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Reposting this photo I shared yesterday because I think I finally put together what Micky and Peter were actually doing. Micky “shot” Peter and Peter had to “die” so Micky could photograph his dramatic demise.

In They Made a Monkee Out of Me, Davy Jones explains a Monkee game called Killer.

We defused a lot of the tension with humour, naturally. On the set, and on the road, we had a game we used to play called Killer. Jim Frawley invented it. The idea was each person was allowed three shots per day. You could shoot whoever you liked—you just mimed your hand as a gun, like kids do, y’know—tssshhh! And whoever was shot had to die. But you couldn’t just fall down, nice and simple—it had to be a spectacular death. You had to moan and kick and fall over furniture and people and take about three-quarters of an hour to do it—like they used to in all of the best Westerns. And if you didn’t die loud enough, or long enough, or imaginatively enough, or if say you just didn’t die at all, because you were being introduced to the Queen Mother at the time, then you lost a life. And if you lost three lives—you were out of the game. Forever. No second chances. That was as good as being really dead. So, of course, we’d look for the best moments to shoot each other—when it would cause the most commotion. Not everyone was included. It was a clique of about eight. Sometimes we’d have a different director—we used to have a guest director to do one or two shows. They’d be in the middle of a scene and somebody would get shot and the whole scene would be ruined because this was very serious business—you couldn’t lose a life. The game produced no end of possibilities for going right over the top. In the middle of a love scene once—I had the stars coming out of my eyes, the whole bit—I’m walking over to the girl with my arms outstretched and she says, “Oh, Davy!” We’re just about to kiss when … Tssshhh!—Peter shoots me. I have to go into an epileptic seizure routine for about five minutes—knocking lamps over, fall over a drum kit, out the door, roll around the parking lot, up the stairs, across the president’s desk—“Oh my God, are you all right, David?”—“Aaargh! Shot, sir!” Back out the door, down the stairs, onto the set, collapse in a heap at her feet. Wild applause. One time in Australia, in front of about five million fans at the airport, Micky got shot and he fell all the way down this gigantic escalator. People were stunned. They thought he’d been assassinated. It was very rarely someone wouldn’t die—not even a token head slump. One time was the Emmy Awards. I think it was Bert Schneider stepped up to receive the award for “Best New Comedy Show.” We shot him, but the moment was too special for him to spoil it. He won an Emmy and lost a life. Towards the end of the second year—to show you how badly things were going—even Frawley couldn’t be persuaded to die anymore. Everyone had been up all night, as usual. We were on the set—first diet pill of the day—started fooling around, messing up takes as always. But somehow it wasn’t the same. Nobody was laughing. Frawley was so mad. The only thing we could do was shoot him. Dolenz shot him—he didn’t die. Mike shot him—still standing. I shot him—nothing. What a bummer. All the feeling was gone. The beginning of the end.

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We’re always like “we’re gonna dress like sci-fi people in the future” and then the next generation is always like yasss jeans

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various japanese presses of the monkees vinyls!

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The Monkees, 1967 Summer Tour

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you know you’ve made it as a band when the FBI think’s you’re a communist threat

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awesome things happening on john lennon’s instagram after the new layout update

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I was always interested in finding out what have happens on the photo. What gave them the idea of depict Paul's funeral: why the funeral, why Paul? Well…I have an answer, I suppose

More legendary than most, however, were a band briefly signed to Brian, the Big Three. Other musicians on the scene seemed to regard this band with awe. They were the original power trio, real sonic bruisers who’d built themselves the biggest amplifiers - nicknamed Coffins - that anyone had ever seen.

