Isolated tracks for ‘Zilch,’ the Monkees’ awesome vocal experiment — dangerousminds.net

I have to confess, I’m a little bit fascinated with the Monkees’ song—if you can call it that—”Zilch.” Buried on side B of their 1967 masterpiece Headquarters, “Zilch” has recently struck me as one of the keys to unscrambling the Monkees’ impressive legacy. Even allowing for the experimental 1960s in which everyone was trying everything, even allowing for the ever-present Beatles influence that constituted part of the Monkees’ damnable raison d’être, even allowing for the possibly amateurish execution, “Zilch” seems to fly in the face of the charge the Monkees were always trying to live down, that they were just a bunch of TV actors looking to cash in on a craze, a charge that was all the more troubling because there was a fair bit of truth to it. The Monkees’ bugaboo always was and always would be “authenticity,” more so than for any other band, and the Monkees’ quest to seize control over the means of production, which ultimately happened but didn’t necessarily lead to long-lasting artistic fruition, should warm the heart of any right-thinking Marxist.

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