Michael Nesmith

Robert Michael Nesmith (December 30, 1942 – December 10, 2021) was an American musician, songwriter, and actor. He was best known as a member of the Monkees and co-star of their TV series of the same name (1966–1968). His songwriting credits with the Monkees include "Mary, Mary", "The Girl I Knew Somewhere", "Tapioca Tundra", "Circle Sky" and "Listen to the Band". Additionally, his song "Different Drum" became a hit for the Stone Poneys featuring Linda Ronstadt.

After leaving the Monkees in 1970, Nesmith continued his successful songwriting and performing career, first with the seminal country rock group the First National Band, with which he had a top-40 hit, "Joanne" (1970). As a solo artist, he scored an international hit with the song "Rio" (1977). He often played a custom-built Gretsch 12-string electric guitar both with the Monkees and afterward.

In 1974, Nesmith founded Pacific Arts, a multimedia production and distribution company, through which he helped pioneer the music video format, winning the first Grammy Award for Video of the Year for his hour-long comedy/variety program, Elephant Parts (1981). He created one of the first American television programs dedicated to music videos, PopClips, which aired on Nickelodeon in 1980, and was soon afterward approached to help develop the MTV network, though he declined. Nesmith was also an executive producer of the film Repo Man (1984).

Early life

Nesmith was born in Houston on December 30, 1942. He was an only child, his parents, Warren Nesmith and Bette Nesmith (née McMurry), divorced when Nesmith was only four. Following the divorce, Bette raised Nesmith as a single mother. Bette McMurry took jobs involving clerical work to design work, eventually attaining the position of executive secretary at Texas Bank and Trust. She went on to invent the typewriter correction fluid known as Liquid Paper. Over the next 25 years, Bette Graham (she had remarried in 1962) built the Liquid Paper Corporation into an international company, which she sold to Gillette in 1979. She died in 1980 at the age of 56.

Nesmith attended Thomas Jefferson High School in Dallas, where he participated in choral and drama activities; he left high school without graduating and enlisted in the U.S. Air Force in 1960. He completed basic training at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, was trained as an aircraft mechanic at Sheppard Air Force Base in Wichita Falls, Texas, and was permanently stationed at Clinton-Sherman Air Force Base near Burns Flat, Oklahoma. He obtained a General Educational Development certificate and was honorably discharged in 1962.

Music career

After Nesmith's tour of duty in the Air Force, his mother and stepfather gave him a guitar for Christmas. Learning as he went, he played solo and in a series of working bands, performing folk, country, and occasionally rock and roll. He enrolled in San Antonio College, where he met John London and began a musical collaboration. They won the first San Antonio College talent award, performing a mixture of standard folk songs and a few of Nesmith's original songs. Nesmith began to write more songs and poetry, then moved to Los Angeles and began singing in folk clubs around the city. He served as the "Hootmaster" for the Monday night hootenanny at The Troubadour, a West Hollywood nightclub that featured new artists.

Randy Sparks from the New Christy Minstrels offered Nesmith a publishing deal for his songs. Nesmith began his recording career in 1963 by releasing a single on the Highness label. He followed this in 1965 with a one-off single released on Edan Records followed by two more recorded singles; one was titled "The New Recruit" under the name "Michael Blessing", released on Colpix Records—coincidentally this was also the label of Davy Jones, though the two men did not meet until the Monkees were formed.

Barry Freedman told him about upcoming auditions for a new TV series called The Monkees. In October 1965, Nesmith's confident, carefree and laid-back manner impressed the producers and he landed the role as the wool-hat-wearing guitar player "Mike" in the show, which required real-life musical talent for writing, instrument playing, singing, and performing in live concerts as part of the Monkees band.

Nesmith's "Mary, Mary" was recorded by the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, then by the Monkees themselves on their second LP in 1967, and subsequently reworked by rap group Run DMC in the mid-1980s. His "Different Drum" and "Some of Shelly's Blues" were later recorded by Linda Ronstadt and the Stone Poneys, in 1967 and 1968 respectively. "Pretty Little Princess", written in 1965, was recorded by Frankie Laine and released as a single in 1968 on ABC Records. Later, "Some of Shelly's Blues" and "Propinquity (I've Just Begun to Care)" were made popular by the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band on their 1970 album Uncle Charlie & His Dog Teddy.

