The Monkees’ Micky Dolenz has sued the FBI in an effort to have the full file the federal agency has on the band unsealed.
The FBI has made some tremendous mistakes going back to the days of J. Edger Hoover.
The FBI reportedly has a file on the Monkees that accuses the band of “left-wing intervention of a political nature.”
So far, only a small part of the file has been released.
“During the concert, subliminal messages were depicted on the screen which, in the opinion of [informant’s name redacted], constituted ‘left-wing intervention of a political nature,’” says a portion of the Monkees FBI file.
“These messages and pictures were flashed of riots, in Berkley, anti-U.S. messages on the war in Vietnam, racial riots in Selma, Alabama, and similar messages which had unfavorable response[s] from the audience,” the FBI file adds.
Now Dolenz wants to see the whole file and hired attorney Mark S. Zaid, an expert in Freedom of Information Act litigation, to get the documents released.
Dolenz is the last surviving member of the group.
“The Monkees reflected, especially in their later years with projects like Head, a counterculture from what institutional authority was at the time,” Zaid said in a statement.
“And Hoover’s FBI, in the Sixties, in particular, was infamous for monitoring the counterculture, whether they committed unlawful actions or not.
“This means that we’re headed into court.
“I tell all my clients, ‘If you are serious about getting your documents, then we need to litigate it.’
“What happens from here is that we’ll be assigned a judge within a matter of a couple of days.
“After that, the process will start,” the lawyer noted.
“Theoretically, anything could be in those files though.
“We have no idea what records even exist.
“It could be almost nothing.
“But we’ll see soon enough.”
“My babysitter, who was about ten years older than me, gave me her collection of Monkees albums in 1975 when I was just a little kid.
“That turned me into a big fan, and I went to see their initial reunion tour in 1986.
“I’ve seen them about eight times after that, and I even got to meet Davy Jones right before he died,” he said.
