I Wanna Be Free – The Monkees

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I Wanna Be Free – The Monkees


Scratching the surface of a memory.
So my family were talking about vinyl records, my niece had mentioned she would like a record player or turntable as everyone calls them now. The older members included in the conversation were reminiscing about how playing your favourite records wasn't without it's dangers. I shared a stack system with my brother as a teenager, it included a functional record player on top. A very compact design to the extent that any 12" LP stuck out three sides of the top cover. The only issue being after much use the catch on the cover became a bit temperamental and had a knack of crashing down just as you were loading your favourite record. This would put a lovely scratch across the groove, often ruining the listening experience.

I had been bought The Monkess Greatest Hits on a very cool looking record one Christmas, I had played it a lot, I was a big Monkees fan from watching their TV show that used to be repeated during the Saturday mornings children's slot. Little did I know as kid that lots of the Monkees big hits had been crafted by the leading songwriters of the day, I'm A Believer (Neil Diamond) and the rest were submitted by artists that would go on to achieve stardom themselves.
Sadly for me this precious record was one of the stack systems victims. Big scratch.

So fair play to my Dad he was in a record store in London and found an even better version of The Monkees Greatest Hits, this time a double album, so four sides of songs instead of just the two. One of the extra tracks on the larger version was this song, 'I Wanna Be Free', just a very simple song used in one of the TV episodes. It never created any huge waves, but I loved it, I think the feeling it creates sums up that teenage longing about not understanding love. So strangely due to the first record being ruined it lead me to find this great song.

Now like most of my stories there's another twist, years later I saw a book advertised somewhere about how to write a hit song, it was by this guy Tommy Boyce, I'd never heard of him and this book was very outdated. But long before the days of Amazon, the book winged it's way in the post probably via America to me. I was just starting to write my own lyrics and found this book very useful and entertaining. Turns out Tommy wrote the theme tune to The Monkees TV series along with a few other songs for them. I Wanna Be Free being one of them, it was even included in the book as one of the examples of how to craft a song, after that I loved the song even more.

Favouite lyric : Like the bluebirds flying by me / Like the waves out on the blue sea



Location: Rayleigh, UK

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