60s music

Hindsight is most definitely 20/20, but in the Sliding Doors of life, you can't help but wonder, what if? That question may have run through a few people’s minds back in the late 60s as the choice of just one tiny "Yes" over a "No" could have completely changed the course of their careers.

Don Kirshner was a music manager known as the Man with the Golden Ear. This meant he had a knack for finding hit songs and promising musicians. He just had a way of pairing tunes with the perfect artists.

The Monkees was a popular show in the 60s. Giphy

He was hired by producers of the hit show The Monkees, which centered around a made-for-TV band, to do what he did best. For example, having been one of the first to discover singer-songwriter Neil Diamond, he brought his penned song "I'm a Believer" to the Monkees, who made it a hit.

But Kirshner, as savvy as he was, also had a reputation for being a bit controlling and pushy. When he presented the song "Sugar, Sugar" (written by Jeff Barry and Andy Kim) to the Monkees, Mike Nesmith used it as an opportunity to fight for more control of the band's music. In an interview with Music Radar, former Monkees drummer Micky Dolenz told Joe Bosso: "As you know, Don Kirshner presented that as the next Monkee tune. I was going to record it. That's when Mike Nesmith led the palace revolt and we fought for the right to have at least some sort of control over the music. I didn't go to the session—I’d gone to England, and that's when I met The Beatles."

Enter The Archies. As noted in Kirshner's 2011 obituary in The Washington Post, they were a completely fictional band, first spotted in the comic book Life with Archie." The cartoon series (The Archie Show) aired on CBS, and (Kirshner) supervised production of 'Sugar, Sugar,' which sold more than 10 million copies and was the No. 1 song of 1969."

Dolenz continues, "Don Kirshner got fired (from The Monkees), but then he recorded the song with The Archies. He said, 'That way, nobody can talk back to me.'" (He was laughing at the idea that a cartoon band couldn't make demands.)

The Monkees TV show was cancelled, and while the band continued to tour and many of their songs are still pop music favorites, they most definitely lost their momentum. Had they recorded the song, perhaps the show would have had another decade. Would anything have changed? NPR reports, “‘Sugar, Sugar’ became the most successful song on the Billboard charts in 1969. In addition, it was a No. 1 hit in Belgium, South Africa, and the United Kingdom. Had the Prefab Four recorded it, it would have been precisely the sort of smash they needed to keep them commercially relevant."

Micky Dolenz did wind up recording a super cool, jazzy version of the song.

- YouTube www.youtube.com

This would be far from the last time a manufactured band would have a hit song. Rolling Stone compiled a "Top 50" list for a piece called "Fake Bands, Real Songs: The 50 Best Tunes by Made-Up Musicians." Ironically, The Archies’ "Sugar, Sugar" makes the list at number 18—but the Monkees’ "Daydream Believer" does not. They write, "We also had a long debate about what to do with the Monkees, before it was decided that at a certain point, they Pinocchio’ed their way into being a real band, and thus didn’t qualify. (Otherwise, ‘Daydream Believer’ would have been very highly ranked.)"

Number one on their list? "That Thing You Do" by the fake band The Oneders. "What else could the number-one song on this list be other than the irresistible power-pop tune by a band that first called itself the Oneders? Tom Hanks’ directorial debut about an early-Sixties group that has one big hit before disbanding would not work at all if the title song was not wholly convincing. But the late Adam Schlesinger proved his bona fides as the unquestioned master of the fake-pop-song form with the tight harmonies and catchy riffs he wrote for these one-hit wonders."

-The fictional band The Oneders perform "That Thing You Do." www.youtube.com, 20th Century Fox