Guides to Music

Here they come...In Monkee Music, Andrew Hickey, author of The Beach Boys On CD, and California Dreaming: The LA Pop Music Scene and the 60s, examines the music of Micky, Mike, Davy and Peter from their early bubblegum pop hits with "Last Train To Clarksville" and "I'm A Believer", through their reinvention as a self-contained band with songs like "Pleasant Valley Sunday" and "Daydream Believer", and their psychedelic masterpiece Head, and on all the way into their 2016 album Good Times! This book contains analysis of every track the Monkees ever released, and is a must for any Monkee Maniacs. The second edition is significantly revised and updated and nearly twice the length of the classic 2011 version, and now includes analyses of the Dolenz, Jones, Boyce, and Hart material, Davy's first solo album from 1965, Good Times! and more.

In 1960, a group of young men in California recorded an instrumental single, Moon Dawg, and started what would become known as surf music. Within a few years, those young men would have been important parts of records by the Beach Boys, Frank Zappa, Canned Heat, the Monkees, and many more. In this book, Andrew Hickey takes a look at the LA pop music scene of the 60s through the lens of its greatest records, loking at the interconnections between seemingly disparate bands and performers. Discover the song Davy Jones of the Monkees wrote about Captain Beefheart, or the member of the Mothers of Invention who named Buffalo Springfield and wrote songs for the Beach Boys. California Dreaming: The LA Pop Music Scene and the 60s takes you from the Gamblers' surf instrumentals, through sunshine pop by the Mamas and Papas and the Beach Boys, to Little Feat and Randy Newman, and shows how all these different artists influenced and inspired each other, in ways that might surprise you...