Oh what can it mean?

Is it possible to be driven stark raving mad by music? To be launched into lunacy by a lyric?

I think the Monkees are driving me insane. Or, more precisely, Davy Jones. Or, to be anally accurate, just this chorus: "Cheer up, sleepy Jean! Oh, what can it mean? To a daydream believer and a Homecoming Queen." That's all I know. Just those 17 words, sung in an English accent to a jaunty melody, repeated non-stop in my head, all my waking hours, since Davy died on February 29. It's 12 days later. I am experiencing a pop music version of Chinese water torture. No, no, that's where they drip water on you slowly, right? This isn't a slow drip. This is nonstop sleepy Jean and the Homecoming Queen. I don't even know what the damn song is about, for pete's sake.

Davy Jones was my first media-induced love. I was 6, and like all my classmates, I watched The Monkees on Channel 5 after school. I can still sing the entire Monkees theme song. But then, I can still sing all the lyrics to The Brady Bunch and The Partridge Family theme songs. I'd feel ashamed, except I know from careful objective surveys of my demographic (i.e. late-night song fests with friends when we're slightly drunk), that every white middle-class American woman my age can do the same.

But before Greg, Peter, Bobby, Marcia, Jan, and Cindy, before Keith, Laurie, Danny, the little kid who no one ever remembers (they did change the actor after the first year), and Tracy, there were the Monkees. Like every girl in the first grade of Western Suburbs Christian School, I picked a favorite Monkee, the man I would marry if I could. That was the question: Which Monkee would you marry? Mind you, we were 6. We were too young to know there are other things one can do with men besides marry them. And although it was 1966, we lived in the white bread western suburbs of Chicago: "The '60s" were still emphatically confined to the city.

And yet. . . I do remember the utter anarchic joy of that goofy theme song--"'cos we're the young generation, and we've got something to say--hey hey we're the Monkees!"--with the four of them on the tv screen jumping and laughing. Did I know the word "liberation" at age 6? I'm not sure, but even if I didn't know the label for what I was feeling, there is no doubt that I felt it, watching the antics (not a word I often have use for, but The Monkees' episodes really rather defined the term) of four silly guys, the sense of possibility, of boundaries crashing, of something going on. And the complete, total, absolute confidence that this something had nothing whatsoever to do with my parents.

Of course, it's more than slightly embarrassing to have one's experience of the '60s summed up by the Monkees rather than the Beatles or the Stones. But such was the sad fate of those of us born in the very twilight of the baby boom. The 60s weren't really ours. They belonged to older siblings, or to our young aunts and uncles. We got the trickle-down 60s: the Monkees, the fringed suede jacket I wore in fifth grade, the Cowsills, the black-light poster I won as a prize for selling magazines to raise money for the school development fund in the 7th grade: "I do my thing and you do your thing and if by chance we find each other, it's beautiful."

So back in first grade, my best friend Wendy chose Mickey, and I selected Davy, but since I was only 6, I never actually owned a Monkees record. My mother would never have spent money on such a thing and I didn't have any independent income. Or a record player. So my Monkees occurred entirely on tv, which explains why I know only one chorus of a Davy Jones song. And if that damn song doesn't get out of my head soon, I am going to go utterly, absolutely, friggin' insane.

Rest in peace, Davy Jones. And hey, Sleepy Jean, Homecoming Queen, y'all hush up, now.

Oh what can it mean. . . for a daydream believah and a AUGHHHHH.