Noël in 1979; Micky Dolenz in the late ’70s. (photos: YouTube, Getty Images)

The internet has many downsides, but if there was ever an example of its power being harnessed for good, it’s the recent unarchiving of “Dancing Is Dangerous” — a never-seen green-screen video by little-known Sparks protégé Noël, directed in 1979 by none other than the Monkees’ Micky Dolenz. It could, in fact, be argued that this is why the World Wide Web exists.

“It’s pretty weird, huh? A pretty weird video, if I’m being honest,” chuckles Dolenz, who up until very recently had forgotten he’d even shot the dystopian disco clip nearly half a century ago.

Scrappy dance-floor darling Noël’s Is There More To Life Than Dancing? — written and produced by Sparks’ Ron and Russell Mael, not long after they’d worked on their own disco record No. 1 in Heaven with Giorgio Moroder — recently received a 45th-anniversary reissue treatment on the Maels’ Lil Beethoven label, which sent the brothers on a quest to find the long-lost clip. According to a recent interview with the elusive and reclusive Noël for Synth History, the video for her debut single was shelved because Richard Branson — the head of Noël’s label at the time, Virgin Records — didn’t think it had enough “disco-dancing pizazz.” (Contradicting himself, Branson also allegedly believed that “disco was passé” and had already moved on to punk rock.)

But when watching Dolenz’s direction for “Dancing Is Dangerous” now, it’s obvious that the video was — like so many things Monkees-related — simply too weird and ahead of its time. Had it been released just two years later, when MTV debuted, it might have found an audience alongside other early, creative but low-budget videos by the Buggles, Devo, Missing Persons, and Oingo Boingo.

“In ‘79, not everybody was doing music videos yet. It was still kind of a new thing. And record companies were, frankly, a bit hesitant,” says Dolenz, who after the Monkees split in the early ‘70s became a television director in the U.K. and was looking to expand his career to commercials and videos. “There wasn’t really the distribution, the outlet, the platforms. There wasn’t really much going on at all with video, but some people were doing it.” And Dolenz, who points out that the Monkees’ “romps” in their eponymous ‘60s sitcom were really some the first music videos ever made, was eager to give it a go.

“I did like the song; it was kind of cool,” Dolenz, an early adopter of the Moog synthesizer, recalls of the new-wavey Noël tape he received from Virgin. “I came up with a visualization, and I guess they liked my idea, because they went with me.” While he admits that he doesn’t “remember a whole lot about the shoot” (please note, Dolenz’s recent autobiographical photo book is titled I’m Told I Had A Good Time), Noël’s memories of Dolenz’s high-camp high concept, as relayed to Synth History, are a lot sharper, involving an “entire storyboard,” a coffin, and an overactive fog machine.

Unfortunately, as Noël recalls, she had the flu and a 103 fever the day of the shoot in Los Angeles and she begged to reschedule, but because Dolenz was catching a flight out of town that evening, that wasn’t possible. She says she attempted to follow the “so excited” Dolenz’s direction, which entailed emerging from a casket “looking all mysterious and witchy,” but when the set’s copious dry-ice fog had the ailing, feverish singer wheezing and gasping for air by the third take, Dolenz disappointedly told her, “’Well, fine, then, we’ll just shoot some close-ups of your eyes and lips and a few standing and kneeling shots and call it a day.’ … He was very sweet and understanding, but I sensed how disappointed he was not to be able to film his vision for the video.”

Dolenz’s recollections of his vision for “Dancing Is Dangerous” are more technical, as he was eager to test out some camera techniques he’d learned from famous television directors Art Fisher and Jack Good on the set of the Monkees’ absolutely bonkers NBC special 33 1/3 Revolutions Per Monkee. (“That’s a weird one too,” Dolenz laughs, promising to talk more about that also-ahead-of-its-time spectacle later.)

“In those days, very few people were doing chroma key, which is what called it back then. Now it’s called green screen, but back then actually it was blue, not green! Not many people were even attempting it, but I had seen it in action,” explains Dolenz. Fisher was actually the first TV director to use chroma key technology, and British director “Jack Good was very experimental, like I tended to be — maybe sometimes a little too experimental, I don’t mind telling you! But you win some, you lose some. The English were a bit ahead of us terms of experimental and edgy stuff, because they didn’t have the same kind of economic restraints that we [American directors] do. But anyway, I knew this was possible because [Fisher and Good] had done it, and my people, my crew, they got it. They knew what it was. But in 1979, it was still experimental to some degree. We were all kind of taking a shot here, because a lot of the people in the crew had never done it before.”

