Yahoo News The Monkees’ Michael Nesmith: a supremely gifted, innovative songwriter
He didn’t always get his dues, and his relationship with his most famous group was knotty. But the late musician’s contributions to pop and country rock are invaluable
Up until a few weeks before his death, Mike Nesmith was touring as the Monkees with Micky Dolenz, the band’s other surviving member, performing I’m A Believer, Pleasant Valley Sunday, Daydream Believer et al, on what was billed as their farewell tour. There was a certain sweet irony in that.
Nesmith was famously the Monkee most horrified by how prefabricated the Prefab Four were supposed to be. Already a gifted songwriter when he signed on for the TV show that would make him famous (Screen Gems, the company behind The Monkees, bought a couple of Nesmith’s songs for the show, although they turned down Different Drum, subsequently the song that launched Linda Ronstadt’s career) he was furious at the restrictions placed on them by producer Don Kirshner. At the height of their fame, it was Nesmith who bluntly informed a US magazine that the band didn’t play on their records – “I don’t care if we never sell another record … tell the world we don’t record our own music” – and that their current album, More of the Monkees, was “probably the worst album in the history of the world”. It was Nesmith who legendarily became so outraged by Kirshner and lawyer Herb Moelis’ high-handed treatment of the band that he put his fist through the wall of Kirshner’s Beverly Hills hotel room and informed Moelis “that could have been your face”.
It was the first in a number of genuinely groundbreaking things that Mike Nesmith would do: albeit unwittingly, he had singlehandedly minted the figure of the manufactured pop band’s loose cannon, unable to cope with the strictures of being stage-managed, willing to blow the gaff in order to escape them: a recurring character in subsequent pop history.
At the time, Nesmith’s behaviour caused chaos – weirdly, rather than laud him for standing up for himself and his bandmates, the press turned on the Monkees, decrying them as “a disgrace to the pop world” – but he eventually won the fight: Kirshner was fired, and the band took control of their own musical direction.
Nevertheless, Nesmith’s attitude to the Monkees seemed to remain equivocal at best. The brilliant country rock albums he made in the 70s didn’t receive the reaction they deserved, at least at the time: it was as if the Monkees’ manufactured legacy clung to his name, regardless of the music he made. Even when the Monkees’ oeuvre was reassessed as a subject befitting scholarly box sets and the TV series reshown on MTV to huge success, Nesmith remained detached. He would sometimes take part in band reunion tours and recording sessions, but usually declined. When he did agree, said reunions sometimes ended acrimoniously. “He’s always been this aloof, inaccessible person,” protested Davy Jones in 1997, “the fourth part of the jigsaw puzzle that never fit.”
And yet, for the last decade of his life, Nesmith happily participated in projects featuring the Monkees’ name – long tours, and an acclaimed 2016 album Good Times!, which came with songwriting contributions from Paul Weller, Noel Gallagher and Rivers Cuomo of Weezer. On the final tour, according to the band’s latterday manager, Andrew Sandoval, Nesmith was given to making an unscripted speech onstage “about his relationship to the fans … [telling] them he knew and cared about them, and that he liked the Monkees and he liked Monkees fans”.
The question of what changed is an interesting one. Perhaps the deaths of Davy Jones in 2012 and then Peter Tork in 2019 caused Nesmith to rethink his past. Or perhaps he felt that his own reputation as a musician and songwriter had become so established that the spectre of the 60s most famous manufactured boyband no longer mattered.
Since the rise of Americana as a genre, he had come to be hailed as a genuinely innovative figure in the history of country rock. The Byrds had sneered at the Monkees on 1967’s So You Want To Be a Rock and Roll Star, but a couple of months before they released their genre-defining country-rock album Sweetheart of the Rodeo, you could hear Nesmith pushing the Monkees towards his own definition of cosmic American music on Tapioca Tundra, from 1968’s The Birds the Bees and the Monkees, a direction he explored further the following year on Don’t Wait For Me and the glorious Listen To the Band. His 1970s albums – some with the First National Band, some released as solo projects – had long outgrown their small cult following to be acclaimed as masterpieces of the genre. And quite rightly so: listen to 1970’s Magnetic South, or its follow-up Loose Salute, and you don’t hear someone following in the wake of the Flying Burrito Brothers or the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, but a supremely gifted songwriter intent on forging his own eccentric path through a musical fusion.
Just before Covid hit, Nesmith was to be found performing 1972’s …And The Hits Just Keep On Coming live in the company of alt-rock luminaries Ben Gibbard of Death Cab For Cutie and REM alumnus Scott McCaughey. Meanwhile, his 1974 album The Prison – heavy on synthesisers and drum machines, home to the implausibly beautiful Dance Between the Raindrops, and released with an accompanying novella – went from being dismissed as “ghastly” and the work of a “crackpot” to being celebrated as a uniquely innovative triumph. And then there was the story that Nesmith had subsequently “invented” MTV: always fascinated by the potential of pop video, he had sold his video-based 1979 TV show PopClips to Time Warner, who, director William Dear said, “watered down the idea and came up with MTV”. It became so widespread that he gained a reputation as the forefather of the most powerful force in 1980s pop promotion.
It was an entirely deserved and correct rewriting of history, that belatedly gave Nesmith the acclaim due to him. Maybe it altered his view of the band that kickstarted his career and that had, after all, provided a home for a succession of fabulous examples of his skill as a songwriter: not just his early country-rock experiments, but Papa Gene’s Blues; Mary, Mary; You Just May Be The One and Circle Sky, the latter his ferocious contribution to the soundtrack of the cult film Head. Certainly, at the end of his life, Papa Nez, as he styled himself, sounded like a man who had made his peace with his past. “I kind of feel like he wanted to say that he finally got it,” said Sandoval of the speech Nesmith made at the last shows he performed, “that he got why they liked it, whereas he didn’t always.”
• This article was amended on 11 December 2021. In an earlier version Don Kirshner’s surname was misspelled as “Kirscher”.
