Micky Dolenz · Tom Dooley · Judas Priest
Spurious suits and stupid FBI tricks
the true crime that's worth your time
September’s bonus-review topic is I Don’t Like Mondays. That title is perhaps better known, in the culture at large, as the name of a Boomtown Rats song about the same case.
I could remember this wrong — it was a long time ago — but I seem to recall drive-time radio shows playing “I Don’t Like Mondays” once a week despite the extremely dark subject matter (at least until the Bangles and Prince did everyone a solid with “Manic Monday.” I don’t recall learning until much later that the song concerned a 1979 school-playground shooting perpetrated by Brenda Spencer. When the police called the Spencer house and Brenda picked up, officers asked her why she’d opened fire. “I don’t like Mondays” was the response.
Contemporary coverage of the case described Brenda, now 60, as a physically wee, “lonely, friendless” girl with “this thing about guns.” She remains incarcerated as of this writing, having “stipulated to a three-year Board of Parole Hearings parole suitability denial” just two weeks ago.
You can watch the 2006 British TV doc on Freevee, but remember, if you want to read the review, you’ll need a ladder over the paywall — and there’s three-odd years of extra content over here, so consider it, won’t you?
Thanks! (August’s review of When The Moon Turns To Blood is right here, in case you missed that one.) — SDB
Micky Dolenz is suing the FBI. Not sure how I feel about the theme shaping up in today’s issue, but let’s see where it goes; first, I’ll refer you to the story from Rolling Stone noting that the last surviving Monkee, 77, would like to see the band’s FBI file. Parts of it, including the report of a Bureau informant who attended a 1967 Monkees concert and grumbled about leftist propaganda shown on video screens thereat (I’m paraphrasing), already got released; Dolenz would like to see the rest, and FOIA requests have gone nowhere.
The suit was filed on Dolenz’s behalf by attorney Mark S. Zaid, an expert in Freedom of Information Act litigation. He was also a key part of the team that represented the government whistleblower in the 2019 Donald Trump/Ukraine scandal, which set the stage for Trump’s first impeachment.
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He met Dolenz through mutual friends not long ago, and suggested to the musician it might be fun to see if the FBI had a file on him or his former bandmates. At the time, he didn’t even know that a tantalizing seven-page portion of the file was released in 2011. “That just kind of reinforced for me that there was actually something here,” he says. “It’s not just a fishing expedition. I mean, we’re still fishing, but we know there’s fish in the water.”
Andy Greene’s story also includes the full filing, and comments that, compared to other bands of the time, the Monkees’ anti-war sentiments seemed comparatively tame. I reviewed Head many years ago, and my write-up is just as snotty as the film is effortful; I could have graded on a more generous curve for the heavy-handed and self-satisfied art-vs.-commerce, Nerf Dr. Strangelove symbology, because the parallels hadn’t in fact been drawn ten thousand times back then. Nathan Rabin’s assessment for The Dissolve is quite a bit more generous:
“They say we’re manufactured, to that we all agree / So make your choice and we’ll rejoice in never being free!” Davy Jones sings, with defiant self-destruction. He’s a pop-culture gorilla rattling his cage, knowing he will never escape. “The money’s in, we’re made of tin, we’re here to give you more,” Dolenz continues. This ditty crosses the line separating mild self-deprecation from self-negation, even suicidal ideation. Head can be understood more as an act of professional suicide than an attempt to extend The Monkees’ brand to film.
The reality is probably somewhere in between — the film is, net, well-intentioned and courageous but also a plotless and tiresome harangue — but what matters for our purposes isn’t whether you should watch Head1 but what the film, and Dolenz’s lawsuit, can tell us about the generation-gappy heads-against-squares atmosphere in the late sixties, and the FBI’s determined attempts to criminalize activism and protest of all types. Like, it’s sort of pitiable when it’s a handful of twentysomething pop stars in stripey bell-bottoms getting surveilled, but we all know that’s not where it stopped; the FBI controversies page on Wikipedia is not a pretty read.
Neither is a list of grim FBI files from Ranker, which suggests the Bureau is historically perhaps more comfortable obsessing over enemy culture-war combatants than exploring tips concerning domestic terrorism; or a Reader’s Digest rundown of things the Fibbies “don’t want you to know,” like that they spent a year looking into the song “Louie Louie” (and that more than one high-ranking agent was probably using his CD-ROM drive as a cupholder); or Muckrock’s report on one of the weirder crawlspaces in Abbie Hoffman’s massive FBI file, in which federal law enforcement has made more work for itself by deeming the impersonation of Smokey the Bear a crime. — SDB
And for the rest of your “half the office already left so I can just skive off in the New Yorker archives for the rest of the day, right?” pre-long-weekend Thursday, let’s keep with the music-and-crime theme. Granted, this is in no small part because the dueling gut renos both behind our house — my office is, natch, in the back — and two doors down have made it nigh on impossible to synthesize content in any meaningful way for y’all.
But I can still aggregate like a mofo, so!
I’ve unlocked a Patreon-bonus Blotter Presents from four years ago with a bunch of murder-ballad and rock/crime-crossover recs and links. Have a listen, or just rifle through the show notes.
This digital-scholarship file from Appalachian State on “The Ballad of Tom Dooley” looks like a nice springy diving board from which to leap into a wiki-hole of true crime in the folk tradition.
Newsweek did an oral history (hehehehe “oral”) on the PMRC’s war on “dirty” lyrics.
And, with a content warning for gun violence and mentions of suicide, back to Rolling Stone for a look back by Judas Priest frontman Rob Halford at the lawsuit brought against the band by the family of James Vance. (Another account at RockAndRollTrueStories.com gives some more context.) — SDB
If you or someone you know is experiencing a mental health, suicide or substance use crisis or emotional distress, reach out 24/7 to the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline (formerly known as the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline) by dialing or texting 988 or using chat services at suicidepreventionlifeline.org to connect to a trained crisis counselor. You can also get crisis text support via the Crisis Text Line by texting NAMI to 741741.
Friday on Best Evidence:
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…enh, why not? It’s a long weekend, and the soundtrack is aces. It’s streamable on Tubi, apparently.