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 the Monkees' image, and although he thought that Peter was a great musician, he had a different process of thinking about songs that weren't right for the Monkees. Music Coordinator Kirshner, though, realizing how important the music was, wanted to move the music in a newer direction than Boyce and Hart to get the best record, and so he decided to move the production to New York where his A-list of writers/producers resided. However, the Monkees had been complaining that the music publishing company would not allow them to play their own instruments on their records, or to use more