Bobby Hart, a key element of the Multimedia Empire of Monkees that teams up with Tommy Boyce to write successes such as “Last Train to Clarksville” and “I’m’t Your Steppin ‘Stone”, died. He was 86 years old.
Hart died on Wednesday at his home in Los Angeles, according to his friend and co-author, Glenn Ballantyne. He was in poor health since his hip breeze last year.
Boyce and Hart were a prolific and successful duo in the mid -1960s, especially for Monkees, the group made for television promoted by Don Kirshner. They wrote their theme song, with its opening blow, “Here We Come, Walkin ‘Down the Street”, and a sustainable song, “Hey, Hey, we are the Monkees”, and their first hit n ° 1, “Last train to Clarksville”. The first eponymous monkees album, a million sales, included six songs from Boyce and Hart, which were also producing and used their own support musicians, the prophets of candy stores, as session players.
“I always attribute them not only to the writing of many greatest successes, but, as a producers, to create the unique sound that we know and love all,” wrote the Micky Dolanz drummer in a preface to the 2015 memories of Hart, “Psychedelic Bubblegum.”
As Boyce and Hart grew up I dream of Jeannie And Delighted.
They were also politically active. They campaigned for Robert F. Kennedy when he presented himself to the presidency in 1968 and wrote the copper “Luv (Let We Voting)” in support of the 26th amendment, which in 1971 lowered the voting age from 21 to 18 years old. Their other songs included the melancholy of the monkeys “I Wanna be free” and the theme of the Daytime Soap Opera “theme theme” Days of our lives.
They were covered by everyone, from Dean Martin (“Little Lovely One”) to sex pistols (“I’m not your steppin ‘Stone”).
In the 1970s and 1980s, Hart succeeded several strokes with other collaborators and even contributed equipment to another television act, the Partridge family. He worked with Austin Roberts on “Over You”, a walk nominated from the Oscars interpreted by Betty Buckley Mercy (1983), and with Dick Eastman on “My Secret (Didja Gitit again?)” For a new edition. He and Bryce did a tour with DOLENZ and his colleague Davy Jones in the 1970s, released the album “DOLENZ, JONES, BOYCE & HART” and received renewed attention when the Monkees had a return to the 80s.
Boyce, who died in 1994, and Hart were the subject of the 2014 documentary The guys who wrote them. Hart married twice, more recently with singer Mary Ann Hart, and had two children from her first marriage.
He was the son of a minister, born Robert Luke Harshman in Phoenix. In his memoirs, he remembered himself as a shy child with a “strong desire to distinguish himself”, as he wrote in “Psychedelic Bubblegum”. Music was the answer. In high school, he learned the piano, the guitar and the Hammond B-3 organ. He also started his own amateur radio station, finally adding a console, turntables and microphones.
After obtaining his secondary school diploma and served in the reserves of the US military, he settled in Los Angeles in the late 1950s, hoping first of all becoming a record jockey but soon working as a songwriter and musician of session. His name has shortened to Bobby Hart, he shot as a member of Teddy Randazzo and The Dazzlers and with Randazzo and Bobby Weinstein wrote “Hurt So Bad”, a success for Little Anthony and the Imperials covered later by Linda Ronstadt.
He also became friends with Boyce, singer and songwriter of Charlottesville, in Virginia, with a “very unusual, spontaneous and extroverted personality, but very cool at the same time”. Boyce and Hart helped write the top 10 “Come a little closer” to Jay and the Americans and were a combination strong enough for Kirshner to recruit them for his writing of Gems Screen songs: they were assigned to the Monkees.
Invited to find songs for an openly modeled quartet on the Beatles, they designed a Twangy guitar line similar to that of the “Paperback Writer” and wrote “Last Train to Clarksville”, a topper of the graphic in 1966 based in part on the Mishearing de Hart de The Beatles Hit (he thought that Paul McCartney was to sing “Take The Last train “near the end;
When Kirshner suggested a song with the name of a girl in the title, they proved “Valeri” and reached the top 5. For the theme song of the show, an outside walk was sufficient.
“Boyce started scratching her guitar and I joined by slamming my fingers and making noises with my mouth which simulated an open and closed hi-human cymbal,” wrote Hart in his memories. “We had created the perfect recipe for inspiration and started to sing about what we were doing:” Walkin ‘Down the Street “.”
