Death comes for the Monkee
I must confess to a certain degree of nostalgia when I was alerted by a friend last week that Michael Nesmith had died from natural causes at age
78. It was the first notification I received but far from the last. Nesmith perhaps was best known as a member of the Monkees, which is enough. But there was so much more to his career — at least to this music vulture’s ears. However, Nesmith spent a couple of decades attempting to garner distance from what was unfairly characterized as teenybopper bubblegum. I would argue his music was so much more.
It has been one of my missions to polish the reputation of the unfairly maligned Monkees since first compiling a mix tape comprised of my favorite songs from my sister’s album collection back in the late 1970s. Such was the nature of this feel-good music I played during my shifts at the Malt Shop, I could recognize a positive shift in the mood of the overall atmosphere.
Since then, I have preached the innate qualities of Nesmith’s songs and performances either as a Monkee or solo, including a 90-minute guest spot several years ago on the National Review Political Beats podcast (as an aside, I was invited back last week for a two-hour overview of Warren Zevon’s career).
Everyone with a whiff of popular music knowledge knows the story of the Monkees, a band disparaged as the Pre-fab Four, an insulting moniker meant to imply the group only resulted from a Hollywood casting call; the pre-fab in this instance meaning pre-fabricated but as well a reference to the original Fab Four fellas from Liverpool, England.
The criticism piled on — Nesmith, Peter Tork, Mickey Dolenz and Davy Jones won out because of their appeal to teen girls, and not because of their musical abilities. Plus, they didn’t write their own songs AND relied on the Wrecking Crew, at the time the most talented group of studio session players this side of Stax/volt and Motown.
Those who actually make those arguments fail to consider the Beatles either recorded or performed 66 songs written by others, relied heavily on their esteemed producer Sir George Martin, and featured guest instrumentalists such as
Eric Clapton and Billy Preston. That’s not to mention the hundreds of orchestra members making appearances on the moptops’ LPS and the efforts of such recording engineers as Glyn Johns, Geoff Emerick and Alan Parsons.
The Monkees’ debut album featured songs by Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart, Carole King and Gerry Goffin, and David Gates and either sole or co-writing credits for two songs by Nesmith. By their third album, 1967’s “Headquarters,” Nesmith authored five songs, two of them solid efforts if not actual countrypop classics. It should also be mentioned 1967 was the same year the Stone Poneys’ released their version of the Nesmith title “Different Drum,” a recording that bounced Linda Ronstadt’s miraculous voice off the world’s collective tympanic membrane for the first time.
Produced by Chip Douglas, who had recently exited the equally underrated Turtles, “Headquarters” featured the Monkees mostly playing their own instruments and many songs they either wrote or co-wrote, including two remarkable Nesmith songs, “You Told Me” and “You Just May Be the One.” Both country-pop gems pre-date by one year the country-rock boom usually credited to the Byrds’ on 1968’s “Sweetheart of the Rodeo.” Space doesn’t allow a recap of all the cool songs written and recorded by Nesmith, but a decent overview of his career is provided by an album by Mickey Dolenz, released this year during the Monkees’ farewell tour. “Dolenz Sings Nesmith” is highly recommended if readers can’t find copies of Nesmith’s solo catalogue.
The silencing of Nesmith’s voice and his blonde 12-string Gretsch are as much a loss as his considerable songwriting talents.
It has been one of my missions to polish the reputation of the unfairly maligned Monkees. . .