(Liverpool - Wondrous Place by Paul Du Noyer, 2002)

Epstein made his way to the Cavern club to see the group perform at a lunchtime session on November 9th. He wrote later that he had never seen anything like The Beatles on any stage. <…> "I loved their ad libs and I was fascinated by this, to me, new music with its pounding bass beat and its vast, engulfing sound." <…> The "pounding" bass that Epstein described was due in part to a new addition to The Beatles' equipment line-up. In the early 1960s there was really no such thing as a proper bass amplifier. Most bass players would use the most powerful guitar amplifier that they could get their hands on. But these were not designed for bass guitar, and did not provide the deep, throbbing bass tones that bass guitarists wanted. As The Beatles evolved their sound and Best perfected his "atomic beat" the group were searching for a stronger and more solid bass sound.

The band considered by many to be the loudest and most aggressive in Liverpool was The Big Three. They bad started out as Cass & The Cassanovas, a four-piece until leader and frontman Brian Casser left during the beginning of 1961. The remaining members stayed together to form The Big Three: Johnny Gustafson on bass, guitarist Adrian Barber, and Liverpool's loudest drummer, Johnny Hutchinson, on the skins.

Barber says that when they became a trio there was an instant problem: he and Gustafson weren't loud enough to project over Hutchinson's drumming. Even the relatively punchy Selmer Truvoice amp was not enough. Barber, however, had an interest in electronics from his days in the merchant navy. <…> Barber went out and bought a book about loudspeakers produced by G A Briggs, who owned the British Wharfedale speaker company, and inside he found construction details for various sizes of cabinets. "I decided on one, and Denis Kealing said he could get me a 15-inch speaker," recalls Barber. "I built a set-up for the bass guitar and for the vocal, in a cabinet about five feet tall by about 18 inches square. <…> I used that and mounted it in a metal ammunitions case, so we could carry it around without killing it. Johnny Gustafson used it as his bass amp, and it was very successful. "When we carried it we bad to lower it on its side, because it was long and skinny. The first time we took it down to the Cavern, we struggled down the tiny stairs there. As we carried this black-painted thing across the room it looked just like a coffin - and that's how it got its name: the Coffin. Now, the Cavern was the underground basement of a warehouse, with three vaulted brick-built archways. Over the years water had seeped down and brought calcium deposits with it, which had settled in the ceiling bricks. So when Johnny plucked that first bass note it was like a shower of snow corning down. People went, 'Wow look at that … and listen to that.' So we were really impressed, and I got ambitious at that point." <…> Other bands began to notice the relative sophistication of The Big Three's amplification, especially the bass gear. "Liverpool wasn't a competitive scene, before it got commercial," explains Barber. '"All the bands co-operated with one another and backed each other up. It was a cool scene, and I started to build these things for other people. Paul McCartney asked me to make him a Coffin. It had a single 15-inch speaker in a reflex-ported cabinet, with two chrome handles and wheels on the side."

McCartney started to use a Barber Coffin speaker cabinet during the late part of 1961. <…> McCartney himself recalls, "Adrian made me a great bass amp that he called the Coffin. And, man! Suddenly that was a total other world. That was bass as we know it now. It was like reggae bass: it was just too right there. It was great live." Pete Best too remembers the Coffin. "Neil Aspinall and I used to carry it. Every couple of shows there'd be a flight of stairs which you had to carry this thing up, and it was then we'd wonder why he couldn't have got something smaller. We'd have sweat streaming off us. But the beauty of it was, with all the laughing and joking aside, it did produce a great sound. The first time Paul plugged it in and used it, we just said my god, this is incredible. It added to The Beatles sound."

(Beatles Gear: All the Fab Four's Instruments from Stage to Studio Hardcover by Andy Babiuk, 2010)

So, I guess, Paul is lying on his bass amp that they called the Coffin - and it's the reason of the pantomime on the photo.

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This too shall pass but like holy fuck

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like to charge, reblog to cast <3

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The Monkees London Press Conference (1967)

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every so often i will come across a macklemore lyric that just… catches me so fucking off guard

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every so often i will come across a macklemore lyric that just… catches me so fucking off guard

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why is “get ___ed idiot” one of the funniest sentences in the english language

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Brian Epstein receiving updates from London while at the New York Plaza, February 1964