Head (The Monkees album)
| Head | ||||
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| Soundtrack album by The Monkees | ||||
| Released | December 1, 1968 | |||
| Recorded | December 1967–August 1968, RCA Victor Studios, Western Recorders, Sunset Sound, California Recorders, and Wally Heider's, Hollywood, and Original Sound, Hollowed |
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| Genre | Psychedelic rock, psychedelic pop | |||
| Length | 28:49 | |||
| Label |
Colgems (original U.S. release) RCA Records (original release outside U.S.) Arista (1981 Japanese LP reissue) Rhino (1985 LP reissue + 1994 and 2010 CD reissues) |
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| Producer | The Monkees, Gerry Goffin | |||
| The Monkees chronology | ||||
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| Singles from Head | ||||
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| Professional ratings | |
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| Review scores | |
| Source | Rating |
| AllMusic |   |
| Blogcritics | (favorable) |
| MusicHound | |
| The Rolling Stone Album Guide |  |
Head is the soundtrack to the film Head, the only theatrical release by The Monkees. Released in 1968 through Colgems, it was the band's sixth album. Head was the last Monkees album to feature Peter Tork till Pool It! in 1987, and the last to feature all four Monkees until 1996's Justus.
The soundtrack album intersperses the six full-length songs ("Porpoise Song", "Circle Sky", "Can You Dig It?", "As We Go Along", "Daddy's Song" and "Long Title: Do I Have to Do This All Over Again?") with bits of Ken Thorne's incidental music, dialogue fragments, and sound effects culled from the film. The selection of music and dialogue approximates the flow of the movie itself, and was compiled by actor Jack Nicholson, who co-wrote the film's shooting script.
In 2013, Rolling Stone ranked the album at number 25 in their list of "The 25 Greatest Soundtracks of All Time".
The music of The Monkees often featured rather dark subject matter beneath a superficially bright, uplifting sound. The music of the film takes the darkness and occasional satirical elements of the Monkees' earlier tunes and makes it far more overt, as in "Ditty Diego/War Chant", or "Daddy's Song", which has Jones singing an upbeat, Broadway-style number about a boy abandoned by his father. In his 2012 essay on the soundtrack album, academic Peter Mills observed that "on this album the songs are only part of the story, as they were with The Monkees project as a whole: signals, sounds, and ideas interfere with each other throughout."
The original issue of the record (Colgems #COSO-5008) featured a front cover with a surface of aluminized PET film, meant to reflect the listener's "head" (face) back at them. With the movie having only a limited release (and virtually no publicity), the point was largely lost, and while the cover was innovative for its time, manufacturing was problematic. (Micky Dolenz recalled years later that the cover was ruining the printing presses at RCA.) A March 1985 LP reissue from Rhino Records (RNLP-145) was less problematic by using foil paper instead, the result being less reflective than the original. The Rhino CD reissue from 1994 (R2-71795) has a grey cover that is not reflective at all.
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