Dolenz says he and his “Dancing Is Dangerous” cinematographer also started “fooling around with a video technique that at the time was called frame-dragging, or lagging. It had to do with the way that you tuned the video cameras, the way that you tuned them for the intensity of the light coming in. This was on video, not film, and video was still pretty new in ‘79 to some degree, so it was all a bit of a crapshoot. We shot the video and the lag, and a lot of people looked at it and said, ‘Uh oh, the camera fucked up!’ And I said, ‘No, no, that was the point! That’s what it’s supposed to look like!” (Four years later, Dolenz would utilize this technique in a sci-fi series for Britain’s ITV called Luna, which starred a then-largely unknown teen actress named Patsy Kensit.)

Meanwhile, the flu-stricken Noël — a former fashion model whose punky persona first captured the Maels’ attention when they witnessed her perform with the Mick Smiley Band at the Troubadour — soldiered through the shoot and made it work, looking like a proto-Lady Gaga with her clown makeup, peroxided hairography, and rotation of fabulously slinky disco outfits. The result was a fever dream, literally and figuratively. While Noël styled herself, she tells Synth History that Dolenz “suggest[ed] which way he wanted me to look with my eyes, how to purse my lips or walk, kneel, and throw my hair back, since he had to scrap his concept for the video.” (Ironically, according to Noël, Dolenz ended up missing his flight that night anyway.)

The whole project seemed doomed from the start, but after interest in the mysterious Noël (whose true identity has never been revealed) grew after the release of Edgar Wright’s The Sparks Brothers documentary, the Maels reached out to her in October 2023. They retrieved the original Umatic master she still had in her possession, and had the “Dancing Is Dangerous” video digitized with the help of Whammy Analog in Silver Lake and the UCLA Film & TV Archive. And the rest was Synth History.

But, as mentioned earlier, the Monkees were always at the audiovisual forefront, and historically, “Dancing Is Dangerous” can be traced back to their above-mentioned television special, 33 1/3 Revolutions Per Monkee. This was another seemingly doomed project — it aired opposite the 1969 Oscars ceremony, because Dolenz recalls NBC “didn’t have much confidence in it,” and the network’s plans to follow up with two additional Monkees specials were eventually cancelled. But decades later, 33 1/3 has found its own cult audience via the internet.

“NBC came to us and said, ‘We want to do a special,’ and we were all for it because at the end of the second [The Monkees] season, frankly, everybody was getting a bit bored. It was all just very samey. I think the general consensus was we didn’t want to do another season of just exactly the same thing. We wanted to do something different from just a long episode of The Monkees.” The band commenced work on 33 1/3 Revolutions Per Monkee just three days after the premiere of their equally bizarre cult film Head, and the two tandem productions effectively if temporarily detonated the careers of the reluctant TV teen idols (while simultaneously ushering in the New Hollywood era). “I personally liked the idea of deconstruction. … It was, absolutely, the deconstruction of the Monkees,” Dolenz explains.

33 1/3 Revolutions Per Monkee was also an early experiment in using video, not film. “It was all videotaped, which was kind of — well, not kind of — it was totally new at the time,” says Dolenz. “The idea originally was to do it at NBC, which was set up for live television and all the big variety shows. But a week before we were supposed to tape at NBC in Burbank, all the TV musicians went on strike. I remember there being talk about just scrapping it, but then the producers and NBC and whoever said, ‘Let’s do it remote — a remote video broadcast!’ Now, that alone had hardly ever been done, except maybe on the 6 o’clock news. A staged thing with music and blue screen and all the bells and whistles and live performances had certainly never done on videotape.”

Relocating the taping at the last minute to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, where productions were typically done on the fly through remote video trucks (“massive 13-wheelers,” as Dolenz recalls), 33 1/3 Revolutions Per Monkee took advantage of the unexpected situation by using various video techniques and effects that were mostly new and unproven at the time. The result was a psychedelic TV trip through something called the Electro-Thought Machine, with a Wizard (played by Brian Auger) and his gorilla sidekick plotting to take over the planet by brainwashing the Monkees. Or… something like that.

“I don’t even remember the original script or anything, except that I know we were all scrambling to get this thing done and having to make up shots and having to make up the dialogue and having to constantly try to salvage what I think could have been a really spectacular, groundbreaking special,” says Dolenz. “It still turned out pretty interesting, but you have to watch it and understand it in the context of the time, and that it was experimental videotape, certainly cutting-edge. And, we got through it.”

33 1/3 Revolutions Per Monkee was quite a romp, so to speak. Among the surreal highlights were a classic ‘50s medley starring Jerry Lee Lewis, Fats Domino, and Little Richard seated at stacked-to-the-rafters grand pianos, and an epic finale featuring Dolenz and his bandmates Davy Jones, Michael Nesmith, and Peter Tork, along with Buddy Miles, engaging in an almost Sonic Youth-like noise-rock jam in a cluttered Hollywood prop-house. And all this “deconstruction” climaxed with footage of an A-bomb blast of Southern California.

