Hier werden erzielte, höhere Kaufpreise für Schallplatten (die meisten aus eBay) gelistet. Ach ja: nach einigen Malen wird man gebeten sich anzumelden- kann man aber umgehen, indem man die Seite einfach erneut aufruft. Viel Spaß!

http://www.popsike.com/index.html

Einfach mal schauen, toller Blog, der sich allen Veröffentlichungen von Colgems Records (natürlich auch die Monkees) widmet. U.a. geht es um Singles-Veröffentlichungen, Sampler, Mono-Versionen:

http://colgems.blogspot.com/

By Peter Tork:

Late last year, after a few months of my not swallowing in a normal way, a friend mentioned that my voice sounded funny, kind of squawky and nasal. I’d meant to get it checked out, but her observation pushed me to doing something about it sooner rather than later. I went to an ear, nose and throat doctor, who sprayed my nostrils with anesthetic and sent a length of fiber-optic cable up my nose and down my throat. He came back with bad news. There was a growth on the lower region of my tongue. He suspected squamous cell carcinoma.

I don’t count myself as being afraid to die, but the news hit me like a fist to the chest.

A subsequent biopsy and pathology exam showed that I had adenoid cystic carcinoma.

Adenoid cystic carcinoma, ACC to the cognoscenti, is a relatively rare cancer, usually occurring in the salivary glands. Mine occurred on the lower part of my tongue; that’s even rarer. I wound up in New York at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, where one Dr. Jatin Shah told me I should get surgery as soon as possible. I thought about it a second and said I wasn’t doing anything that afternoon….

Dr. Shah laughed and amended: as soon as practicable. That turned out to be the following Wednesday, which was March 4. I woke up from that surgery with another tube up my nose and down my throat — this one for feeding me. About three months later I began a follow-up course of radiation at a high-tech hospital in Boston, where they rev up a cyclotron and pipe protons down the hall and through a giant metal tube into my throat. (Remember electrons, neutrons and protons? Those.)

My friend Therra Gwyn, who is also my editor and publicist, suggested that if the news of my cancer seeped out without my having a say in it, it would most likely get so distorted that there’d be 30 stories out there, none of them with more than a tangential relationship with the actuality. Better she said — and I agreed — to tell the story myself, as best I could. Besides making sure the record was straight, telling the story out loud on a Web site and Facebook page might help the world (or that part of it that was interested) relax some fears about cancer in general and might boost attention to adenoid cystic carcinoma in particular. Also, it might just help me keep a right-sized attitude about life and myself. Otherwise, you know, it’d be like: I’m a celebrity, get me offa this planet! Can’t have that.

As of this writing, I’m just beginning to feel the effects of the second course of radiation, a bit of soreness on the tongue, some unpleasant effects when swallowing. So far, not too bad.

I have a couple of performance dates lined up, which I’ve opted not to cancel. I know I’m taking a chance here, because one of the side effects of the radiation is supposed to be hoarseness. The radiologist told me, „Well, you play guitar and you sing. Perhaps you won’t sing, but maybe you’ll play guitar a lot more.“

I recovered very quickly after my surgery, and I’ve been hoping that my better-than-average constitution will keep the worst effects of radiation at bay. My voice and energy still seem to be in decent shape, so maybe I can pull these gigs off after all. Just in case, though, I’ve invited some friends to join me, including my friend Lauren, a world-class slide guitar player. People will be so dazzled by her that they won’t notice whether I’m doing well. I’m also bringing in belly dancers, and I’m expecting a fly-over by the Royal Canadian Air Force. Maybe elephants.

I mean to do those shows.

By Jennifer LaRue Huget |  July 1, 2009; 7:00 AM E

Thanks to Jennifer LaRue Huget (The Washington Post),

Link: http://voices.washingtonpost.com/checkup/2009/07/my_blog_last_week_about.html

…through the years…

(from the movie HEAD, 1968)

From the movie HEAD (1968)

Rock and Roll Bizarro World: What if Stephen Stills and Charles Manson Had Been in the Monkees?

Jerry McCulley | 05.14.2008

It’s the most intriguing question in any field of endeavor: What if?

But in the volatile world of rock music, it often seems more like a mandate when trying to recruit a workable line-up of musicians―or, more crucially, replace an already departed key member. Consider then the bands that might have been, the rumors of potential members who never were―and the sometimes strange fates that befell them.

TV producers Bob Rafelson and Bert Schneider knew a good thing when they saw it, and when raging Beatlemania stubbornly refused to succumb after almost two years, the die was cast―their Raybert Productions would give a young American television audience its own pre-fab-four. Thus, on September 9, 1965, an ad in the Hollywood trade journal Variety sought variously “Folk & Rock Musicians Singers” and “4 Insane Boys, Age 17-21,” a casting call for “Acting roles in a new TV series.” Some 437 young hopefuls were auditioned to become the Monkees, a made-for-TV outfit eventually split evenly between musicians (Mike Nesmith, Peter Tork) and young stage/screen performers (Davy Jones, Mickey Dolenz). It turned out that of the band members eventually cast, only Nesmith had even seen the ad.

