According to a number of reports, Micky Dolenz, the last remaining member of The Monkees, (Davy Jones, Pete Tork and Mike Nesmith have all passed away), is suing the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to obtain any records that the organization has on the band and its members.
Dolenz is basing his request on the report that in 1967 an FBI informant attended a concert on the band’s first tour in the US and filed a report that claimed the concert featured “subliminal messages […] depicted on the screen which, in the opinion of [informant] constituted ‘left-wing intervention of a political nature.’”
The report continued to describe the messages as showing “riots in Berkley, anti-US messages on the war in Vietnam, racial riots in Selma, Alabama, and similar messages which had an unfavorable response from the audience”.
The Monkees file was released to the public in 2011 but was heavily redacted. In June 2022, Dolenz – the only surviving member of the band – filed a Freedom of Information Act request to obtain the full file but failed to achieve his goal.
A lawsuit has now been filed against the FBI via lawyer Mark S. Zaid in a bid to get access to the full file and any other files relating to the band and its individual members.
“The Monkees reflected, especially in their later years with projects like Head, a counterculture from what institutional authority was at the time,” Zaid told Rolling Stone. “And [J. Edgar] Hoover’s FBI, in the ‘60s in particular, was infamous for monitoring the counterculture, whether they committed unlawful actions or not.”
