Boyce & Hart

Boyce & Hart, the songwriting and (later) performing team of Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart, are most famous for writing several of the Monkees' big hits, including "Last Train to Clarksville," "Valleri," and "(I'm Not Your) Stepping Stone." Together and separately, they also wrote or contributed to hits by several other acts in the 1960s, including Freddy Cannon, Curtis Lee, Little Anthony & the Imperials, and Jay & the Americans. In 1967 they began recording on their own as a duo, landing a Top Ten hit the same year with "I Wonder What She's Doing Tonite." Based in Los Angeles, Boyce & Hart were a West Coast equivalent to the kind of craftsmanship and methodology espoused by Brill Building songwriting teams, although their material was less meaningful and enduring than Goffin-King's or Barry-Greenwich's. They emphasized bright, happy, AM radio melodies with room for lots of vocal harmonies, an appropriate vibe for the Monkees and other acts; it was typical of the L.A. late-'60s pop/rock that would retroactively be dubbed "sunshine pop." Boyce, the older of the pair, had a history that long predated the Monkees, co-writing a Top Ten hit for Fats Domino in 1959 ("Be My Guest"). Around the early '60s, he met Hart and the pair spent some time in New York in the mid-'60s, where they (with Wes Farrell) wrote the Jay & the Americans hit "Come a Little Bit Closer." Throughout the first half of the 1960s Boyce wrote or helped write material without any Hart involvement, including hits by Cannon ("Action") and Lee ("Pretty Little Angel Eyes"), while Hart had a piece of the songwriting for Little Anthony & the Imperials' "Hurt So Bad." It wasn't until 1965 that the Boyce-Hart partnership took off in earnest, as they were signed to the Screen Gems publishing company. They knocked...