This July 6, 1967 file picture reveals the musical group, The Monkees, from left, Peter Tork, Mike Nesmith, David Jones, and Micky Dolenz at a information convention on the Warwick Hotel in New York.
Ray Howard/AP
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Ray Howard/AP
NEW YORK — Bobby Hart, a key a part of the Monkees’ multimedia empire who teamed with Tommy Boyce on such hits as “Last Train to Clarksville” and “I’m Not Your Steppin’ Stone,” has died. He was 86.
Hart died at his house in Los Angeles, in response to his pal and co-author, Glenn Ballantyne. He had been sick since breaking his hip final yr.
Boyce and Hart have been a prolific and profitable staff within the mid-Sixties, particularly for the Monkees, the made-for-television group promoted by Don Kirshner. They wrote the Monkees’ theme music, with its opening shot, “Here we come, walkin’ down the road,” and enduring chant, “Hey, hey, we are the Monkees,” and their first No. 1 hit, “Last Train to Clarksville.” The Monkees’ eponymous, million-selling debut album included six songs from Boyce and Hart, who additionally served as producers and used their very own backing musicians, the Candy Store Prophets, as session gamers.
“I at all times credit score them not solely with writing lots of our greatest hits, however, as producers, being instrumental in creating the distinctive Monkee sound everyone knows and love,” the Monkees’ Micky Dolenz wrote in a foreword to Hart’s memoir, Psychedelic Bubblegum, printed in 2015.
As Boyce and Hart grew in fame and the Monkees took extra management of their work, they pursued their very own careers, releasing the albums Test Patterns and I Wonder What She’s Doing Tonite and showing on such sitcoms as I Dream of Jeannie and Bewitched. They additionally have been politically energetic. They campaigned for Robert F. Kennedy when he ran for president in 1968 and wrote the brassy “L.U.V. (Let Us Vote)” in help of the twenty sixth Amendment, which in 1971 lowered the voting age from 21 to 18. Their different songs included the Monkees’ melancholy “I Wanna Be Free” and the theme to the daytime cleaning soap opera Days of Our Lives.
They have been coated by everybody from Dean Martin (“Little Lovely One”) to the Sex Pistols (“I’m Not Your Steppin’ Stone”).
In the Nineteen Seventies and ’80s, Hart managed a number of hits with different collaborators and even contributed materials to a different TV act, the Partridge Family. He labored with Austin Roberts on “Over You,” an Oscar-nominated ballad carried out by Betty Buckley in “Tender Mercies,” and with Dick Eastman on “My Secret (Didja Gitit Yet?)” for New Edition. He and Bryce toured with Dolenz and fellow Monkee Davy Jones within the ’70s, put out the album Dolenz, Jones, Boyce & Hart and obtained renewed consideration when the Monkees loved a comeback within the Nineteen Eighties.
Boyce, who died in 1994, and Hart have been the themes of a 2014 documentary The Guys Who Wrote ‘Em. Hart was married twice, most just lately to singer Mary Ann Hart, and had two kids from his first marriage.
He was a minister’s son, born Robert Luke Harshman in Phoenix, Arizona. In his memoir, he remembered himself as a shy child with a “robust want to differentiate” himself, as he wrote in Psychedelic Bubblegum. Music was the reply. By highschool, he had realized piano, guitar and the Hammond B-3 organ. He additionally began his personal beginner radio station, ultimately including a console, turntables and microphones. After graduating from highschool and serving within the Army reserves, he settled in Los Angeles within the late Nineteen Fifties, hoping first to develop into a disc jockey, however quickly working as a songwriter and session musician. His identify shortened to Bobby Hart, he toured as a member of Teddy Randazzo and the Dazzlers, and with Randazzo and Bobby Weinstein wrote “Hurt So Bad,” a success for Little Anthony and the Imperials later coated by Linda Ronstadt.
He additionally befriended Boyce, a singer and songwriter from Charlottesville, Virginia, with a “very uncommon character, spontaneous and extroverted, but very cool on the identical time.” Boyce and Hart helped write the highest 10 hit “Come a Little Bit Closer” for Jay and the Americans and have been a powerful sufficient mixture that Kirshner recruited them for his Screen Gems songwriting manufacturing facility: They have been assigned to the Monkees. Asked to provide you with songs for a quartet brazenly modeled on the Beatles, they devised a twangy guitar line just like the one for “Paperback Writer” and wrote “Last Train to Clarksville,” a chart topper in 1966. When Kirshner urged a music with a woman’s identify within the title, they turned out “Valleri” and reached the highest 5.
For the present’s theme music, a stroll exterior was sufficient.
“Boyce started strumming his guitar and I joined in by snapping my fingers & making noises with my mouth that simulated an open & closed hi-hat cymbal,” Hart wrote in his memoir. “We had created the proper recipe for inspiration and began singing about simply what we have been doing: ‘Walkin’ down the road.'”
