Song #24: "Last Train to Clarksville" by The Monkees

 

The Monkees — “Last Train to Clarksville”

🎵 Today’s Song

The Monkees — “Last Train to Clarksville”
1966

Random draw

Selected era bucket: 1960–1969

Verified remaining eligible population: 9,051 recordings

Selection method: Equal-probability era draw, then one uniform random draw from previously unselected eligible recordings in that era

Chart performance

Overall pop peak: #1

Billboard Hot 100: #1

Other relevant Billboard pop charts: N/A

Billboard R&B: N/A

Billboard Country: N/A

UK: #23

Yearly rank: #20

Weeks charted: 15

Weeks Top 20: 10

Weeks Top 10: 9

Weeks at peak: 1

The Monkees at this point

Charting record: 1st of 21

Top-20 hit: 1st of 10

Top-10 hit: 1st of 6

#1 pop hit: 1st of 3

Previous Top-20: None

Next Top-20: “I’m a Believer”

Retrospective standing

GOAT overall: #968

Among Monkees songs: #3 of 20

Among Monkees Top-20 hits: #3 of 10

GOAT points: 627,436

Hot 100 portion of chart run: #1 peak; 15 weeks

Record details

Entered chart: September 10, 1966

Released: August 16, 1966

Recorded: July 25, 1966 — RCA Victor Studio B, Hollywood

Single: “Last Train to Clarksville” / “Take a Giant Step”

Album: The Monkees

Songwriters: Tommy Boyce, Bobby Hart

Lead vocal: Micky Dolenz

Running time: 2:40

Label: Colgems

Catalog number: 66-1001

Recording to use: The original 1966 Micky Dolenz recording; preferably the original mono single mix

Listen / watch / read

🎧 Original recording: Rhino’s original 1966 recording

📺 Contemporary performance/promotional clip: The song was incorporated into The Monkees television series; there was no conventional standalone music video in the modern sense.

📝 Lyrics: Licensed lyrics are available through Musixmatch and major streaming services.

Versions & title history

Original or cover: Original

The song has subsequently been recorded by numerous artists, including Cassandra Wilson, whose much slower 1995 version appears on New Moon Daughter.

Same-title unrelated chart hits: None identified

Streaming note

Modern streaming services contain stereo remasters, alternate mixes and live performances. For this project, use the original 1966 studio recording with Micky Dolenz on lead vocal.

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It is easy to describe the Monkees as a manufactured band.

It is also true.

The problem is that the word manufactured makes the whole thing sound much more orderly than it actually was.

Bob Rafelson's idea actually predated the Beatles.

Years before The Monkees, Rafelson had spent time traveling around and playing music, and around 1960 he began trying to sell a television comedy about the misadventures of a young musical group. The idea made sense from his own experience. A struggling band gave a sitcom a built-in reason for its young characters to live together, chase gigs, travel to new places, meet new people and, conveniently, perform music along the way.

The problem was that television executives apparently didn't see the appeal.

Then the Beatles happened.

By 1964, A Hard Day's Night had demonstrated that audiences might happily watch young musicians joke around, chase girls, get into trouble and occasionally play songs. Rafelson later said that he had conceived his show before the Beatles existed, but that nobody would let him make it until the Beatles became popular.

In other words: he had the idea first. The Beatles made it look like a good idea.

So when Rafelson and Bert Schneider formed Raybert Productions in 1965 and began developing what became The Monkees, they weren't simply trying to manufacture an American version of the Beatles. They were finally getting a chance to make an older idea in a world the Beatles had transformed.

Now they needed a band.

Or, more accurately, they needed four people who could convincingly play a band on television.

Their famous 1965 casting call sought musicians and singers for acting roles. Hundreds of people auditioned. The distinction is important: Rafelson and Schneider weren't holding auditions to find the four best musicians in Los Angeles. They were casting a television show about musicians.

The four people they chose arrived through very different routes.

