The song was written by the songwriting duo of
Tommy Boyce and
Bobby Hart. Boyce has said that the song's opening guitar part (played by
Louis Shelton) was an attempt to emulate the type of memorable and clearly identifiable riff that
the Beatles had used in songs such as "
I Feel Fine," "
Day Tripper" and "
Paperback Writer". Hart knew that the Monkees'
TV series was being pitched as a music/comedy series in the spirit of the Beatles' film ''
A Hard Day's Night,'' and he was hoping that by emulating the Beatles the song might become a successful single. The lyrics tell of a man phoning the woman whom he loves, urging her to meet him at a train station in Clarksville before he must leave, possibly forever. There is 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 to a soldier leaving for the
Vietnam War. Hart has denied any connection by the song to the city of
Clarksville, Tennessee, near
Fort Campbell, the home of the
101st Airborne Division that was then serving in Vietnam. 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." ==Recording==