Headquarters by The Monkees

Headquarters, the Monkees' third studio album, came out on Colgems on May 22, 1967, and it's the sound of the made-for-TV band staging a coup. After a fight with music supervisor Don Kirshner for control of their own records, Micky Dolenz, Davy Jones, Michael Nesmith and Peter Tork won the right to produce themselves, and for the first time they played the instruments and wrote much of the material, with Chip Douglas producing and the session pros mostly sent home.

The result is looser and scrappier than the hit factory's product, a garage-band pop rock record with its seams showing and its heart on its sleeve, with oddball corners like "Randy Scouse Git" that the hit factory would never have signed off on. It still sold: their third straight number-one album in the States, over two million copies in its first two months, and number two in Britain. It later made the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.