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THE MONKEES
Headquarters Sessions
This title is no longer available from Rhino Handmade.
However, numbered copies from the original edition may be available at select retailers.
An individually numbered, limited edition of 4,500 copies from Rhino Handmade.
From the group’s pre-fab inception, The Monkees’ albums were the brainchild music industry veteran Don Kirshner. The Monkees started out being actors playing the parts of musicians singing songs written by and selected for them by others. They supplied the singing voices to music performed by session players.
In 1967, this changed. After a series of creative tug-of-wars, Kirshner was out of the picture and Michael Nesmith, Peter Tork, Davy Jones and Micky Dolenz were -for the first time ever- given creative control over the making of a Monkees album. They now found themselves at RCA Studio C in Hollywood as a working band, just as they had always been on the small screen. And the album they were about to create, Headquarters, would be released on May 20, 1967; a month later it would hit #1 on the Billboard Hot 100, and remain in the Top Ten for almost three months.
The Monkees Headquarters Sessions is an 84-track 3-CD set which contains 60 previously unreleased recordings and which also includes the complete original mono mixes of the album on compact disc for the first time anywhere. Researched and compiled by longtime Monkee maniacs Andrew Sandoval and Bill Inglot, Headquarters Sessions collects almost four hours of unique audio insight into the recording of this Monkee milestone. It includes almost three-and-one-half-hours of alternate takes, demos, backing tracks, and recording session audio hijinx never before preserved on compact disc.
We’ve combed through all of the known surviving Headquarters session reels -both complete and intermediate mixes- to assemble a strikingly cohesive peek into The Monkees’ inner workings as a finally unencumbered creative entity and as the genuine -if sometimes still learning- musicians that they were. To this end, Headquarters Sessions includes only recordings from those sessions where the band had control over all aspects of the recording process and where they played most, if not all, of the instruments. The 3-CD set collects all of the vocal masters from these sessions that were not included on the original stereo album as well as all of the surviving vocal demos and a few tracks with vocals which were never completed.
However, the beefy middle of this tasty digital triple-decker is the collection of previously unreleased instrumental backing track sessions (both for familiar and previously unknown compositions), rehearsals, spoken word oddities, and studio chatter. And to top it all off, the original mono masters are presented in an initially proposed, but ultimately unused, running order. All contained in a gatefold digipack with a 40-page booklet filled with photographs, a contemporaneous day-to-day chronology, track notes as well as interesting ephemera. Headquarters Sessions is sure to make you a believer.
Headquarters Sessions is available as an individually numbered limited edition of 4,500 copies.
Selection # 7715
You really should take a look at these:
- The Monkees Summer 1967: The Complete U.S. Concert Recordings
- The Monkees Music Box (Boxed Set)
- The Monkees Greatest Hits
- Various Artists The Look Of Love: The Burt Bacharach Collection (Boxed Set)
- Helene Grimaud Helene Grimaud (Six-CD Boxed Set)
- Tiny Tim God Bless Tiny Tim: The Complete Reprise Recordings
- Bjork Surrounded (DualDisc Box)
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