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 According to Nesmith, it was Dolenz's voice that made the Monkees' sound distinctive, and even during tension-filled times Nesmith and Tork sometimes turned over lead vocal duties to Dolenz on their own compositions, such as Tork's "For Pete's Sake", which became the closing title theme for the second season of the television show. The Monkees' debut and second albums were meant to be a soundtrack to the first season of the TV show, to cash in on the audience. In the 2006 Rhino Deluxe Edition re-issue of their second album, "More of the Monkees", Mike Nesmith stated, "The first album