A Taste of Nostalgia

There's something really unusual that happens when I watch an episode of Professor of Rock on YouTube: I get whatever song he's covering stuck in my head.

Okay, that's not the unusual bit. What's unusual is that the song doesn't enter my head until several days after I watch the show. A few minutes after watching the show, I become preoccupied with the next thing that fills my head and not soon after, I completely forget which artist or band was the topic of that nearly daily show.

"The Monkees" by Mark Sardella is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

The song just pops in my head two or three days later and plays on a continual loop for the remainder of that day. So it was no surprise that, three days after watching an episode of the popular 1960s show, The Monkees, on Professor of Rock, the theme song became an ear worm that occupied much of my Sunday.

As a kid, I would race home after school to catch an episode. Though, by then, the show was in syndication, it was a favourite of mine, right up there with Gilligan's Island, Get Smart, The Beverley Hillbillies, The Brady Bunch, Batman, and Bewitched.

(I think Elizabeth Montgomery was my first crush. Can you blame me?)

By the time Kid 1 and I sat down to dinner (DW is away, this week), I was humming The Monkees theme son. "Do you know this song?" I asked her.

"No, should I?"

"Have you heard of The Monkees?" I countered.

She paused for a moment. "Is their name spelled with two Es?"

"Yes."

"I might have heard of them but I don't know anything about them."

So I explained the show and how these four young men came to be a big hit in North America, including the controversy around the fact that other people wrote their songs and other musicians played the instruments. I told them that the show was very goofy, but in a fun way, and that the music was fantastic.

We looked them up on YouTube and played a full episode on our big TV screen. The show was about how a TV producer was looking for a hip musical band to star in his upcoming show, and he accidentally hears a song on a reel-to-reel, falls in love with the sound, and wants to hire that band for his show.

Only, he doesn't know the band on the tape (but the audience does—surprise!).

Meanwhile, several other bands have been invited to audition for the show, but Davy, Mikey, Peter, and Mike aren't invited, so they try to contact the producer to get him to listen to them. And every attempt fails in a silly way.

In the end, the boys meet with the producer who says he wants to sign them to his show, and asks them to perform his show's theme song. He gets his secretary to sing a bit of the song to The Monkees, and when he hears her voice, the producer changes his mind and hires his secretary.

As I said, goofy. But when "Papa Gene's Blues" started playing, I joined in, much to Kid 1's surprise (surprised me too: it's been decades since I've heard that song).

After the show ended, we looked at a few more shorter videos or their songs, including an appearance on The Tonight Show, from 2001, minus Mike Nesmith. We also played the excerpt from a show where they sing "Daydream Believer," which is my favourite Monkees song.

"Oh, I know this song," said Kid 1.

"Really?"

"I've heard you sing this song around the house," she said. "This is the first time I've heard the original version."

I stayed quiet so she could take it in. It's very possible that she caught me singing this song around the house, though it would have been many years ago. A couple of months ago, when no one was home, I tried to sing it, to see if I could cover it for a karaoke night, but my vocal chords can no longer do the chorus.

I love that Kid 1 likes to share in some of the nostalgia that I have for some of these old TV shows. Years ago, DW and I got both kids hooked on Bewitched, and we watched the whole series. We even saw the pilot and the earliest episodes, which I had never seen before.

I finally learned how Samantha had told Darrin about her special powers, and I even saw some actors who I didn't know at the time but who became another staple of my early TV years (James Doohan comes to mind).

And, yeah, I still had a crush on Elizabeth Montgomery.

Happy Monday!