Monkees won't attend Davy Jones funeral

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The remaining members of the Monkees will not say goodbye to late bandmate Davy Jones at his low-key Florida burial.

In an interview with Billboard.com, band drummer and singer Micky Dolenz says he, Peter Tork and Mike Nesmith would not attend the ceremony because it would run counter to the family's wish for a private funeral.

"My understanding is they want to avoid a media circus … the family wants to keep it very, very low-key and very, very private," Dolenz said to Billboard "And you can imagine as soon as one or two or any of us were to show up, it would very quickly be degraded into something that I don't think his immediate family would want to deal with. So I'm kind of respecting their wishes, whatever their wishes may be."

Jones' spokeswoman Helen Kensick said that while the family is planning a low-key funeral, there will also be public memorials in New York and the U.K., though no dates have been announced for the public events.

Dolenz added that he was shocked by Jones' death, who was the youngest of the musicians "There are a lot of people who are grieving pretty hard. The Monkees obviously had a following… and so did [Jones\] on his own. So I'm not surprised, but I was flattered and honored to be considered one of his friends and a cohort in Monkee business. It's like losing a brother," he said.

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Dolenz hopes the surviving Monkees will come together at the proposed public memorials, but says any future work under the Monkees name is "a huge if."

"We've had a sort of unspoken, I guess, agreement over the years that if it's just two of us getting together, we never called it the Monkees," Dolenz explains. "And you have to remember that the four of us do not and did not and have never owned the rights to the Monkees; we cannot use the name the Monkees without permission from whoever happens to have the rights at any given time. A lot of people don't realize that. I can see us getting together to do a memorial concert, of course, but right now I can't imagine anything else happening without the Manchester Cowboy."

The last time the group played together was in 1997 in the U.K. to promote their reunion album titled "Justus." Jones, Dolenz and Tork toured to commemorate their 45th anniversary in 2011.

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