Stephen StillsOne of those hopeful young stars auditioning was indeed Stephen Stills, not quite an “insane boy” but definitely an up-and-coming folk/rock musician. He’d most recently found success in the Greenwich Village-based harmony group the Au Go-Go Singers, a nine-piece outfit that also included a young Richie Furay, his future partner in Buffalo Springfield. Though Stephen’s musical abilities were impeccable enough to get him on the producer’s short list of potential Monkees, the 20-year-old musician was reportedly not cast because of prematurely thinning hair and dental problems, cosmetic issues that added years to his appearance. He’d also been resistant to surrender publishing rights of his songs to Screen Gems, the show’s corporate production entity, an issue that would later mushroom when the band tried to wrest control of their music from the Hollywood machinery that had assembled them.

“They could have fixed my teeth,” Stills later said of his rejection by the Monkees producers. “What I really wanted to do was write songs for the show. But I found out that they already had a pair of staff writers in Boyce and Hart.”

Conversely, producer Bert Schneider recalled that Stills “had a little less abandon. In order to do this kind of thing, guys really had to have a lot of abandon. I suspect Stephen was a little more inhibited.”

Ironically, it was Stills who introduced the producers to Peter Tork. Though he went on to found Buffalo Springfield and Crosby Stills Nash & Young, Stills would also play uncredited on several Monkees recording sessions.

Rumors also circulated for years that convict/cult figure Charles Manson had been an unlikely participant in the Monkees auditions as well. Now serving a life sentence in San Quentin for organizing the infamous Tate-LaBianca killings that terrorized Los Angeles in 1969, Manson was indeed a fringe figure in Hollywood’s music scene during the ’60s, a wannabe songwriter who eventually manipulated his way into the circles of Columbia producer Terry Melcher and Beach Boy Dennis Wilson.

Wilson not only briefly played host to Manson and his “family” of outcasts, but convinced the Beach Boys to record one of Charlie’s songs, “Never Learn Not to Love,” for their 1969 20/20 album and the B-side of their “Bluebirds Over the Mountain” single.

Manson’s persistently rumored Monkees connection likely comes courtesy of longtime KROQ radio personality Rodney Bingenheimer, the veteran L.A. scenemaker/male groupie who’d also failed his Monkees audition, yet remained close enough to the band to be cast as Davy Jones’ double in an episode of the show. Bingenheimer claimed that Manson was a part of the Monkees auditions so frequently that the story even made it into Eric Lefcowitz’s biography of the band, Monkees Tale. But a quick review of Manson’s extensive criminal record puts the kibosh on Bingenheimer’s oft-told legend: Charlie served time at the U.S. Penitentiary at McNeil Island, Washington and Terminal Island prison from 1961 until March, 1967.

Other notables who failed their Monkees audition include Three Dog Night’s Danny Hutton and songwriters Paul Williams and Harry Nilsson, both of whom would go on to eventually have songs recorded by the band. Yet, strangely, it was Charles Manson who made it to the cover of Rolling Stone.

Go figure.

(05.14.2008)

Link:

http://www.gibson.com/en-us/Lifestyle/Features/rockandrollbizarroworldw/

His Monkee Money Gone, Peter Tork Finds a New Life as Mr. Thorkelson, Teacher

After the NBC-TV series The Monkees premiered in the fall of 1966, Peter Tork, Davy Jones, Mickey Dolenz and Mike Nesmith, the four zanies cast as pseudo-Beatles, became recording stars too.

It seemed to bother no one that the actors on the show sang but did not play the instruments for their records. (A backup band did.) It did disturb Tork, a guitarist who wanted to be taken seriously as a musician. The son of an economics professor at the University of Connecticut, Tork (né Thorkelson) was a folk singer who had played the coffeehouse circuit before the series.

In 1968 he left the group to make it on his own. The millions he made as a Monkee did not last long. „I gave a lot of money away to friends, on the theory that it would come back to me in the long run.“ In 1972 he hit bottom. He was arrested for possession of hashish and served four months in a federal prison.

Today, at 34, Tork has his act together at last. Since September he has been teaching English, math, drama, Eastern philosophy and „Rock Band Class“ at Pacific Hills, a private secondary school in Santa Monica, Calif. A college dropout, Peter got the job on the strength of his interview with Dr. Penrod Moss, the school’s director. „I like to hire people who are independent and creative,“ Moss said. „I was impressed by his personality and his ability to talk.“

Instead of the splendid Wally Cox house in Studio City he once owned, Peter now lives in a three-room house in Venice, Calif. with his daughter, Hallie, 6, from his first marriage, his live-in lady, Barbara Iannoli, and their 8-week-old son, Ivan Iannoli-Thorkelson.

While Tork the musician still has dreams of one day returning to the rock circuit, Thorkelson the teacher is happily planning his next course, „Mao, Marx and Mama.“ „I’m doing something important,“ he says. „I never do anything less than important.“

(April 05, 1976, People magazine)