Happy 70th Birthday to The Monkees’ lead singer and drummer Micky Dolenz, whom I had the incredible (and slightly surreal) pleasure to meet and chat with face-to-face a few months ago. He signed my original “bearded back cover” “Headquarters’ LP, with the inscription “Cool!” and I finally had the chance, after 45 years since first catching the zany foursome during their second wave of popularity (Saturday morning reruns in ’69) to tell him how much he and the Monkees meant to me as a kid. I always felt like they lived next door to me somehow (yeah, I even told my schoolmates that they did!), they seemed so friendly and close. Micky even shares a birthday with my dad (who would have been 93 today), which is strangely coincidental to the fact that one of my other favorite singers, Mick Jagger, shares a birthday with my mom. And in my moment of coherence, I told Micky that I always knew that, even though Davy Jones was the face and heartthrob of the band, Micky Dolenz was their madcap humor, their zany energy, and their perfect pop voice. He thanked me graciously and actually seemed to appreciate hearing that. Here’s a riff on The Monkees below, which I wrote after Davy’s passing as an intro to a first-person piece I penned for The Boston Globe some years back. LOTS of Monkees links, from original screen tests to a very rare Micky commercial from the early ’70s, AND a VERY IMPORTANT RPM POLL! And I’d LOVE to know YOUR favorite Micky track!