That warehouse jam was the Monkees’ final performance as a quartet (Tork quit the band immediately after the 33 1/3  taping)… until 1986, of course, when a Monkees marathon took over MTV and sparked a spectacularly successful reunion. And so, the world had finally, fully caught up with the Monkees. Dolenz even recalls that MTV darling Cyndi Lauper “came up to me once out of the blue at some event and said, ‘I’ve just got to tell you, I was a big Monkees fan, because you guys made it OK to be different.’”

Now Dolenz is the only surviving Monkee, sadly, but he shows no signs of slowing down, embarking on his Songs and Stories concert tour this summer. Is it possible that the Noël might join him onstage at one of the gigs for some sort of surprise noise-rock/disco jam? That’s highly unlikely… but if that does happen, someone had better videotape it.

Fifty years ago, Columbia Pictures and Raybert Productions released a fascinating ’60s celluloid artifact promised to be “the most extraordinary adventure western comedy love story mystery drama musical documentary satire ever filmed.” That film, Head, effectively (if temporarily) detonated the careers of reluctant TV teen idols the Monkees — but it simultaneously ushered in the New Hollywood and kickstarted the career of a certain future Oscar-winning actor.

“That was a very strange experience,” chuckled the Monkees’ Micky Dolenz, visiting Yahoo Entertainment in 2016 to discuss the Monkees’ comeback album Good Times!, when asked about the notorious cult classic. “[The Monkees series co-creator and Raybert co-founder] Bob Rafelson brought this guy in one day. He was a B-movie actor, and he said, ‘It’s a friend of mine, and he wants to do some writing. And his name is Jack Nicholson. … Jack’s going to hang around the set and go to your homes and hang out with you at home and you’re going to just see what kind of movie we put together.’”

The strategy came at a point in the made-for-TV band’s career where they were feeling stifled onscreen (NBC forbade them from making overt political statements or even saying the word “hell” on the “Devil and Peter Tork” episode). The Monkees had also seized creative control of their musical output with their third album, Headquarters, the year before. So, while Dolenz and his bandmates Michael Nesmith, Peter Tork, and Davy Jones (credited as “David Jones” in Head) didn’t quite know what to expect when they joined Rafelson and Nicholson for a weekend brainstorming trip to Ojai, Calif., they did all agree that Head would not be a typical pop-music matinee.

“When the idea of doing a movie had come up, the obvious way to go, which would have been much more commercial, would have been to do a 90-minute version of a Monkees episode,” Dolenz told Yahoo. “And it was discussed. And I remember agreeing with [Rafelson, who argued], ‘I don’t know if we should do that. We’ve been under the thumb of the censors and of the network. This gives us an opportunity to go out and push the envelope a little bit, in humor and in the sensibility of the whole thing.’”

Poster courtesy of GAB Archive/Redferns

Nicholson used tape recordings of the Ojai sessions to write the screenplay for Head, reportedly — and not surprisingly, given the bizarre result — while dropping acid. (Nicholson had written the script for Roger Corman’s countercultural LSD film The Trip the year before.) Suffice to say, the super-meta movie — filmed around Southern California one month after the cancelation of the band’s Emmy-winning TV series, directed by Rafelson and produced by Rafelson and his Raybert partner and  Monkees co-creator Bert Schneider — definitely would not have made it past those NBC censors.

Head plays out like a lysergic dream sequence — beginning with Dolenz leaping off Long Beach’s Gerald Desmond Bridge, then frolicking with a school of hippie mermaids in the kaleidoscopic waters below to Carole King and Gerry Goffin’s woozy, psychedelic epic “Porpoise Song” (which is now widely regarded as one of the all-time greatest Monkees tunes).

Over the course of the ensuing “circular” 86 minutes (the film was deliberately crafted to have neither a beginning nor an end, so that viewers could drop in at any point in the disjointed storyline), the following events transpire: The Monkees find themselves trapped in a giant vacuum cleaner (with a baseball-bat-sized blunt). The band members engage in a kissing contest with a nubile brunette (spoiler alert, it ends in a four-way tie). They’re terrorized by both a King Kong-sized Victor Mature and an enormous bloodshot eyeball that dwells inside a public restroom’s medicine cabinet. And so on.

“We hope you like our story/Although there isn’t one,” declares the film’s Nicholson-penned song “Ditty Diego — War Chant,”  a vicious parody of the Monkees TV show’s original cheery theme song. But amid all the drug-addled chaos and kookiness and non sequiturs and laughably cheap green-screen, Head does offer many compelling, fourth-wall-shattering moments, bravely skewering the Monkees’ goody-goody image and the entertainment industry in general.