Michael Nesmith was probably the closest to the conventional story of a musician answering an audition notice. He was already working the Los Angeles folk scene, writing songs and recording under the name Michael Blessing. He had also already written “Different Drum,” although the Stone Poneys wouldn't turn it into a hit until 1967.

Nesmith saw the Monkees casting notice and showed up for the audition wearing the wool cap that would become part of his television image. He wasn't somebody with no musical career hoping television might create one for him. He was a working musician who happened to be trying out for a television show.

Peter Tork got there through Stephen Stills.

Stills had auditioned for the Monkees himself but wasn't chosen. He suggested Tork, whom he knew from the Greenwich Village folk scene, and called him—twice, because Tork mostly blew off the first suggestion—to convince him to audition.

That's a remarkable fork in the road. A future two-time Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee was available, and the producers passed. Stills would eventually be inducted as a member of both Buffalo Springfield and Crosby, Stills & Nash.

Instead they chose Tork, who was hardly some musically unqualified substitute. He was an experienced folk musician and multi-instrumentalist who could play guitar, bass, banjo, piano and other instruments. The Stills referral got him into the process; Tork still had to win the role himself.

If the objective had simply been to assemble the most musically formidable rock band possible, passing on Stills might look insane.

But that wasn't the objective.

They were making television.

Micky Dolenz came from almost the opposite direction. He already knew how to be on television. As a child, billed as Mickey Braddock, he had starred in the 1950s series Circus Boy. By the time of the Monkees auditions, he also had experience playing in rock bands and auditioned with a guitar.

Dolenz therefore had an unusually useful combination for this particular job: he understood television, he could act, and he wasn't a stranger to rock music.

There was just one problem.

He wasn't a drummer.

After they cast him, they decided that was where he belonged in the fictional band, so he learned.

Davy Jones, meanwhile, was hardly an unknown walking in from an open casting call. He had played the Artful Dodger in Oliver! on Broadway, earning a Tony nomination, and had already been signed to the Screen Gems-Columbia orbit as a singer and actor.

In one of the stranger coincidences in this story, Jones had even appeared with the Broadway cast of Oliver! on The Ed Sullivan Show on February 9, 1964—the same episode on which the Beatles made their first appearance. Jones later remembered watching the audience reaction to the Beatles and wanting that kind of response himself.

Less than two years later, he was auditioning for a television show about a rock band.

Jones had an obvious advantage because Screen Gems already knew him and had invested in his career, but he still went through the audition and screen-test process before getting the role.

Put the four together and the casting starts to make more sense.

Nesmith was a working songwriter and musician. Tork was an experienced folk musician and multi-instrumentalist. Dolenz was a former television star who also played rock music. Jones was a Tony-nominated musical-theater performer and recording artist.

This wasn't a random collection of four pretty actors handed instruments.

They could perform.

But that was only part of the job. They also had to be interesting to watch.

The casting process took four people with very different backgrounds and sharpened them into distinct television personalities. Nesmith became the dry, relatively grounded one. Tork became the sweet, naïve one. Dolenz supplied the manic comic energy. Jones was the obvious heartthrob.

That feels surprisingly familiar now. Manufactured pop groups and boy bands would later make individual member identities a central part of their appeal.

The Monkees weren't necessarily inventing that formula consciously. They were doing something more basic: casting a sitcom ensemble.

But the result looks a lot like an early version of what would eventually become a standard pop-group strategy.

While Rafelson and Schneider were figuring out who the Monkees were going to be, Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart were already helping figure out what the Monkees were going to sound like.

Boyce and Hart were established Screen Gems-Columbia songwriters. They had already written hits for other artists, including Jay & the Americans' “Come a Little Bit Closer,” and were brought into the Monkees project while it was still being developed.

They were involved before the four Monkees had even been cast.

They wrote the show's theme and supplied music for the pilot, including “I Wanna Be Free” and “Let's Dance On.” So two things were happening at essentially the same time.

Rafelson and Schneider were inventing the Monkees as people.

