The Monkees Back In The Top 20 With New Live Set

The Monkees are back on the charts with their new concert collection, The Monkees – The Mike & Micky Show Live. The album, which features surviving members Mike Nesmith and Mickey Dolenz, combines the band's greatest hits with a deep dive of classic album favorites and a healthy dose of Nesmith's beloved catalogue highlights.

The Monkees – The Mike & Micky Show Live has hit Number 13 on Billboard Top Albums chart, 178 on the Billboard 200, Number Two on the Internet Albums list, Number Three on Current Pop Albums, and Number 45 on the the Current Digital Albums chart.

Micky Dolenz explained to us that although Mike Nesmith has been physically absent from the band for most of the last 30-plus years, his songs never have been: “I must say, I love the novelty, in a way, of playing with Mike — but then again, I've always done a lot — and we always have — a ton of Nesmith material.”

The new live album leans heavily on Mike Nesmith-written songs. We asked Nesmith to give us the back-story on writing one of his earliest and still most beloved Monkees songs: “'Papa Gene's Blues' I wrote in my apartment that (my wife Phyllis) and I were living in the San Fernando Valley. And typically what I would do in those days — which is pre-Monkees — was write a song a day. Take the guitar, get the chords worked out, do a quick turn around the chord, then sing the lyrics that I understand and then the nonsense lyrics, I go 'nom-nom-nom-nom-no' and then start crafting from there.”