Covered: Tommy Boyce & Bobby Hart: 1959-1987

Next up for my Covered series highlighting the careers of great songwriters is the duo of Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart, usually just known as Boyce and Hart. These guys definitely knew how to write catchy songs. They were sometimes successful performing their own music, including having one big hit, but mostly they wrote songs for others.

Boyce was the first to have songwriting success. In 1959, when he was about 20 years old, he wrote the song "Be My Guest," and wanted rock star Fats Domino to sing it. He waited hours outside of Domino's hotel room, and got him to promise to listen to a demo of the song, which Domino actually did. It was a big hit later that year, selling over a million copies. 

Boyce and Hart first met later in 1959. Hart was the same age and was trying to make it as a singer, without much success. Not much happened for a few years, except for Boyce writing another big hit, "Pretty Little Angel Eyes" by Curtis Lee, in 1961. Gradually, Boyce and Hart started writing songs together. Their first big success as a duo was "Come a Little Bit Closer" by Jay & the Americans, which may or may not have reached Number One in the U.S. in 1964, depending on the chart. 

In late 1965, things really got cooking for Boyce and Hart when they got involved with the very start of the Monkees TV show. In fact, at first the duo practically was the Monkees! For the first season of the TV show, and the band's first album, they produced and recorded nearly all of the songs, using their own backing band, and wrote many of the songs as well. The actual Monkees starring in the show only replaced the guide vocals sung by the duo with their own for the final product. However, after the debut album came out, the band's musical supervisor Don Kirshner fired the duo, after claiming they were secretly using studio time for their own projects. That may well have been true. But they continued to write songs for the Monkees, despite no longer being involved with the production and recording. Every Monkees album released in the 1960s had at least one song by them, except for "Head."

Their success with the Monkees, including writing many of their biggest hits, gave them the prominence to have success as a recording duo. Their biggest hit on their own was "I Wonder What She's Doing Tonight," which was released at the end of 1967. It didn't have a big chart peak, only reaching Number Eight in the U.S., but it sold a million copies, which was typical of songs at or near the very top. They also had two more songs make the U.S. Top Forty, "Out and About" and "Alice Long [You're Still My Favorite Girlfriend]." I've included all three of those, as well as one more song they performed together that I like, "We're All Going to the Same Place."

Commercially, the duo peaked in the late 1960s, when they were writing hit after hit for the Monkees, themselves, and other musical acts. But musical trends were changing fast, and their style didn't fit in so well with the 1970s and after. They still did have occasional successes - the last five songs here are from after 1970 - but not so many. And some of those songs I chose at the end were actually written much earlier but not hits until later. "Hurt So Bad," written by Teddy Randazzo, Bobby Weinstein, and Bobby Hart, was a hit for Little Anthony and the Imperials in 1965. But I chose a 1980 version that was a hit for Linda Ronstadt in 1980. Similarly, "Under the Moon of Love," written by Tommy Boyce and Curtis Lee, was a minor hit for Curtis Lee in 1961. But in 1976, the band Showaddywaddy had a Number One hit with it in Britain.

In the mid-1970s, Boyce and Hart joined Davy Jones and Micky Dolenz for a reunion of the Monkees, essentially replacing the two missing original Monkees members. They put out a new album in 1975, but for legal reasons they weren't allowed to call themselves the Monkees, so they went by the name "Dolenz, Jones, Boyce and Hart." But the earlier magic was gone, and their album didn't have much success. I chose not to include any songs from that album. In the 1970s, both Boyce and Hart tried releasing their own solo albums, but to even less success.

Hart is still alive as I write this in 2025. However, Boyce died in 1994. He was suffering from depression, and then had a brain aneurysm, which put him in a lot of pain. So he shot himself with a gun.

Here's a Wikipedia entry about the duo, if you want to know more: 

Boyce and Hart - Wikipedia 

Strangely, Boyce has his own Wikipedia entry, here, but Hart does not:

Tommy Boyce - Wikipedia 

This album is an hour and one minute long. 

01 Be My Guest (Fats Domino)
02 Pretty Little Angel Eyes (Curtis Lee)
03 Come a Little Bit Closer (Jay & the Americans)
04 Peaches 'N' Cream (Ikettes)
05 [Theme From] The Monkees (Monkees)
06 Action, Action, Action (Keith Allison)
07 [I'm Not Your] Stepping Stone (Paul Revere & the Raiders)
08 The Last Train to Clarksville (Monkees)
09 I Wonder What She's Doing Tonight (Tommy Boyce & Bobby Hart)
10 She (Del Shannon)
11 Out and About (Tommy Boyce & Bobby Hart)
12 Words (Monkees)
13 I Wanna Be Free (Keith Allison)
14 Alice Long [You're Still My Favorite Girlfriend] (Tommy Boyce & Bobby Hart)
15 Valleri (Monkees)
16 We're All Going to the Same Place (Tommy Boyce & Bobby Hart)
17 Tear Drop City (Monkees)
18 Something's Wrong with Me (Austin Roberts)
19 Keep On Singing (Helen Reddy)
20 Under the Moon of Love (Showaddywaddy)
21 Hurt So Bad (Linda Ronstadt)
22 Dominoes (Robbie Nevil)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/YWEcVX4i

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/q01I8u3QJF4SfvS/file

I don't know the details of the cover photo, but based on the clothes, I'd guess it's from around 1967. That's Boyce on the left and Hart on the right (with the red jacket).