Bobby Hart, who co-wrote many Monkees hits, dies at age 86

Musician-songwriter Bobby Hart, half of a composer duo who penned the Monkees’ theme song and many of the group’s mega-hits, has died.

He was 86.

His friend and co-author, Glenn Ballantyne, said Hart died at home in Los Angeles, amid a health decline that began after he broke his hip last year.

Hart and collaborator Tommy Boyce each had numerous music credits to their name when they were tapped to help create a television show promoted by Don Kirchner titled “The Monkees” that would comedically chronicle “the misadventures of a struggling rock group,” as IMDB described it. Though Micky Dolenz, Davy Jones, Michael Nesmith and Peter Tork were actors hired to play the roles, they quickly became a pop phenomenon in their own right, thanks in no small part to Hart and Boyce.

Together the two penned the group’s first hit, “Last Train to Clarksville,” as well as the Monkees’ theme song with its opening line, “Here we come, walkin’ down the street,” leading up to the rollicking catchphrase, “Hey, hey, we’re the Monkees.”

They produced the debut album and used their own backup band, the Candy Store Prophets, as the session players. Hart and Boyce wrote six songs on that debut album, also titled “The Monkees,” which flew to the top of the Billboard 200 chart at the end of 1966 and stayed there for 13 weeks. They also contributed to all but one of the group’s subsequent albums, including “More of the Monkees,” which spent 18 weeks at the top as well as “Headquarters” and “Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones Ltd.”

The duo had a hand in making the Monkees the only group ever to have four albums on the Billboard 200 chart at once during a calendar year, an unmatched feat still enshrined in the Guinness Book of World Records.

The composing partners also wrote the theme to “Days of Our Lives” and ventured into acting, with guest spots on “Bewitched” and “I Dream of Jeannie,” among others. Hart continued making music after Boyce’s death in 1994.

Though it lasted just two seasons, from 1966-68, “The Monkees” left an indelible mark, due also to Hart and Boyce’s musical machinations. Last week Dolenz, the group’s only surviving member, marked the 59^th anniversary of the show’s Sept. 12, 1966, debut in an Instagram post.

“I always credit them not only with writing many of our biggest hits, but, as producers, being instrumental in creating the unique Monkee sound we all know and love,” Dolenz wrote in a forward to Hart’s 2015 memoir, “Psychedelic Bubblegum.”

The Monkees’ also mourned the loss of “the songwriting dynamo who was half of the duo responsible for so many Monkees songs,” in an Instagram post, adding, “He will be remembered for his incredible talent and his innate spirituality.”

With News Wire Services