The Monkees Members of the Monkees, Nesmith in particular, cite the soundtrack album as one of the crowning achievements of the band. Tensions within the group were increasing. Peter Tork, citing exhaustion, quit by buying out the last four years of his Monkees contract at $150,000 per year, equal to about $ per year today. This was shortly after the band's Far East tour in December 1968, after completing work on their 1969 NBC television special, "33⅓ Revolutions Per Monkee", which rehashed many of the ideas from "Head", only with the Monkees playing a strangely second-string role. In the DVD commentary for
The Monkees it was the antithesis of "The Monkees" television show, intended to comprehensively demolish the group's carefully groomed public image. Rafelson and Nicholson's "Ditty Diego-War Chant" (recited at the start of the film by the group), ruthlessly parodies Boyce and Hart's "Monkees Theme". A sparse advertising campaign (with no mention of the Monkees) hurt any chances of the film doing well, and it played briefly in half-filled movie theaters. In the DVD commentary, Nesmith said that everyone associated with the Monkees "had gone crazy" by this time. They were each using the platform of the Monkees to push their own disparate