purchase [I'm a Believer ]
Despite what J. David says about the Monkees (or maybe in spite of what he says), they appeared to me as a real band. I had at least one of their albums. Actually, I had to do some searching to recall which one it was that I spent my allowance on, and it appears to have been not just one, but the first two albums! Aw, come one now- one hit from each: <Last Train to Clarksville> and <I'm a Believer>. Great Pop. For those days.
It must have been PR/chart appearances that did it for me. At that time, my musical selection was "guided" by AM radio hits - and that they had. I didn't have no older brother to set me straight, and - I confess - it appealed to some part of my adolescent psyche. We are talking late-mid 60s here and I was all of about 12 year old. The ideal demographic for their output.
It wasn't until a few years later, when someone more informed than myself shared Crawdaddy magazine with me, and I began to get a sense of the music industry's perfidies. The Monkees were a joke. That made money off of pre-teen dupes like myself. And they weren't the only industry that followed this curve by any means.
That said, we need to expose the fake-ness:
The Monkees were very real to me in 1967: hey ... top of the charts is real enough. Seems it wasn't as real underneath- what was presented to the public:
Time magazine said> The Monkees are about as real as a fake band can get.
Fact is, it blew up: they really wanted to be real.
Again, as Time says > it’s hard to tell where the actors ended and the real band began.
