Hit Songwriter for the Monkees and Others Was 86

Bobby Hart, a songwriter who co-wrote some of the greatest hits of the Monkees, and a performer in his own right who made the top 10 as a member of the duo Boyce and Hart, died Wednesday at age 86. His wife MaryAnn said that her husband’s death came after a long illness.

Hart was associated throughout his career with co-writer Tommy Boyce, his official partner at Screen Gems/Columbia. Together, they wrote a series of huge hits for the Monkees, including the theme song for the TV series that spawned the group, “(Theme From) The Monkees,” as well as the 1966 No. 1 “Last Train to Clarksville” and follow-up singles such as “Valleri” ( a No. 3 Hot 100 hit), “I Wanna Be Free,” “(I’m Not Your) Steppin’ Stone” and “Words.”

Mickey Dolenz issued a statement of sympathy Sunday morning: “Another great is gone. Bobby Hart, who along with Tommy Boyce, penned and produced some of the Monkees’ greatest hits not only made a vital contribution to the popular success of the Monkees, but even more importantly to the essence, the very spirit of the entire venture. His talent, charisma, good humor and calmness in the face of what at times was nothing less than a maniacal roller coaster ride often brought a sense of peace that heartened everyone around him. He was the stillness that is the eye of the hurricane.”

The “Monkees” theme was not their only indelible TV song; the duo also wrote the theme for the long-running soap “Days of Our Lives.”

Another song that became a standard, “Hurt So Bad,” was first a No. 10 pop hit for Little Anthony and the Imperials, before being covered by acts from the Lettermen to Linda Ronstadt (whose cover reached No. 8 in 1980). The duo’s other songs included “Come a Little Bit Closer” for Jay and the Americans, a No. 3 Billboard hit in 1964.

Hart was also an Oscar nominee, with “Over You,” a song from “Tender Mercies,” in which Robert Duvall portrayed a country singer, being put up for an Academy Award in 1983; his co-writer for that was Austin Roberts.

Although Boyce and Hart remained best known for helping establish the Monkees as actual charttoppers as well as TV stars, they found success on their own as a duo, releasing three albums and finding success with one big hit, amid a series of lesser-charting singles. Their gold-selling single “I Wonder What She’s Doing Tonight” reached No. 8 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1967.

Boyce and Hart also made a series of television appearances during their brief heyday as a duo in the 1960s, appearing on “Bewitched,” “The Flying Nun” and “I Dream of Jeannie.” (In a clip taken from their “Bewitched” episode, seen below, the dialogue centers around coverage of the duo’s career in Variety.)

As a duo, they were done by the end of the 1960s, but in the mid-1970s they came back together in the studio alongside ex-Monkees members Micky Dolenz and Davy Jones for what was widely seen as an attempt to form a new version of the Monkees, dubbed Dolenz, Jones, Boyce & Hart. The supergroup did not have any super success on the charts and the collaboration only lasted for one 1976 studio album; they had a somewhat greater impact as a touring act.

Hart played on some of the hits he co-wrote with Boyce as well, such as playing the Vox continental organ on the Monkees’ version of “(I’m Not Your) Steppin’ Stone.” That song was actually first recorded by the Liverpool Five and then Paul Revere & the Raiders before the Monkees took it to No. 20 on the Hot 100.

Boyce and Hart were also part of a campaign in the 1960s to lower the voting age to 18, releasing a single titled “L.U.V.,” which stood for Let Us Vote.

Tommy Boyce died by suicide in 1994 at age 55.

Bobby Hart was born Robert Luke Harshman on Feb. 18, 1939, in Phoenix, Arizona. He changed his name at the behest of a manager when he started a brief career as a solo artist with the 1960 single “Girl in the Window.”

“It was a time when there were songwriters who did nothing more than write songs for artists who didn’t write songs for themselves,” Hart explained in an interview with Gary James for Classic Bands. “Tommy and I had our first success in New York. I came from Phoenix to Los Angeles at 18, but I met Tommy when we were the same age and we became friends out here (California), but then we had a chance to go to New York and had our first success back there with ‘Come A Little Bit Closer’ by Jay and the Americans, and a Chubby Checker record and Little Anthony and the Imperials. We got signed to Screen Gems Columbia Music and came back to the West Coast in 1965. We were just set up with all these projects and basically at that point were seeing ourselves as short order cooks, if you will — whatever was needed and whenever it was needed. If Paul Revere and 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 and the Raiders record and demo it and get it to them in three days. That was our life in 1965.”

He discussed playing with as well as writing for the Monkees. “The songs we produced for the Monkees, we used my band, the Candy Store Prophets, and augmented it with a couple of guitar players named Louie Shelton and Wayne Erwin, and Tommy and I also played and sang background on ’em. It was a different sound than we would’ve gotten if we had used the Wrecking Crew guys, the regular studio guys that played on almost everything else. We loved those guys and we did use them on other sessions for other artists, but the Monkees, it really was a garage band, and one that Tommy and I played with in one form or another for four or five years.”

Hart told Sunshine Factory about the initial assignment to write for the “Monkees” television show, before the roles had even been cast.

“One day, our boss at Screen Gems, Lester Sill, said, ‘I want you to go over and meet with these guys on the lot, Columbia Pictures lot. They have an idea to do a pilot for a television show.’ So Tommy and I went over and had a meeting with Bert Schneider of Raybert Productions. Of course, his partner was Bob Rafelson. And he explained what they wanted to do, a show called ‘The Monkees,’ which was basically ‘A Hard Day’s Night,’ Beatles on American television, a lot of madcap visuals, and we got it right away, and we convinced him right in that first meeting that we knew exactly what the counterpart musically should be. So he gave us the job of coming up with the theme song and two other songs that they needed for the pilot of ‘The Monkees.’

“We didn’t see a script,” he said, but knew “it should be something that might sound a little Beatle-esque but was not a complete ripoff of the Beatles, something that encompassed the new wave of mod music that was coming from England. And so, of course, they needed the theme song first, and 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.’”

Hart continued, “Tommy was a great collaborator, and we worked really well together. 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. We both had a background of writing complete songs, so we both did lyrics, and we both did melodies. … And then they needed a song where, in the pilot show, Davy Jones would be walking on the beach, kind of reminiscing about a failed romance that he had. And so we had a song that we’d already written called ‘I Wanna Be Free,’ and we envisioned that that could be something that could be kind of haunting and appropriate for that scene.”

In 2015, Hart published an autobiography, “Psychedelic Bubble Gum: Boyce & Hart, the Monkees, and Turning Mayhem Into Miracles,” co-written with Glenn Ballantyne.

More recently, he published another book co-penned by Ballantyne, this time focusing on his spiritual practice and not his career. “Yoga and Your Hidden Soul Power: A New Path to Love, Happiness, and Abundance Using Yoga’s Ancient Niyama Wisdom,” released in 2024, expounded on his advocacy for Kriya Yoga and the teachings of Paramahansa Yogananda, founder of the Self-Realization Fellowship and author of “Autobiography of a Yogi.”

Hart married MaryAnn in 1980 and they shared a strong interest in meditation retreats. “Bobby’s songwriting work accurately articulated youthful energy, and emotions to the world,” his wife said in a statement, “but his soul work brought happiness, contentment, and peace into our home.”

Along with MaryAnn, Hart is survived by sons Bret and Bobby Jr., from a former marriage to Becky; several grandchildren and great-grandchildren; and his sisters Deborah and Rebecca.

A rep says Hart’s memorial service will be private, to be followed by a public celebration in spring 2026 in Los Angeles. In lieu of flowers, the family suggests donations be directed to the Self-Realization Fellowship.