Boyce and Hart were inventing the Monkees as a sound.

Eventually those two creations had to meet.

“Last Train to Clarksville” is where they did.

The song wasn't sitting around for months as the carefully chosen centerpiece of a master plan. Boyce and Hart wrote it very late in the recording of the first Monkees album, when they thought they still needed more material. It was recorded on July 25, 1966.

Twenty-two days later, it was released as the Monkees' first single.

One of the most recognizable parts of the record also seems to have emerged almost casually.

Boyce and Hart wanted an instrumental signature that would identify the song immediately. Guitarist Louie Shelton came up with the bright guitar figure that opens the record, and Boyce and Hart immediately recognized that it worked. Hart later suggested that the riff was probably one of the major reasons “Last Train to Clarksville” was chosen as the first single.

They were right about the riff.

It's probably my favorite part of the song.

It is immediately catchy, extremely 1966 and very Beatles-adjacent.

That last part isn't entirely accidental.

Bobby Hart got the phrase “last train” after mishearing part of the Beatles' “Paperback Writer” on the radio. He eventually realized the Beatles weren't actually singing what he thought they were singing, but he liked the phrase he'd mistakenly heard.

Even the repeated “no, no, no” has been described as a playful answer to the Beatles' famous “yeah, yeah, yeah.”

And then there is the guitar sound itself.

I hear “Paperback Writer” there too—not particularly in the melody, but in the bright, biting guitar tone. “Clarksville” sits comfortably inside the musical vocabulary the Beatles had helped make fashionable.

If your goal was to avoid comparisons to the Beatles, none of this was especially helpful.

But in 1966, being compared to the Beatles wasn't necessarily the worst commercial problem to have.

The guitar also doesn't disappear after doing its work in the introduction. The record remains full of jangly guitar, keeping everything moving forward with a lightness that becomes increasingly strange once you pay attention to what the song is actually saying.

The narrator is leaving.

He desperately wants his girlfriend to take the last train to Clarksville so they can spend one more night together. He's alone in a railroad station. He says he's feeling low.

And he doesn't know if he's ever coming home.

That's a pretty bleak premise for a record that sounds this chipper.

There has long been an interpretation that the narrator is a soldier leaving for military service, possibly Vietnam. The real Clarksville, Tennessee, sits near Fort Campbell, which makes the connection look almost suspiciously perfect.

Except Boyce and Hart apparently didn't know that.

Hart's geographical inspiration was Clarkdale, Arizona, a place he remembered from his travels. They played around with the name until “Clarksville” sounded right. Only afterward did they learn that an actual Clarksville sat next to a major Army installation.

So the military implication and the location appear to have arrived by different routes.

I certainly never heard any of that when I knew this song growing up.

I just thought the guy was leaving.

When he said he didn't know if he was ever coming home, I interpreted it almost as melodrama: he's sad about leaving this woman, so naturally everything feels permanent.

Knowing the possible military context changes the stakes of the line.

It doesn't really change the way the record sounds.

I kept expecting it to.

It doesn't.

This song seems almost constitutionally incapable of being sad.

I even tried Cassandra Wilson's 1995 version, which stretches the song past five minutes and gives it a much slower, darker setting. I expected that arrangement to expose the torch song hiding inside “Last Train to Clarksville.”

And somehow, even that version is more buoyant than I expected.

There seems to be something in the construction of the song—the rhythm of the title, the momentum of the melody, the repeated “oh no no no,” the way the phrases keep pushing ahead—that resists becoming mournful.

That's a pretty useful trick.

I don't know that Boyce and Hart were sitting around thinking deeply about emotional counterpoint. The simpler explanation seems more likely: they were trying to write a catchy pop record.

They succeeded.

Then there is Micky Dolenz.

One of the most interesting stories surrounding the recording is that all four Monkees apparently tried the lead vocal before Boyce and Hart chose Dolenz. The other attempts were erased.

I desperately wish they hadn't been.