In “Ditty Diego,” the band members address their prefab personas and lack of credibility, intoning, “Hey, hey, we are the Monkees/You know we love to please/A manufactured image/With no philosophies.” They address crass consumerism via Dolenz’s losing battle with an exploding Coca-Cola vending machine and the band members’ portrayal of jumbo dandruff flakes in an obnoxious shampoo commercial. Tork gets into an onscreen argument with Head’s directors over one violent movie scene’s direction, arguing that it will alienate the band’s teenybopper fanbase. Jones, the main heartthrob of the group, dumps fellow teen idol Annette Funicello (who plays his small-town girlfriend), then competes in a boxing match with a man twice his size and allows his pinup-pretty face to be pounded into pulp.

And, after Jones does a delightful, old-fashioned soft-shoe routine with choreographer Toni Basil to Harry Nilsson’s “Daddy’s Song,” he encounters Frank Zappa, who, in the movie’s most amusingly deadpan one-liner, tells him, “That song was pretty white.”

Far less amusing, but just as effective, is the juxtaposition of footage of screaming female Monkees fans alongside images of the Vietnam War (including the execution of Viet Cong operative Nguyen Van Lem), and a scene in which the Monkees, after performing Nesmith’s “Circle Sky” at a cult-like concert, have their mannequin doppelgängers torn apart by those same hysterical fans.

“Who knows what it’s really about. But I can give you a couple of hints,” Dolenz told Yahoo Entertainment. “What I think it was about, on sort of a philosophical level, is breaking out of the Hollywood mold. … There’s one scene in the movie which I think speaks to that, and it’s the kind of spine of it. It’s the one where Mike and I are cavalry guys, and we’re being attacked by Indians in covered wagons. Teri Garr — in her first onscreen [speaking] appearance — is wounded, sitting there, dying. And I’m there with my rifle and Mike’s looking out for the Indians, and all of a sudden the special effects guy … hits me with three arrows. And I look down and I go, ‘Oh, Bob’ — and I’m talking to Bob Rafelson, the director — ‘That’s it! I’m finished! I’m through with all this fake Hollywood!’ And I break off the arrows, throw down the gun, turn around, and walk right through the back of the set, through the big painting, the scrim. Tear a big hole in it and walk out.”

Most people didn’t understand or appreciate what Head was trying to accomplish, and negative audience response at an August 1968 test screening led the film’s creators to trim 24 minutes from its original length. But when the finished Head officially premiered three months later, on Nov. 6 in New York, it still flopped, eventually recouping only $16,111 of its $750,000 production budget. (Perhaps it was a bad omen that Nicholson and Rafelson were arrested at the premiere, after Nicholson tried to affix a Head sticker on a police officer’s helmet.)

“It did get some critical acclaim, but it didn’t sell any tickets, because nobody got it,” Dolenz shrugged. “The kids didn’t get it at all; they were expecting a Monkees episode. I think it was even rated where little young kids, our youngest fans, couldn’t even get in, because there was some violent things; I can’t remember what the rating was.” [Editor’s note: Some posters advertised Head as being “not suitable for children,” although in the U.S. it was surprisingly rated G.]

Despite Head’s initial failure, and the fact that the Monkees split up shortly thereafter, the movie changed Hollywood in unexpected and lasting ways. “There was no independent film industry [back then]. … The studios controlled everything,” Dolenz explained. But just one year later, in 1969, provocateurs Rafelson and Schneider released the groundbreaking Easy Rider, directed by Dennis Hopper (who had a cameo in Head) and starring Nicholson and The Trip’s Peter Fonda. A year after that, Rafelson and Schneider formed BBS Productions with Stephen Blauner and released the Rafelson-directed Five Easy Pieces, which was nominated for four Oscars (including Nicholson for Best Actor). And it all started with the Monkees.

Football player Ray Nitschke, making his acting debut, with Jack Nicholson on the set of ‘Head.’ (Photo: AP/Harold Filan)

“I would argue Head had incredible influence on Hollywood over the next several decades,” musician Sean Randall wrote in Huffington Post in 2017. “The awkward, disjointed, deep thought randomness and repeated themes reminded me strongly of David Lynch and Mulholland Drive. … The film also [has] a slightly less comedic And Now for Something Completely Different vibe, one of Monty Python’s cinematic efforts after Head came out. … Further, I’d wager that this film, while not being successful itself, opened the door for other musician cinematic vanity projects, like Pink Floyd’s The Wall. Or the lesser-known Metallica 3D concert film Through the Never, which definitely looked to Head for inspiration.”

“Now [Head has] become a real cult thing,” Dolenz proudly said of the film, which was released on Blue-ray in 2010 and whose soundtrack, featuring additional musical contributions from Ry Cooder, Neil Young, Stephen Stills, Leon Russell, and Jack Nitzsche, is now a coveted collector’s item. “I know Quentin Tarantino, when I first met him, he said it’s like top five for him. Edgar Wright and a lot of people have said that. It’s like top five movies for those kind of filmmakers.”

This article originally ran on Yahoo Music.