Micky Dolenz
Tulsa Theater
May 7, 2026
Conversations about rock and roll often pivot on the overrated-underrated axis. The legacy arena band your neighbor can't stand. The obscure indie act your coworker swears made the greatest record of the ’90s. We love this, the tussle and friction, and the chance, above all, for real discovery. Because sometimes it's true: sometimes a band you dismissed at 15 and never took another look at—sometimes they had the jams.
We are talking now about the Monkees, a band I first heard about in punchlines. In Dumb and Dumber, Lloyd Christmas, scrolling through a jukebox, finds a Monkees song and talks about what a huge influence they were on the Beatles. He's an idiot, right? Only an idiot would think something like that.
I am not going to argue the Monkees were an influence on the Beatles, but I am going to argue they are the most perfectly underrated band in rock and roll history, first, because of how roundly dismissed they were, and second, because it turns out they really did have the jams all along.
Micky Dolenz, last surviving Monkee, played the Tulsa Theater this past Thursday night, and it was a total scream. Dolenz has put together what amounts to a stellar Monkees cover band and set himself to work as its frontman. He's 81, and he walked onstage in a fedora, purple-tinted glasses, a gray suit over a pale blue teeshirt, and a fuchsia scarf. He looked like Elton John playing a dapper private eye.
I took my wife, a Monkees fan from the early ’80s, who discovered the band on MTV. It gets a little lost in history, but in the first days of Music Television, when the channel played almost exclusively music videos, one of the only things they played that wasn't videos were episodes of The Monkees.