Sometimes I play a game in my head: name the five best American rock bands of the '60s. My list goes: The Velvet Underground, The Byrds, The Beach Boys, The Doors, and then I stall on the fifth. Creedence? The Band - although they're mostly Canadian. Simon & Garfunkel? Jefferson Airplane? The Lovin' Spoonful? But I plump for The Monkees. Song for song they are the best pop group of the period, and their story is one of the most intriguing. The myth which shadows them is that they couldn't play, they weren't really a band and their music was sugary top-ten fodder. Yet the excellent reissues of their first four albums with bonus discs, released by Rhino Records in the past couple of years, show a band with real depth - one that not only crystallised the very best qualities of west-coast pop but also pulled off one of the greatest inside coups in showbiz history.

The bones of the group, its talent and temperament, goes back to the two men who put it together. Bert Schneider and Bob Rafelson, who hatched and pitched the idea of a television show based on the wacky antics of The Beatles in A Hard Day's Night and Help!, were west-coast hipsters with the pulse of the '60s within them. Their off-beat approach meant that the four actors/musicians they chose to play the band members in the series were not going to be the square-jawed, Brylcreemed types who usually played anyone under 30 in the TV shows and movies of the time. Those they picked from the 437 applicants to the Variety ad calling for "four insane boys" sealed the fate of the band, the show, the music and all those who worked with them. Put simply, if almost any people outside of Michael Nesmith, Micky Dolenz, Davy Jones and Peter Tork had made up The Monkees, we would now have only a slim greatest-hits album to evaluate from a show that might have lasted a year.

The casting net was thrown wide. Tork was a Greenwich Village folkie, Nesmith a wry Texan singer-songwriter, Dolenz an LA-based former child actor, most famous for playing Corky in the late-'50s TV series Circus Boy, and Jones was an English-born Broadway singer with roots in vaudeville. That was the band. Actually, it wasn't a band initially because they were only actors playing a band, but then life began imitating art and they became a touring and recording group beyond the one they were hired to be, and they kept their name, The Monkees. So, if nothing else, long before MTV, American Idol and every ‘reality' show blurring on- and off-camera life through the prism of mass entertainment, The Monkees were pioneers. And this being the '60s, and with the corporate screws not yet so down on the younger generation, the band had room to wriggle and rebel, leading to some fantastic music, some eye-popping TV, and finally a movie named Head that starred Frank Zappa and Victor Mature and began with the four Monkees busting a police cordon and diving off a bridge to their symbolic death.

The first four albums of their squashed (1966-70) recording career can be neatly cut in two. The Monkees ('66) and More of The Monkees ('67) are straight-up pop albums from what could be called the ‘fabricated' era, when the instruments were mostly played by studio musicians and the production and direction of the records was out of the band's hands. Notwithstanding this, both albums are crunchy, hit-laden collections of great songs. There's a ridiculous number of hooks, and an exuberance and glee that is forever tuned to the golden pop of the last half of '66. The Monkees has about six potential hit singles on it, yet only one was released: ‘The Last Train to Clarksville'. More of The Monkees, which followed very swiftly, has ‘I'm a Believer' and ‘(I'm Not Your) Steppin' Stone' (later covered by the Sex Pistols), plus ‘Mary Mary', ‘She' and ‘Look Out (Here Comes Tomorrow)' as further hits - if only there had been time to release them.