Bobby Hart, who co-wrote ‘Last Train to Clarksville’ and other Monkees hits, dies

NEW YORK — Bobby Hart, a key a part of the Monkees’ multimedia empire who teamed with Tommy Boyce on such hits as “Final Prepare to Clarksville” and “I am Not Your Steppin’ Stone,” has died. He was 86.

Hart died at his residence in Los Angeles, in response to his pal and co-author, Glenn Ballantyne. He had been sick since breaking his hip final yr.

Boyce and Hart had been a prolific and profitable workforce within the mid-Nineteen Sixties, particularly for the Monkees, the made-for-television group promoted by Don Kirshner. They wrote the Monkees’ theme track, with its opening shot, “Right here we come, walkin’ down the road,” and enduring chant, “Hey, hey, we are the Monkees,” and their first No. 1 hit, “Final Prepare 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 all the time credit score them not solely with writing lots of our largest hits, however, as producers, being instrumental in creating the distinctive Monkee sound everyone knows and love,” the Monkees’ Micky Dolenz wrote in a foreword to Hart’s memoir, Psychedelic Bubblegum, printed 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 Check Patterns and I Surprise What She’s Doing Tonite and showing on such sitcoms as I Dream of Jeannie and Bewitched. Additionally they had been 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 lined by everybody from Dean Martin (“Little Pretty One”) to the Intercourse Pistols (“I am 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 But?)” 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 obtained renewed consideration when the Monkees loved a comeback within the Nineteen Eighties.

Boyce, who died in 1994, and Hart had been the themes of a 2014 documentary The Guys Who Wrote ‘Em. Hart was married twice, most just lately to singer Mary Ann Hart, and had two youngsters 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 “robust want to tell apart” himself, as he wrote in Psychedelic Bubblegum. Music was the reply. By highschool, he had discovered piano, guitar and the Hammond B-3 organ. He additionally began his personal beginner 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 turn out to be 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 “Damage So Unhealthy,” a success for Little Anthony and the Imperials later lined by Linda Ronstadt.

He additionally befriended Boyce, a singer and songwriter from Charlottesville, Virginia, with a “very uncommon character, spontaneous and extroverted, but very cool on the identical time.” Boyce and Hart helped write the highest 10 hit “Come a Little Bit Nearer” for Jay and the Individuals and had been a powerful sufficient mixture that Kirshner recruited them for his Display screen Gems songwriting manufacturing facility: They had been assigned to the Monkees. Requested to give you songs for a quartet brazenly modeled on the Beatles, they devised a twangy guitar line much like the one for “Paperback Author” and wrote “Final Prepare to Clarksville,” a chart topper in 1966. When Kirshner prompt a track with a woman’s title within the title, they turned out “Valleri” and reached the highest 5.

For the present’s theme track, a stroll exterior was sufficient.

“Boyce started 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 proper recipe for inspiration and began singing about simply what we had been doing: ‘Walkin’ down the road.'”