This Classic Rock Band Scored Four No. 1 Albums In 1967

Before the staggeringly high record sales in 1967, the story of the Monkees started with an open audition in Los Angeles in 1965, which sought four young guys with musical and comedic skills to play the Monkees, a band on a TV sitcom. Micky Dolenz, Davy Jones, Michael Nesmith, and Peter Tork were summarily hired. The story of the Monkees TV show, "The Monkees," began in 1966, when it debuted on NBC. An American response to both Beatlemania and the Beatles' hit madcap comedy films, "The Monkees" was designed to serve as a weekly showcase for the Monkees — each episode included what were proto-music videos for the band's songs — and the show was an immediate hit. Colorful, youthful, and utilizing lots of quick cuts, daring camera angles, and production techniques, it won the Emmy Award for Outstanding Comedy Series in 1967.

At first, the four Monkees on TV weren't exactly the same Monkees heard on their albums and singles. Primarily hired as actors, they were permitted to sing on Monkees releases, but the songs were at first written and performed by industry veterans and studio musicians. Before the entire operation crumbled, the Monkees enjoyed its peak in 1967 and achieved a feat that nobody else has done before or since. That year, the Monkees became the first and only rock n' roll band to top the Billboard 200 album chart with four different LPs.

Demand for the Monkees was very high in 1967, so record label Colgems happily and lucratively obliged by regularly churning out a hefty amount of content for fans to buy. Many songs were previewed and featured on "The Monkees" TV show, thereby urging viewers to go out and buy an LP if they dug the song. The Monkees' first four albums all subsequently topped the album chart at some point in 1967.

At the beginning of 1967, the self-titled "The Monkees" spent five weeks at No. 1. Then the Monkees replaced the Monkees in the top position with "More of the Monkees," which spent a remarkable and rare 18 consecutive weeks atop the chart; at the end of 1967, Billboard would name it the year's bestselling LP of any kind. Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass finagled the No. 1 slot from the Monkees for a week in June 1967, before the group took it back for a single week with "Headquarters," the first album that featured significant songwriting and instrumental work by the four stars of "The Monkees." The group would close out 1967 with a five-week span at No. 1 with "Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones Ltd."