Bobby Hart, who alongside his best friend, Tommy Boyce, gave a musical identity and several hit songs to a fictional television rock group called the Monkees, died on Wednesday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 86.
The band announced the death on social media.
The Monkees were invented for “The Monkees,” an NBC sitcom about the high jinks of a struggling rock band. The show went on the air in September 1966, and a debut album, also called “The Monkees,” was released the next month.
Supposedly the work of the band, the record was actually produced by Mr. Hart and Mr. Boyce with studio musicians. They also wrote most of the record’s hits, like “Last Train to Clarksville” and the Monkees’ television musical theme.
In December of that year, Mr. Hart ran into Michael Nesmith, one of the actors who played a Monkee, after a concert.
“We’re bigger than the Beatles,” a stunned Mr. Nesmith said, “and I can’t even play the guitar.”
He was right. In 1967, the Monkees sold 35 million records — twice as many as the Beatles and the Rolling Stones combined.
Mr. Hart and Mr. Boyce lived together in a Hollywood Hills home they called “the Boat House” for its marine shape. They worked best under impossible-seeming deadlines, and they were inspired by other pop music of their era, leading to a style frequently derided as “bubble gum.”
Mr. Hart promoted an alternative term in the title of his 2015 memoir: “Psychedelic Bubble Gum: Boyce & Hart, the Monkees and Turning Mayhem Into Miracles,” written with Glenn Ballantyne. It is a chronicle of a surprisingly intense moment of stardom, with anecdotes featuring musicians like Jimi Hendrix and Leon Russell as well as other figures of the era like Hugh Hefner and Zsa Zsa Gabor.
The two songwriters first discovered each other as kindred spirits in Hollywood in the late 1950s. They were both around 20, born a few months apart. They were each music lovers with big dreams born to working class families. They even shared an exact weight and height: 127 pounds, 5-foot-8-and-a-half.
Their lucky break came about indirectly, though Mr. Hart only learned that detail later, he wrote in his memoir. He and Mr. Boyce were living in New York. George Goldner, a powerhouse of the record industry, met Mr. Boyce’s girlfriend at a party and began courting her. Through a high-level connection, he got Mr. Boyce placed on the fledgling Monkees project — which required Mr. Boyce to move to Los Angeles. Mr. Boyce and the girlfriend broke up, but he brought Mr. Hart with him onto the new job.
The two young men came up with the Monkees’ theme music on a walk to the park, and they developed a friendly but savvy relationship with the actors. They realized, for example, that by recording each member of the Monkees singing individually, they could avoid the actors horsing around and trying to impress one another.
Musically, Mr. Boyce and Mr. Hart struck a fine balance between several imperatives. Study the Beatles, but don’t imitate them to the point of absurdity; catch the spirit of the ’60s in the use of Indian instruments and lyrics about “the young generation,” but don’t be too challenging.
Some veteran producers became frustrated trying to make the Monkees into a real band and gave up. Mr. Boyce and Mr. Hart persisted. “To us,” Mr. Hart wrote, “it was the chance of a lifetime.”
Robert Luke Harshman was born on Feb. 18, 1939, in Phoenix. Bobby formed a lifelong relationship with the Hammond B-3 electric organ by playing it in the Pentecostal church his family attended.
He grew up idolizing rockabilly radio D.J.s like Ray Odom, and he set up a make-believe radio station in his bedroom.
During a stint as an Army reservist, he got himself on the Army radio, where he announced the titles of “endless John Philip Sousa songs,” he wrote in his memoir.
He spent years working in record-label printing shops before he could support himself as a songwriter. During an attempt to make it as a solo artist, a producer told him that “Harshman” was too long and that henceforth “Hart” would be his name. It stuck.
The Monkees would end up rebelling against their corporate minders and demanding to make their own music. In Mr. Hart’s estimation, that led to the fizzling of the group. But in the 1970s, he and Mr. Boyce joined in as musicians with a couple of Monkees, Micky Dolenz and Davy Jones, for a wide-ranging reunion tour.
Among Mr. Boyce and Mr. Hart’s other notable successes was composing the theme music for “Days of Our Lives,” the soap opera that began in 1965 and is still running today.
Mr. Hart had two sons, Bobby Jr. and Bret, with his first wife, Becky Brill. That marriage ended in divorce. He married MaryAnn Hart in 1980. His wife and children survive him, along with two sisters, Deborah and Rebecca, and several grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
After Mr. Hart and Mr. Boyce’s manager and mentor stole money from them around 1970, Mr. Boyce grew depressed and quit the music industry, Mr. Hart wrote. Mr. Boyce killed himself in 1994. His widow, Caroline Boyce, has maintained a community of fans of the songwriting duo.
Two kinds of listening enabled his and Mr. Boyce’s success, Mr. Hart wrote. First, it was listening to the Top 40 chart, with its “instant updates on the kind of music the kids were loving and buying.” Second, Mr. Hart continued, “we had learned to listen to conversations, our own and others, our subconscious minds constantly scanning the soundtracks of our lives for that elusive song title or catchy line.”
Alex Traub is a reporter for The Times who writes obituaries.
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