You were in a folk group in the early 1960s, The Modern Folk Quartet. What did you do in it?
I played the banjo and harmonica and sang--we were actually a vocal group. I mean, we all played instruments, but we did four-part harmonies, so the vocals were a big part of it. We had two albums on Warner Bros. and some singles on Dunhill. And then we did a single for Phil Spector called "This Could Be The Night," which was--still is--Rodney Bingenheimer's theme song. That's me singing. Apparently, it's one of Brian Wilson's favorite songs, mostly because it's a Spector thing. Actually, Harry Nilsson wrote it, but Phil Spector produced it and recorded us singing it.
What got you into photography?
In about 1964, we were doing college concerts across the country; we were in a camper driving all over. We stopped in a little used store (a junk store, actually) up in Michigan, and we all went in and bought these little funky cameras. They were just tiny cameras--mine was broken; it kind of chewed up the bottom of the film. For the rest of the tour we were snappin' photos of each other; whatever was happening, we kept photographing each other. We got back to L.A. and had a big slide show, and it was so much fun looking at those moments up on the wall really big. That was the magic of it to me--that you could collect these images and then look at them later blown up huge on your wall. So it all had to do with slides and slide shows, and from then on I just kept wanting to take more pictures to show in slide shows to my friends, and that's what got me into it full time.
Where did most of your work get used?
Initially it was the teen mags. My first picture that ever got used was a picture of the Buffalo Springfield in Teen Set magazine, and that was purely an accident. I just happened to be hanging out with those guys one day at a club, and I took a picture of 'em outside because there was a great mural on the wall of this club in Redondo Beach. It was a great big colorful mural, and I'd been photographing the mural just for slide shows, and I said "Hey, guys, why don't you stand in front of that?" And so I took pictures of them, and apparently they told the magazine when they did an interview that I had photos.
That was a revelation to me. The magazine called and said, "We wanna use that picture." They paid me 100 bucks, and I though "Oh Man! You mean you can get paid for doing this?" Up until that time I was spending all my musician money on film and processing, so that was the transition there--that's when I realized I could actually make money to pay for all these pictures I was taking. Soon after that I started getting work on record covers. I think most of my well-known work is really all the album covers I did.
How did you first start photographing The Monkees?
Tiger Beat magazine called me one day and said they wanted me to go down to this TV set and spend the day photographing. They hired me for the day, and I went down there and--my gosh--it was amazing to walk in and see so much stuff going on. And here were these young dudes that I had actually seen around town. I did know Mike Nesmith from the Troubadour days, and I had seen Davy and Micky around at a party here and there, you know, but I didn't really know them. But the minute that I stepped onto that set we became really, really good friends.
Most of the people taking photos in those days were guys who had come from, like, AP [The Associated Press]--they were press photographers. They were older guys, not at all of the same generation, and I think it kind of bugged The Monkees, because they'd get these old guys that would try to contrive things. You know, they'd say, "OK, you guys get together over here" and try to set 'em up a certain way. There was one guy that kept saying "OK, do something zany," and they hated that. So when I walked in there with a camera, I had long hair and love beads, and I was their generation--a hippie, like they were. A peace and love hippie freak, so that was really cool. They were a lot more relaxed around me. Then they started saying that if anyone wanted photos, they had to get me to take them, because they didn't want to suffer these older, square photographers that kept coming around bugging them.
When I started shooting The Monkees, I was used to shooting my friends. I was kind of a fly-on-the-wall photographer--I documented stuff. I never wanted to bother anybody and say, "OK you guys, stand over here" or "Look this way." I did it in a much more friendly, organic way and just shot what was happening. My job was to sit there on the set all day and try to get close-up head shots of each guy because that's what the magazines wanted--a full-page head shot. So I would sit there with a telephoto just staring at them and waiting for the exact moment when they would make some kind of a face or do something funny and then...bang! I'd take the picture. So when I look at the second season pictures of The Monkees in Tiger Beat and stuff, I think that the style of photography I was doing was different and kind of had a warm feeling--at least to me. I can see a difference in it.
Who was responsible for The Monkees' look?
