"Valleri" is a song written by Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart for The Monkees, who had a #3 on BillboardHot 100 hit with it, also spending two weeks at #1 on Cash Box in early 1968. The song also rose to #1 in Canada, and #12 in the UK.
Background
president and music supervisorDon Kirshner asked Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart if they had any "girl's-name" songs to be used in the Monkeestelevision series. After claiming, via telephone, that they had a finished song, Boyce and Hart improvised "Valleri" on their way to Kirshner's office. Kirshner was pleased with their work, and "Valleri" took its place on the Monkees recording schedule, with Boyce and Hart producing the original sessions in August 1966. The original recording was featured in the show's first season in 1967; a staged performance showed Michael Nesmith apparently picking Shelton's guitar solo via cuts between Nesmith with his hands obscured and close-ups of hands playing the solo. While the first version of "Valleri" went unreleased, a few off-air recordings received radio airplay, and later surfaced on bootleg recordings. 16 months later, in December of 1967, the song was rerecorded. According to Bobby Hart, the original 1966 track could not be used because the Musicians Union contracts had already been filed with Boyce and Hart listed as producers. The Monkees, by late 1967, had renegotiated their contracts that included a clause that stated all future recordings would show "Produced by The Monkees" on the label, which meant the song had to be recorded again. Boyce and Hart were approached about coming back to produce a new track. Bobby Hart continues, "Lester Sill came back to us and said, 'They want you to recut Valleri. You can't have producers credit, but we want you to go back in and do it again, making it sound as close to the original as possible.'" The recording was produced by Boyce and Hart on December 26, 1967. When Lester Sill heard the track, he felt it needed something extra, and had a brass section overdubbed on December 28. The remade "Valleri" was released on February 17, 1968. In the United States, the song reached Number Three on the Billboard charts, and Number One in Cash Box. It would be the band's last US top ten hit.
Other appearances
The original recording of "Valleri" was finally released in January 1990, as part of the Rhino Records collection Missing Links, Volume II, along with several other versions of Monkees tunes used in the TV series. Of note, 1960s single and LP releases of the second version, as well as subsequent hits packages of the song, feature a fade out ending. The cold ending version was first released on Arista's "Then And Now, The Best Of The Monkees" in 1986. Subsequent hits packages and reissues of the single on their Flashback label also feature the longer version. Early examples of the Flashback single release have the fade out ending.
Live history
When Davy Jones, Micky Dolenz and Peter Tork reunited in 1986 to tour as The Monkees, they featured "Valleri" frequently in their song lineup. The song mainly consists of four chords ; a bridge offers a touch of harmonic variety.
