[Mike Mercury]

from Wikipee:

The song, written by Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart and recorded at RCA Victor Studio B in Hollywood on July 25, 1966. Lead vocals were performed by the Monkees' drummer Micky Dolenz. "Last Train to Clarksville" was featured in seven episodes of the band's television series, the most for any Monkees song.

The song has been compared to the Beatles' "Paperback Writer", particularly the "jangly" guitar sound, the chord structure, and the vocal harmonies. The Beatles' song had been number one in the US charts three months earlier.

The lyrics tell of a man phoning the woman he loves, urging her to meet him at a train station in Clarksville before he must leave, possibly forever. There was no explicit reference to war in the song but its last line, "And I don't know if I'm ever coming home", was an indirect reference about a soldier leaving for the Vietnam War.

It has often been presumed that the song refers to Clarksville, Tennessee, which is near Fort Campbell, Kentucky, the home of the 101st Airborne Division, which was then serving in Vietnam. However, according to songwriter Bobby Hart, that was not the case. Instead, according to Hart, "We were just looking for a name that sounded good. There's a little town in northern Arizona I used to go through in the summer on the way to Oak Creek Canyon called Clarkdale. We were throwing out names, and when we got to Clarkdale, we thought Clarksville sounded even better. We didn't know it at the time, [but] there is an Army base near the town of Clarksville, Tennessee — which would have fit the bill fine for the storyline. We couldn't be too direct with The Monkees. We couldn't really make a protest song out of it — we kind of snuck it in."

The lead guitar part was written and played by Hollywood session musician Louie Shelton who would eventually become a mainstay on Monkees recordings.