I was given this when I was six

Back when I was a kid, I was a huge fan of the Monkees. I watched their show, and thought that it was funny. I listened to their music with much pleasure. I liked having - in the late 1960s - an American group (I also loved the Beatles) to look up to. I didn't know that the Monkees were considered a "manufactured" group, and being very young, probably would not have cared.

Today, I still really like a lot of the "poppier" music of the mid to late 1960s; Tommy James, the 1910 Fruitgum Company, Boyce and Hart, Sonny and Cher, the Ohio Express, the Lemon Pipers, and even cartoon bands like the Banana Splits and the Archies all sound good to me, and strains of this type of pop can be heard in such various Elephant Six bands like the Apples in Stereo and the Olivia Tremor Control and even in such indie bands as the Clean, the Minders, and Unrest. Not to mention all the great powerpop bands of the 70s and 80s (also borrowing from a lot of the poppier bands on the various Nuggets-type reissues.

It is also the case, I feel, that the Monkees were something more than simply a manufactured pop group. They had talented songwriters, such as Neil Diamond, writing very well crafted songs for them. Their film, Head, was a genuine attempt to embrace hipness (with Peter Tork being the one member who most embraced the 60s counterculture - he appears, as himself, in the Holy Modal Rounders documentary, which I recently watched). Of course, many rock fans know the story of Jimi Hendrix opening for them, and of bewildering the Monkees' core audience. But, the bottom line for me is that the Monkees are an endearing part of my late 1960s childhood (which was a time when I also listened to things like this).











Anyway, I was telling my wife, after we were amusedly viewing some retro K-Tel ads on line, about an experience I had as a kid. My one aunt bought me, as a special gift, what she may have thought was a Monkees record. But the thing was, it was not a Monkees record. Instead, it was a cheap knockoff, on the "Wyncote" label, by a group called the Chimps. It was meant to dupe people into thinking that they'd bought one thing without realizing that they'd gotten a lesser version (which my wife told me has also happened a few time to her record-collecting dad); notice for example how much the word "monkey" on this cover resembles the chosen font of the Monkees' logo? As far as the Wyncote Label, as Mike Callahan, Steve Klein, David Edwards, and Patrice Eyries of the Both Sides Now website, all explain,

In 1964, Cameo-Parkway started Wyncote, a budget label subsidiary named for a Philadelphia suburb, to reissue their large back catalog. The product on Wyncote was very typical of budget label of the 1960s. Record jackets were inexpensively made and tended toward falling apart easily, there was no inner paper or plastic sleeves for the albums, and there were usually only nine or ten tracks on each album. Many times the artists names weren't even given. Far worse, though, was the substandard vinyl pressings which were noisy and had many bumps. The vinyl on some of the early Wyncote albums could only be described as pathetic, with blisters, peels and bumps abounding. After the first few issues, they settled down to a vinyl quality that was passable, but not much more.

Also typical of budget labels was the annoying habit of using deceptive names or record jackets to fool a casual record buyer into thinking they were buying a better-known product. Thus we got the Mexican Brass doing hits by the Tijuana Brass, an album with "Beatlemania!" across the front in big letters which actually had tunes by a group called the Liverpools, and an unnamed band (actually, the Chimps) doing Monkees songs. Probably the worst offense in this regard (and they must have thought they were being soooo clever) was the takeoff on the very popular album Bach's Greatest Hits, which had been out a couple of years earlier by the Swingle Singers. Wyncote SW-9088 was Bach's Biggest Hits by the Single Swingers! Sheesh!

And as for the Chimps record, here is the track listing:
W/SW-9199 - Monkey Business - Chimps [1967] I'm A Beliver/Last Train To Clarksville/Sunday's Kid/Papa's Blue Jeans/Sally Sally//Watch Out/Sit Tight Girl/Just A Little To Early/No Survivors/I Realize

I think that I listened to it once. It sounded odd, and I set it off to the side of the records in our house. I don't know what became of it, but today, I'd love to still own it, for its sheer novelty value. I'm also not sure of what became of my Bobby "Boris" Pickett and the Crypt Kickers LP. And today, I sort of prefer this version of the song The Monster Mash.