Search - The Monkees :: Headquarters Sessions

In 1967, The Monkees found themselves at RCA Studio C in Hollywood as a working band. And the album they were about to create, Headquarters, would be released on May 20, 1967; a month later it would hit #1 on the Billboard Hot 100, and remain in the Top Ten for almost three months.

The Monkees Headquarters Sessions is an 84-track 3-CD set which contains 60 previously unreleased recordings and which also includes the complete original mono mixes of the album on compact disc for the first time anywhere. Researched and compiled by longtime Monkee maniacs Andrew Sandoval and Bill Inglot, Headquarters Sessions collects almost four hours of unique audio insight into the recording of this Monkee milestone. It includes almost three-and-one-half-hours of alternate takes, demos, backing tracks, and recording session audio hijinx never before preserved on compact disc.
To this end, Headquarters Sessions includes only recordings from those sessions where the band had control over all aspects of the recording process and where they played most, if not all, of the instruments. The 3-CD set collects all of the vocal masters from these sessions that were not included on the original stereo album as well as all of the surviving vocal demos and a few tracks with vocals which were never completed.

However, the beefy middle of this tasty digital triple-decker is the collection of previously unreleased instrumental backing track sessions (both for familiar and previously unknown compositions), rehearsals, spoken word oddities, and studio chatter. And to top it all off, the original mono masters are presented in an initially proposed, but ultimately unused, running order. All contained in a gatefold digipack with a 40-page booklet filled with photographs, a contemporaneous day-to-day chronology, track notes, and ephemera.

Headquarters Sessions is available as an individually numbered limited edition of 4,500 copies.