Obviously, Bert Sneider and Bob Raefelson had the original idea. Then they had a costume guy named Gene Ashman who designed those Monkee shirts. One day I went on the set wearing this set of love beads that I had made for myself which were blue and white and Davy said, [English accent] "Hey man, I'd like to have a pair of those to wear." So that night I strung up some for him, and the next day the cameraman wanted some, and then Micky wanted some. The correspondents for the magazines started seeing these blue and white love beads all over the set and they started calling them "Monkee Love Beads." Pretty soon the magazines were selling little bags of beads "String-'Em-Yourself Monkee Love Beads." And those were beads that I had designed for myself. I had picked those colors very carefully, for my own feeling, you know, and it was kind of funny to see those become "Monkee Love Beads," because they were a personal thing to me. So that had a little bit to do with their look, at least beadwise.
When did you first realize this band was going to be huge?
I really started on the second season. I was in New York shooting The Lovin' Spoonful for the first year of The Monkees, and then I came back to L.A. in '67, and that's when I got the call from Tiger Beat. In, like, April '67, I went down to the set, and then I kept going down there every week until the summer tour, and then I went on the summer tour and took photos. And then when they came back, they filmed all the fall season, and I photographed all of that as well. So they were already pretty big. I would say the summer tour was when it really became evident, because they were playing and doing concerts all over the country, and there were all these screaming crowds of little teenyboppers. That's when it really became evident that they were huge all over the country.
What was the craziest thing you ever saw Monkees fans do?
I can't think of any real incident. When I was with them, I'm sorry to say, I don't have any colorful stories about that. They had the security guys, and they had a bunch of people on the road to sort of keep that under control. It was a well-oiled machine, really, that would get 'em in and out of these concerts and in and out of these hotels. But no matter where we stayed, there was always at least a hundred little teenyboppers wearing their pastel clothes with lots of oranges and yellows and light greens. It was a colorful time, clotheswise, and I just remember these crowds of little girls all dressed in these sort of bright colors with their autograph books and stuff. The concerts themselves were just screaming--little girls screaming so you could hardly hear the music.
Did you socialize with any of the guys much?
Yeah, I did. Especially Micky, 'cause we both lived up in Laurel Canyon. We became really good friends--I would go over to Micky's house a lot. He had a lot of parties, and he had the kind of house that he wanted friends to kind of hang out and stuff, so I became a good friend with Micky and Samantha. I took pictures when they had their daughter; I took a lot of pictures of her when she was little. So, yeah, I would say Micky really became my good friend.
Was there any musical collaboration between the MFQ and The Monkees? Did you play on any of their records?
They didn't play on our records, but one of the guys in my group, Chip Douglas, became their producer. After we broke up, we all went our separate ways--I became a photographer, Jerry Yester became a producer (he produced Tim Buckley, Tom Waits, and a bunch of things), and Chip joined The Turtles. And then Chip sang with Gene Clark, and he produced Linda Ronstadt, and finally The Monkees asked him to produce them. So he became their producer.
I went down to a lot of the Monkees sessions, not only as a photographer but also as a friend of theirs and the producer. I played banjo on one song called "D.W. Washburn," and I played something on "Zor And Zam"--I'm not sure what actually, but there's a credit on there! And I played clarinet on a song called "Shake 'Em Up," which is on the Rhino Missing Links, Volume 3. And then they had a little segment that they played when the show was syndicated that would go "We'll be back in a minute, back in a minute"--a little break, you know, before the commercials--and I sang on that. Me and Coco Dolenz (Micky's sister). So yeah, I would occasionally pick up a tambourine or sing a background part or play an instrument since my old pal was producing 'em.
How would you describe each performer?
Peter was a very interesting guy because of his philosophical attitude about life. He was very much into peace and love and yoga and kind of spiritual things--he was the philosopher of the group. And also one of the musicians. I mean, Mike and Peter were the two that were really musicians before the whole thing started. Mike's thing was that he was kind of the leader of the group. He was just a little bit more business-minded than the other guys--he later became an executive of his own company. And he was a songwriter and a really good musician. But with Mike it was more the leadership role that he took; I think he'd been more involved in sort of music business stuff--he'd been a songwriter--before all that. With Micky, it was his spontaneity and his comedy, you know--the fact that he's just so funny; a real clown. For Davy, the main thing was his showmanship. He was a professional more than the other guys--he'd been on stage, and so he really knew the moves. And he was a very big-hearted and generous guy. But so was Peter. Peter was very generous--he had a big house and a lot of friends that kind of hung out, and I think helped him spend his money...