I'd love to hear the same Boyce and Hart backing track with Davy Jones, Michael Nesmith and Peter Tork each trying to solve the same song. Would Davy have leaned further into the romance? Would Nesmith have made it drier? Would Tork have sounded more vulnerable?

We'll never know.

What we do know is that Micky won.

And listening to the finished record, he makes sense.

His vocal is incredibly crisp. He enunciates everything. Even his pronunciation of “again”—essentially a-GAYN so that it rhymes neatly with “train”—sounds like an actor making sure the line lands.

That may be one place where Dolenz's acting background actually helped the record rather than somehow making him less authentic as a musician.

I noticed something else after listening to Boyce and Hart's own records.

Dolenz sounds surprisingly comfortable inside their vocal style.

I can't prove that this had anything to do with why they chose him, and I don't want to pretend it did. But if you listen to Boyce and Hart singing their own material and then return to Micky on “Clarksville,” his selection feels less surprising.

He sounds like the singer their record wants.

And it really was, to a remarkable extent, their record.

The backing track wasn't performed by the four Monkees functioning as a band. Boyce and Hart instead used musicians they regularly worked with, a loose studio group known as the Candy Store Prophets, supplemented by other Los Angeles session players.

Louie Shelton, Wayne Erwin and Gerry McGee played electric guitars; Boyce played acoustic guitar; Larry Taylor played bass; Billy Lewis played drums; Gene Estes and David Walters handled percussion.

Even the tambourine wasn't Davy Jones.

It was Gene Estes.

Dolenz supplied the lead vocal, with the Monkees added vocally around the record according to some session documentation. But the instrumental performance the public heard as the Monkees' first single came from Boyce and Hart's own circle of professional musicians.

For this record, that's simply what the Monkees were.

A television cast, a pair of songwriters and producers, a collection of session musicians, and one particularly well-suited lead singer were combined and presented under one name.

And it worked almost immediately.

“Last Train to Clarksville” was released August 16. It entered the Billboard Hot 100 on September 10 at #67.

Two days later, The Monkees premiered on NBC.

The following week, “Clarksville” jumped to #43.

It kept climbing.

On November 5, it reached #1.

Think about how quickly that happened.

In the summer of 1966, the Monkees essentially didn't exist to the American public. By November, they had the #1 record in the country.

The television series and the records created a powerful promotional loop. Viewers weren't merely hearing Monkees songs on the radio. Every week they were seeing the four personalities behind them, with the music built directly into the show.

It was a kind of MTV effect long before MTV—not because The Monkees invented the idea of visually promoting songs, but because the show repeatedly connected the records with the faces and personalities of the group. The fictional band and the real records reinforced each other until the distinction started to matter less.

That's the part I find most interesting after spending a day looking at how the Monkees were created.

They manufactured the opportunity. They didn't manufacture the outcome.

“Last Train to Clarksville” is where the experiment started working.

That doesn't mean I love the song.

I like it.

It's a good, catchy, extremely well-constructed pop record. The guitar riff immediately grabs me, and there is nothing about the arrangement that makes me want to turn it off. I've listened to it repeatedly today without getting tired of it.

But I have three Monkees songs in my favorites: “Daydream Believer,” “Pleasant Valley Sunday” and “Valleri.”

Those songs have something that jumps out at me—melodically, lyrically or musically—that gives each one a distinctive character. “Clarksville” never quite gets there for me.

Maybe part of it is the lyric. I don't particularly relate to the situation. But I think more of it is the performance.

Dolenz sings the song well, but I remain conscious that I'm hearing a performance. The narrator says he's feeling low, but the record never makes me feel low. He may be leaving forever, and the record sounds delighted to be here.

That doesn't make it bad.

It just keeps me at a distance.

If “Last Train to Clarksville” came on the radio, I wouldn't change the station.

I'm also probably not going to search for it.

The story of how it happened turned out to fascinate me more than the record itself.

Rating: 62/100