Rant #3,194: Pleasant Valley Sunday

August 21!

Yes, as my wife and I were talking about yesterday, the summer has gone pretty quickly, at least for us, and before you know it, Labor Day will be here and the summer will, for all intents and purposes, be over.

One of the reasons that the summer has gone by so quickly for us, I do believe, is that we had the backyard pool at our disposal this summer—

As opposed to last summer, when all we had was a giant bathtub of pea soup.

While our water did not stay crystal clear for the entire season, it was good enough the last few times, and we were able to swim in it yesterday, passing a few summer hours away, assisted by the music that we like to listen to, from the mid-1960s through the mid-1970s.

When we are in the pool, we used to listen to a station on the AM dial from Southern New Jersey that for some reason we were able to get in loud and clear, but for whatever reason, we can’t get in to even a listenable level anymore.

So we re-discovered a long-time Long Island station, WHLI, which has changed its musical format seemingly as many times as one changes their underwear.

For years and years, it was a only station in the area that carried Big Band and 1940s music. It was the only place to hear anybody from Glen Miller to Frank Sinatra to Judy Garland and everyone in between.

And then, probably about at least a decade ago, it completely shifted gears, and carried 1950s music, everyone from Elvis and Dion to Bill Haley and Fats Domino.

And now that it can also be listened to on the FM band and streamed, it recently changed its format to as mid-1960s to mid-1970s playlist, which means you now get music from everyone who was popular during that era, from the Beatles and the Dave Clark Five to Petula Clark and Elton John and the Eagles and … .

We were in the water for about two and a half hours yesterday using the music from that era as our own personal swimming soundtrack, and at about 2:30 p.m., we decided that we had had enough, and started to get out of the water for probably the final time this summer.

And as we were getting out of the water, the last song we heard on WHLI was “Pleasant Valley Sunday” by the Monkees—a song written by Carole King—a song that, at least by its title, was an appropriate “adieu” to our summer backyard pool swimming season.

But on this Sunday, the “barrel full of Monkees” continued once we dried off and took our showers and redressed ourselves, as there was a “The Monkees” TV show marathon on Catchy TV.

Once known as Decades, the network has fallen flat, in my opinion, to rerunning the usual suspects of sitcoms, and I rarely watch the channel now, because the news aspect of the station has been entirely removed, with the 1 millionth reruns of “Cheers” and “Taxi” and “I Love Lucy” in its place.

But this particular weekend, I literally stumbled upon the station running “The Monkees” marathon—I had no idea that it was programmed until I turned the channels to find something to watch—but again, the timing of this marathon was newsworthy, but Catchy simply expects you to know this and they won’t tell you about it.

The reason “The Monkees” was binged this past weekend had to do with the fact that 57 years ago, in /august 1966, the world was getting acquainted with Peter, Micky, Mike and Davy through the pre-release-from-the-TV-show of the act’s first single, “Last Train to Clarksville,” which debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 this very month and rose up the charts to No. 1 without a TV series to promote the song for much of its ascent.

The show premiered on September 12, 1966, so having the binge this week pretty much replicated when “The Monkees” came into our consciousness, at least as a musical act.

Anyway, I watched several episodes—shows I have seen hundreds of times since they were new—and you really have to put the show into context of 1966, and not 2023, to really understand and appreciate how completely revolutionary the show was for that time.

Right in the middle of the Vietnam War, here was a show where the “younger generation” completely ruled the roost.

There were no parental authority figures on the show, and “The Monkees” focused entirely on the 20-something boys, with their long hair and “mod” clothes and “groovy” way of communicating.

So notwithstanding the millions upon millions of records that they sold, and keep on selling to this day, the show—which might look trite by 2023 standards—was groundbreaking and revolutionary in a period where the standard sitcom fare was “My Three Sons” and “The Lucy Show,” great sitcoms but shows that followed the standard sitcom format.

I was particularly interested in the two documentary-style shows that were part of the series, “The Monkees In Concert” and “The Monkees in Paris,” episodes which I don’t think I foully understood as a kid but which I have a new appreciation for as an adult.

These two episodes truly were outside the box of what the usual sitcom format was, and still is, and showed the Monkees as what they actually had become, pop phenomenons that were known both nationally and internationally through the show and their music.

On the show, they were simply a struggling garage rock band, but in these two episodes, that theme was pretty much left in the dust, and the foursome were shown to be among the most popular people on the planet at the time, constantly pursued by the same younger generation that they were expressly created for.

Life imitates the Frankenstein Monster if you will, but those two episodes are among the best of the series, so different from the norm—even the normal Monkees episode—that they stand out from that bunch of any sitcom shows before or since.

So it is now Monday, back to the same old, same old, but I have to say that this past weekend was quite nice, with a real “Pleasant Valley Sunday” to cap it all off.