“Daydream Believer,” The Monkees

The sense memory of this song is powerful. I was 7 years old, living in Houston, TX & I was on the swim team. I can smell the chlorine, feel the freezing cold water (practice was always at 6 a.m.) & taste the Jell-O powder that we all ate straight out of the box on days when we had a meet.

I wish I could say I was a maverick & that my favorite Monkee was Michael, or Mickey, or Peter. But nope, it was Davy, always Davy. A few years later, I met Davy & Mickey when they were touring w/ Boyce & Hart as The New Monkees. It was 1976 at the Sanno Hotel (a hotel for American military personnel & their families) in Tokyo, Japan & they were a long way from the enormous popularity they’d enjoyed in the sixties. Davy looked sad, or at least I thought so when we met them backstage afterward. Tiny, too; I was already a gawky teenager. I have their autographs & the ticket stub from that show around here somewhere. In 1992 I was working for a publicist in L.A. & when Peter Tork was thinking about jump-starting his career, he came to our offices for a meeting. He didn’t hire us, but I got to cross another Monkee off the list.

Michael, it’s just you now.