A musician and songwriter, Hart didn’t have a lot of success as a performer, but he had a knack for songwriting, especially when collaborating with others. Most notably, he worked with Sidney “Tommy” Boyce. Hart served in the U.S. Army, and after discharge he went to Los Angeles to make his fortune, and it was there he met Boyce. Each were writing songs for others; Boyce most notably wrote “Be My Guest” for Fats Domino, which was a massive hit. Together they wrote other hits for several artists, including Chubby Checker, Jay & the Americans, Paul Revere & the Raiders, and the theme song for the soap opera, Days of Our Lives.
Essentially, Hart said in an interview years later, he and Boyce “were seeing ourselves as short order cooks, if you will: whatever was needed and whenever it was needed. If Paul Revere & the Raiders were coming up to record in three days and they needed a record, we would do something that we thought would sound like a Paul Revere & the Raiders record and demo it and get it to them in three days. That was our life in 1965.” It worked well, and set them up for a big break. “One day, our boss at Screen Gems, Lester Sill, said, ‘I want you to go over and meet with these guys on the [Columbia Pictures] lot. They have an idea to do a pilot for a television show.’” The show needed a lot of songs that fit in to the contemporary scene. The show: The Monkees. Boyce and Hart were brought in before the TV show was even cast. They would write songs, record them with their own band, singing the parts themselves, and when they were ready to be recorded for TV, the actors would re-do the singing parts.
But first, one song was especially important. “We actually wrote that by walking down the street from our house on Woodrow Wilson down to a little park in the Cahuenga Pass. And while walking, we started snapping our fingers and kinda got that that would be a good groove for the piece. So by the time we got there, we basically had it in our minds that it would be ‘Here we come, walking down the street.’ And then we envisioned the drumroll from the Dave Clark Five record [“Catch Us If You Can”]. That would take us into the chorus, ‘Hey, hey, we’re The Monkees!’” It was a hit. They wrote most of the songs for the show’s first season, most notably the smash hit, “Last Train to Clarksville”. They were not the only songwriters for the group; among others, Neil Diamond also penned songs for the show, along with the band members.
Despite writing hit after hit for the TV band, Boyce and Hart didn’t get along very well with the show’s musical supervisor, Don Kirshner, and it finally came to a head and they were fired. That came at a good time to not be associated with the show, since word got out that Kirshner was not allowing the band’s stars — Davy Jones, Micky Dolenz, Michael Nesmith, and Peter Tork — to perform the music themselves, nor control what songs were released as records for sale. The stars won out and Kirshner was fired. Boyce and Hart were worried that the band, which was starting to tour as The Monkees, might have animosity toward them, but they went to one of the concerts anyway, and were recognized. Davy Jones called them up to the stage, introducing them to the audience: “These are the fellows who wrote our great hits — Tommy and Bobby!” Every original Monkees album (except for the soundtrack for Head and the band’s 1996 comeback album, Justus) included Boyce and Hart songs.
Boyce and Hart finally found some success recording their own music, releasing three albums (Test Patterns, I Wonder What She’s Doing Tonight, and It’s All Happening on the Inside), as well as getting guest spots on popular TV shows as themselves, including Bewitched, The Flying Nun, and I Dream of Jeannie — which all “happened” to be produced by Screen Gems, which also had produced The Monkees. They even teamed up with Jones and Dolenz and toured together, playing Boyce and Hart songs written for the group, but they couldn’t bill themselves as The Monkees as that trademark was locked up. [An album resulted: Dolenz, Jones, Boyce, Hart *] The four even did a TV special, The Great Golden Hits of the Monkees Show. According to the Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock & Roll, Boyce and Hart wrote more than 300 songs together, and sold more than 42 million records. They were unquestionably a massive success despite being relatively unknown.
Still, Boyce struggled with depression, and shot himself to death in 1994 at 55. “Tommy was a great collaborator, and we worked really well together,” Hart said. “He was a mile-a-minute, throwing out ideas, and I was more the structural guy who was saying, ‘Hey, wait a minute, those five that just went by, forget about, but that one there, that one sticks. Let’s see what we can do with that.’ And that’s the way we generally wrote.” Hart published his autobiography, Psychedelic Bubble Gum: Boyce & Hart, the Monkees, and Turning Mayhem Into Miracles, with Dolenz writing the foreword. Hart died September 10 after “a long illness.” He was 86. Dolenz is the only survivor of The Monkees; he’s 80.