clive Barnes, and a number of other reporters…except they weren’t those people. They were just names in the phone book that were the same. But he said, ‘Walter Winchell says this is a smash! Clive Barnes says this is the best thing he’s ever seen!’ And he put them on the billboards outside…without, of course, saying that it was Walter Winchell from New Jersey or Clive Barnes from Virginia or wherever. Smart man.
“So we ran. Georgia was nominated, Clive (Revill) was nominated, and I was nominated for Tony Awards, and I remember going to the Tony Awards, and they said, ‘And the winner for Best Supporting Actor, David…’ And I leaned forward in my seat…and they said somebody else’s name. But I’m glad it wasn’t me that won, ’cause that guy died six months later. It could’ve been me!”
At this point, since I was talking about Oliver!, I wanted to make sure that I tied in Jones’s often-forgotten contribution to one of the greatest TV episodes in rock ‘n’ roll history: appearing with the rest of his fellow cast members on The Ed Sullivan Show the same night as the Beatles.
“So,” I ventured, “was ‘Consider Yourself’ the song you guys sang on ‘Sullivan’?”
“No, we sang…”
Again, he burst into song. “I’d do anything / For you, dear / Anything!”
Another grin.
“And then Georgia sang ‘As Long As He Needs Me,'” he explained. “So it was about the cast and the kids and the feel of the show.”
“In retrospect, it must’ve been pretty remarkable to look back realize just how much of a rock and roll landmark that particular episode ended up being,” I said.
In the manner of a man who prefers to keep the spotlight on himself (and rightfully so, given that the interview was, after all, about him), Jones chose to sidestep any discussion of the Beatles and simply say, “Well, for us, the reason we wanted to do The Ed Sullivan Show was because, supposedly, if you went on The Ed Sullivan Show, that made your career,” said Jones. “But no one show makes your career. It’s like the kids on American Idol or the contestants on Dancing with the Stars or what have you. It doesn’t mean they’re gonna get the Chita Rivera part in West Side Story just because they danced well. It doesn’t mean they’re gonna get a long career. It all depends on who you’ve got around you, who’s supporting you, and how grounded you can become in regards to your success. Booker T. Washington said, ‘Success is not to be measured by the position you reach in life but by the obstacles you overcome to reach that success.’ And most careers are fishbowls: Sammy Davis, Jr., Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra, they go up, they go down, and they settle for somewhere in the middle of the bowl and end up with a long and successful career. And that’s what I’ve got: the most unused recognizable voice in America.”
Jones laughed at this last bit. But not very hard, and – I rather suspect – without nearly as much of the humor his accompanying smile was intended to convey.
I decided to ask him about the trio of singles he released in the brief window between being on Broadway and being in the Monkees: “Dream Girl,” “What Are We Going to Do?,” and “The Girl from Chelsea.”
“That came straight after The Ed Sullivan Show,” said Jones. “I said, ‘Let’s go into the recording studio and record some stuff,’ and they said, ‘Fantastic!’ So they took me into the studio, and the pianist from Oliver! played the demo tape of me doing…”
At this, Jones sang the opening lines from a Bobby Darin number (“More than the greatest love the world has ever known”), then switched gears and began to channel his inner Sondheim (“Maria, I just met a girl named Maria”). I know you can find his version of the former (“More”) on a self-released collection of early material entitled Just for the Record, but I’ll be damned if I can find any trace of a recorded version of “Maria.” If anyone’s ever actually heard it, do let me know, won’t you?
Sorry, sorry, I know: less me, more Davy. Moving on…
Jones said that he went into the studio, cut enough songs to fill an album, including “Put Me Amongst the Girls,” which his father specifically asked him to tackle, and, you may be surprised to learn, a version of Bob Dylan’s “It Ain’t Me, Babe.”
“I was dating a girl at the time, a girl named Eileen,” said Jones. “We (the Monkees) just played the Greek Theater in Los Angeles, and would you believe it? I saw her for the first time in 45 years. She walked in the door, and she just smiles and says, ‘David.’ It was Eileen. We hugged. She’s married, she’s got a daughter, and both her husband and daughter were there, along with her daughter’s boyfriend. We spent 45 minutes together. I wasn’t in the meet-and-greet that night, I can tell you. I wasn’t out there shaking hands with all the people. I just sat in the dressing room with Eileen and her family, because that was a really touching time in my life, you know?”
Jones hesitated, then straightened up in his chair, shaking off a bit of the emotion he’d been drifting into. “You know, in this business, you’ve really got to go off and go sell yourself,” he said, adding with a smile and a sigh, “I’m getting ready to sell myself now. Because I’ve got a musical that I want to sell, and that’s where I want to be. And with a little bit of credibility…”
At this, Jones trailed off, and with the pause in transcription, I found myself wondering exactly how far he’d gotten with this musical of his. Was it just an idea that he was shopping around, or had he actually begun the process of writing songs for it? If it’s the latter – or, really, even if it’s just the idea – I hope Jessica Pacheco will consider letting someone move forward with the musical as a posthumous tribute to her husband, thereby bringing his dream to fruition.
Okay, last bit: when Jones started up again, he was still more or less on the topic of pursuing new endeavors in the future.
“If I had gone off after the Monkees had finished in 1970 and gone to Hollywood Park or Santa Anita and said, ‘I’m a jockey, I can ride,’ you don’t think I would’ve got rides?” he asked. “I would’ve got rides, if only just because of who I was. So you’ve got to really pick your moments, and…it’s actually the same thing you’ve got to do on a horse, really. The best horse is not always the horse that wins the race. It’s the jockey that makes the least mistakes. And I don’t think I’ve made too many mistakes so far, because I haven’t been overplayed.”
A smirk. “Although I may overplay myself a bit…”
The story Davy tells about Merrick inviting people with the same names as prominent reviewers wasn't for Oliver; it was for 1961's "Subways Are for Sleeping". (And it was done not because of the newspaper strike but because the play was a bomb).
Wiki link has the ad. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subways_Are_for_Sleeping
To Merrick's credit, he didn't force these 7 folk to praise the show. But he treated them to dinner and a Broadway show; of course they were going to say good things.