Yes, I know the Beatles wrote their own songs and the Monkees didn't.
Mike Nesmith wrote many of the Monkees' songs, and Mickey Dolenz and Peter Tork wrote songs for the band as well. As time went on, they asserted more and more creative independence from their producer.
Also, a significant number of
the Beatles' songs were written by people other than the Beatles.
Yes, I know the Beatles played their own instruments and the Monkees didn't.
http://www.monkees101.com/musicfaq.html
Is it true the Monkees didn't play their own instruments?
No. Nez, Peter and Micky had experience as working musicians prior to auditioning for the Monkees. However, Don Kirshner preferred to record with studio musicians who were more seasoned and whose time wasn't taken up with shooting a series. Despite this, Peter Tork has a guitar credit on the very first album and all four were expected to perform as a group on tour. After ousting Kirshner and winning more musical control, the group continued to utilize session musicians, by choice. This was not unusual. Both the Beatles and the Beach Boys were highly respected and were making good use of outside musicians on their recordings.
I know the Beatles changed the world and the Monkees didn't. I know the Monkees were a manufactured band, created as a US answer to the Beatles.
The Monkees (the TV series) may have been an attempt to follow in the footsteps of
A Hard Day's Night (and the Marx Brothers), but it was a very innovative television sitcom, breaking the fourth wall, embracing surrealism and nonlinear storytelling, and playing with the distinctive form and technology of television as a medium in ways that only Ernie Kovacs had attempted before. It was also quite innovative as a multimedia franchise -- they created a television show about a rock band, but instead of just going with a fictional band like
The Partridge Family, they created a real rock band that recorded albums and went on live concert tours, blurring the line between fiction and reality. It was a forerunner of the kind of multimedia cross-promotion that we see today, like viral marketing and alternative-reality games for shows like
Lost, or the way the mystery novels written by the title character of
Castle within the show are actually published in real life.
Not to mention that the show's musical segments (while also inspired by
A Hard Day's Night) were forerunners of the modern music video. Later in life, Mike Nesmith created a show that was the direct forerunner of MTV, so he basically invented the music video as we know it. I'd say that's a pretty important cultural legacy.