How interested were Micky, Davy, Peter, and Mike in the machine behind the music?
Once again, it seemed like Mike was the only one that really was savvy about that. In fact, I was just talking to Gary Strobel about this, and he reminded me that Mike had two of his songs on every Monkees album. So he knew that that was the way to go, that the way to really do well was to have your songs on the albums. The other guys either didn't have songs or didn't know about that and didn't push it as much as Mike. Mike was very savvy about the machine behind them, behind the Monkees. And of course he was the one that kind of led the revolution when they wanted to produce themselves. He's the guy that insisted, and punched a hole in the wall to demonstrate how much he meant it! The other guys...I think they were more into the showbiz of it, the acting and singing and stuff and not so much the business angle. Although Micky came from a showbiz family, and I think he did very well investing his money. He and Mike had some business sense in terms of what to do with the money they were making.
Did you work with the band in their later incarnations?
Yes, I did, all the way through it. Initially Peter left the group, and I did take pictures when it was just three of them. Then when it was Dolenz, Jones, Boyce, and Hart; I believe I played banjo on that album. In the '80s when they got back together and toured, I went on part of that road tour. A whole bunch of Monkees conventions came up around that time, in the mid-'80s, and I would get hired by the girls who would put these conventions on to come and show slides and talk about my experiences with The Monkees. Generally, these conventions would coincide with The Monkees playing in that town, and so I would go to the concert as well and shoot. So I shot quite a bit of all those concerts in, like, I guess it was '86 when that all started.
In '87 they did those couple of videos for Rhino, "Heart And Soul" and "Every Step Of The Way," and I was hired to shoot stills for that. When they did Pool It!, I did the album cover, and then when they did Justus, whenever that was, I went down and took photos in the studio and did the publicity pictures. I didn't do the cover, but I did all the pictures inside the thing. And then there was also Mike Nesmith's Television Parts, and he did that whole show, of which there were quite a few episodes. I was the still photographer for that, and I was there every single day photographing all of that. So, yeah, I've worked extensively with those guys, and kind of still do, you know. If anything comes up, I'm usually there takin' pictures of it.
As a premeditated teen phenomenon, The Monkees drew a lot of critical flack when they started. After all these years, how would you rate their place in music history?
Well they were a teen group that was put together and then had a life on their own, weren't they? But I was thinking: The Monkees spent so much time together, doing so many things, that they actually became a real group just as if they had spent all those hours in the garage, playin' together over a little tape recorder. It's just like they got together after school and played in the garage and stuff, only they were doing it on the soundstage and on the road. But they spent a great deal of time together getting to know each other, paying dues, and kind of gelling as a unit, you know. In the end they turned out to be a real group, even though somebody else had the idea to put them together. I think it's kind of like Pinocchio--they became a real live boy! [Laughs]
I think they're a totally viable group. I mean, the fact that they were on TV just put them in so many households. When my little son was three years old, around '88, he was standing in front of the TV set with his little plastic guitar around his neck, boppin' and playing music with The Monkees, and I thought "My God! To this little kid they're a brand-new group!" The fact that they have all these TV shows just makes 'em live forever, and little kids in future generations will discover The Monkees and love them just like they're a brand-new thing.
What's your favorite Monkee memory?
[Laughs] Boy, you know, there are so many that it's hard to say. All those times on the set. The summer tour of '67 was a great deal of fun--they had their own airplane. We went and kind of barnstormed around the country, staying in all these hotels where there were a lot of swimming pools that everybody was in and a lot of fun stuff happening there. At one point we were in Chicago, staying at a place called The Astor Towers, and Buffalo Springfield was staying at the same hotel. Everybody had a day off, and someone had the idea to go up to an Indian reservation that was having a big festival; everyone was into American Indians and stuff then. So The Monkees volunteered their plane, and some of the Monkees and some of the Buffalo Springfield took the Monkees' airplane and flew up to Wisconsin and went to this Indian pow-wow thing, and we all bought a bunch of beadwork and stuff. That was a pretty interesting time.
[You can see (and buy) some of Henry's handiwork at his Web site, http://www.henrysgallery.com]
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