Micky Dolenz

The being known as Wonder Girl is speaking I believe

It’s not easy trying to tell her that I shortly have to leave

—“Randy Scouse Git,” released as “Alternate Title” in the UK

Okay, so the list of songs Micky wrote in his Monkees days is fairly short. Frankly, Mike was the best songwriter of the lot. That’s okay; there are a lot of musicians who don’t write their own songs. Some really quite famous ones. It’s also true that he had to learn how to play the drums for the show when they cast him as the drummer. However, that’s because he wasn’t a drummer. He was a guitarist. Because the boys were cast the way they were, they were put on the instruments of the showrunners’ choice, not the ones they actually played best.

In fact, he is the actor of the group. If you want proof of that, go to YouTube and call up Circus Boy. I discovered the show existed in the first place because there’s an episode of The Monkees where he keeps singing the show’s theme song, one where the boys are at a circus. It ran two seasons in the mid ‘50s. He plays, arguably, a version of Dick Grayson where he actually stays with the circus instead of moving in with Batman, given he’s the orphan son of two trapeze artists who died in a tragic performing accident. It’s not a terrible show, though some episodes are better than others. Davy had done some acting—including a 1961 episode of Coronation Street—but it was really what Micky did.

Which is not to downplay his musical chops. “Not as good a musician as Mike Nesmith” is a much higher bar than a lot of people probably realize. However, he did much of the lead vocals, when it wasn’t Davy. He can play guitar, and well. He owned the third-ever Moog synthesizer, after Wendy Carlos and Buck Owens. Sure, he was happy to leave the drumming to studio drummers whenever possible, but we must once again emphasize that this is because he hadn’t been a drummer before he signed onto the show.

Still, if you’re looking for acting, you’re looking due Micky. (It’s hard for me to call them by their last names, because I grew up during the ‘80s revival era.) He did a lot of voicework, including thirteen episodes of The Tick as Arthur. (I don’t know why Arthur had multiple voice actors.) Appropriately enough, he did an episode of Batman: The Animated Series. He was in the ‘97 Bruce Campbell-starring remake of The Love Bug, which has a truly bonkers cast. And if a lot of what he’s been in looks like garbage, well, he was still acting.

One of the truly wild details of his life is that he was one of the founding members of Alice Cooper’s Hollywood Vampires, alongside Keith Moon, Actual Drummer, and Ringo Starr, Both Actual Drummer And Actual Beatle. The ‘70s apparently featured a lot of substance abuse, which apparently caused the collapse of his first marriage. His then-wife, television presenter Samantha Juste, wanted a more stable home for their daughter, actress Ami Dolenz. Hard to blame her, really. He does, however, seem to be one of the people who made it out to the other side, and good for him.