NEW YORK (AP) — Songwriter 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 dwelling in Los Angeles, in accordance with his pal and co-author, Glenn Ballantyne. He had been unwell since breaking his hip final 12 months.
Boyce and Hart had been a prolific and profitable duo within the mid-Nineteen 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 street,” and enduring chant, “Hey, hey, we’re 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 Sweet Retailer Prophets, as session gamers.
“I always credit them not only with writing many of our biggest hits, but, as producers, being instrumental in creating the unique Monkee sound we all know and love,” the Monkees’ Micky Dolenz wrote in a foreword to Hart’s memoir, “Psychedelic Bubblegum,” revealed 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 had been additionally 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 assist of the twenty sixth Modification, 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 had been coated by everybody from Dean Martin (“Little Lovely One”) to the Intercourse Pistols (“I’m Not Your Steppin’ Stone”).
Within 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 Household. 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 Version.
He and Bryce toured with Dolenz and fellow Monkee Davy Jones within the ’70s, put out the album “Dolenz, Jones, Boyce & Hart” and acquired renewed consideration when the Monkees loved a comeback within the Eighties.
Boyce, who died in 1994, and Hart had been the topics of a 2014 documentary “The Guys Who Wrote ’Em.” Hart was married twice, most not too long ago 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 “strong desire to distinguish” 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 newbie radio station, finally including a console, turntables and microphones. After graduating from highschool and serving within the Military reserves, he settled in Los Angeles within the late Fifties, hoping first to change into a disc jockey, however quickly working as a songwriter and session musician.
His title 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 unusual personality, spontaneous and extroverted, yet very cool at the same time.” Boyce and Hart helped write the highest 10 hit “Come a Little Bit Closer” for Jay and the People and had been a powerful sufficient mixture that Kirshner recruited them for his Display screen Gems songwriting manufacturing unit: They had been assigned to the Monkees.
Requested to provide you with songs for a quartet brazenly modeled on the Beatles, they devised a twangy guitar line much like the one for the “Paperback Writer” and wrote “Last Train to Clarksville,” a chart topper in 1966 primarily based partially on Hart’s mishearing of the Beatles hit (he thought Paul McCartney was singing “take the last train” close to the top; McCartney was singing “paperback writer”).
When Kirshner steered a music with a lady’s title within the title, they turned out “Valleri” and reached the highest 5. For the present’s theme music, a stroll outdoors was sufficient.
“Boyce began 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 perfect recipe for inspiration and started singing about just what we were doing: ‘Walkin’ down the street.’”