The Monkees

From 1965 to early 1970, Nesmith, along with Micky Dolenz, Peter Tork, and Davy Jones, was a member of the television pop-rock band the Monkees, created for the television situation comedy of the same name. Nesmith won his role largely by appearing nonchalant when he auditioned. He rode his motorcycle to the audition, and wore a bobble hat to keep his hair out of his eyes; producers Bob Rafelson and Bert Schneider remembered the "wool hat guy" and called Nesmith back.

Once he was cast, Screen Gems bought his songs so they could be used in the show. Many of the songs Nesmith wrote for the Monkees, such as "The Girl I Knew Somewhere", "Mary, Mary", and "Listen to the Band" became minor hits. One song he wrote, "You Just May Be the One", is in mixed meter, interspersing 5/4 bars into an otherwise 4/4 structure.

Even before Colgems and Don Kirshner's surreptitious release of the second Monkees album, More of the Monkees, without the knowledge or consent of the four musician-actors, they came to be frustrated by their studio-manufactured "bubblegum" image. Within weeks of the album's release, Nesmith successfully lobbied the group's creators, Bob Rafelson and Bert Schneider, that the Monkees be allowed to play their instruments on future records. During a group meeting with musical supervisor Kirshner and Colgems lawyer Herb Moelis, in a suite at the Beverly Hills Hotel, each actor received a $250,000 royalties check; yet Nesmith still threatened to quit. Moelis rebuked him: "You'd better read your contract". Nesmith defiantly punched a hole in the wall, declaring to Moelis, "That could have been your face, motherfucker!" Weeks later, due to a breach of (verbal) agreement over the next single release, which was promised to Nesmith by Rafelson and Schneider, Nesmith led the charge in ousting Kirshner, effectively giving the four youths complete artistic and production control of their output. The group finally worked as a true four-man rock group on 1967's Headquarters—despite Jones and Dolenz having limited instrumental skills, studio time being expensive and retakes being costly.

During the band's first independent press conference, Nesmith called More of the Monkees "probably the worst record in the history of the world", partly due to rushed, shoddy studio engineering. The band took a hit to its artistic credibility when fans learned the four had not played all the instruments on the first two albums. However, sales continued to be profitable. Headquarters sold 2 million copies, down 2 million units from its predecessor, but still reached the No. 1 spot on Billboard, falling only to Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band a week later and remaining at No. 2 all through the entire 1967 Summer of Love.

For the remaining five Monkees LPs, ironically, the original Kirshner formula of hired studio musicians and songwriters again became the norm, although Nesmith, Tork, Dolenz and Jones contributed about 50 percent of the original compositions, Nesmith the majority of those. By the end of the Monkees run, Nesmith was withholding many of his original song ideas from Monkees albums, planning to release them in his post-Monkees solo career.

Nesmith's last contractual Monkees commitment was a commercial for Kool-Aid and Nerf balls in April 1970 (fittingly, the spot ends with Nesmith frowning and saying, "Enerf's enerf!"). As the band's sales declined, Nesmith asked to be released from his contract, despite it costing him: "I had three years left ... at $150,000 [equivalent to $1.16 million in 2022] a year." He remained in a financial bind until 1980, when he received his inheritance from his mother's estate. In a 1980 interview with Playboy, he said of that time: "I had to start telling little tales to the tax man while they were putting tags on the furniture."

Return to the Monkees

Nesmith did not participate in the Monkees' 20th anniversary reunion, due to contractual obligations with his production company, but he did appear during an encore with the three other Monkees at the Greek Theatre on September 7, 1986. In a 1987 interview for Nick Rocks, Nesmith stated, "When Peter called up and said 'we're going to go out, do you want to go?' I was booked. But, if you get to L.A., I'll play."

Nesmith next joined his fellow Monkees for the 1986 "Monkees Christmas Medley" video for MTV appearing throughout dressed/disguised as Santa Claus until the finale, when he revealed his identity to all.