Micky Dolenz
Tulsa Theater
May 7, 2026
Conversations about rock and roll often pivot on the overrated-underrated axis. The legacy arena band your neighbor can't stand. The obscure indie act your coworker swears made the greatest record of the ’90s. We love this, the tussle and friction, and the chance, above all, for real discovery. Because sometimes it's true: sometimes a band you dismissed at 15 and never took another look at—sometimes they had the jams.
We are talking now about the Monkees, a band I first heard about in punchlines. In Dumb and Dumber, Lloyd Christmas, scrolling through a jukebox, finds a Monkees song and talks about what a huge influence they were on the Beatles. He's an idiot, right? Only an idiot would think something like that.
I am not going to argue the Monkees were an influence on the Beatles, but I am going to argue they are the most perfectly underrated band in rock and roll history, first, because of how roundly dismissed they were, and second, because it turns out they really did have the jams all along.
Micky Dolenz, last surviving Monkee, played the Tulsa Theater this past Thursday night, and it was a total scream. Dolenz has put together what amounts to a stellar Monkees cover band and set himself to work as its frontman. He's 81, and he walked onstage in a fedora, purple-tinted glasses, a gray suit over a pale blue teeshirt, and a fuchsia scarf. He looked like Elton John playing a dapper private eye.
I took my wife, a Monkees fan from the early ’80s, who discovered the band on MTV. It gets a little lost in history, but in the first days of Music Television, when the channel played almost exclusively music videos, one of the only things they played that wasn't videos were episodes of The Monkees.
For this 60th anniversary tour, Dolenz has put a giant screen at the back of the stage where he plays clips from the old TV show. They're astoundingly fresh and energetic, and somehow familiar to contemporary eyes. They're like proto-TikToks, underscoring the band's old-time showbiz roots.
Dolenz is a charismatic performer, and even in his early 80s he worked the crowd like a veteran ham, punning "Pick it, Wilson!" before launching into "Daydream Believer" then calling it off, joking that half the crowd would leave if they played that song too early.
Micky's a bit like the winner of a tontine at this point, the only man left with any claim to a colorful fortune of snappy pop classics, and he's using this anniversary tour to pay tribute to the writers whose songs the Monkees made into hits—names that might surprise you, like Carole King, who co-wrote "Take A Giant Step" with Gerry Goffin for the band's first record, and Neil Diamond, who wrote "I'm a Believer" and "A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You," songs the band played with snap and flair.
To his credit, Dolenz has not only assembled a great team of musicians for this tour, but he's incredibly generous with the spotlight, letting drummer Rick Dart take frontman duty on "Your Auntie Grizelda" and singing duets with his sister Coco on ballads like "Shades of Grey."
He's also recast the story of the Monkees into a heroic narrative around his close friend and fellow Monkee, Mike Nesmith. The Monkees were, it's true, originally formed as a commercially engineered product, and there's something inherently cynical about that. Or, at the very least, not very rock and roll. Two things, though: First off, there's no rule that says a band created purely by corporate design can't make hits. (The Spice Girls! The Wonders!) Second, as Dolenz told it, the Monkees only let the suits run things until the second record, after which they all rallied around Nesmith and took creative control.
From then on, the Monkees made the records they wanted to make, and Dolenz moved chronologically through them, hit after hit, before calling a 20-minute intermission an hour in, not long after singing "I'm Going Down." (Perfectly understandable. Under the wrong conditions, singing "I'm Going Down" might kill a man. People who sing "I'm Going Down" at karaoke think people who sing "It’s the End of the World as We Know It" are punks.)
During the intermission, my wife and I stepped into the lobby, where we found a grown man wearing a full-body monkey costume (adult pajamas, I believe). He wasn’t the only person dressed to thrill: I saw a number of snazzy sports jackets and spangly psychedelic jewelry calling back to the swinging ’60s. But he was the only person I saw wearing what he might’ve worn to watch The Monkees on Saturday morning TV (where the show first aired).
I introduced myself, told him I was a writer for The Pickup, and that I was supposed to chat up any interesting characters I found at the show. "You know any?" I joked. He said his name was Marcus Makar. He's 65 years old and a longtime Tulsan.
"Ever been to a Monkees show before, Marcus?" (assuming the man in the literal monkey suit had to be a Mega-Monkeemaniac). "No," he said. I didn’t ask if he dressed like a giant Sesame Street E for his first Springsteen show. I asked instead if I could take his picture, and he said only if my wife joined him.
Back inside, Dolenz returned and told the story of how the Jimi Hendrix Experience had been the Monkees' first opening act, and how much he loved the Hendrix band's theatricality, their "psychojello outfits." Except the Monkees' core audience were ten-year-old girls, who didn't quite see why a guy might light his guitar on fire. To illustrate the problem, Dolenz and the band launched into a cover of "Purple Haze" before Micky interrupted to chant "We want Davey!" in a fake little-girl voice.
The show was full of great bits like that (when somebody hollered "We love you Micky!" Micky shot back "Thanks, Mom!"). But the jams were there, too. Underneath all the campiness of the Monkees, the jams were always there, and when you get right down to it, it's the jams that matter because it's the jams that last. People don't show up 60 years later just because you were cute and funny 60 years earlier. As the show closed out with both "Believer" songs ("Daydream" and "I'm A"), I looked around and saw a group of Gen Zers losing their minds in the aisles. Dancing, shaking, screaming. Monkeying around.
