San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Ex-Monkee created early music videos
“It would always seem wildly ironic to me that I was the one given credit in the press for being the ‘only musician’ in the Monkees,” he wrote. “Nothing was further from the truth.” But he was musician enough to have a modest solo career after Monkee mania faded at the end of the 1960s, and that led him into a role in music television history.
In 1977, he recorded a song called “Rio” for the Island Records label, which asked him to make some kind of promotional film for it.
“They wanted me to stand in front of a microphone and sing,” Nesmith was quoted as saying in the 2011 book “I Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution,” by Craig Marks and Rob Tannenbaum. But he did something different.
“I wrote a series of cinematic shots: me on a horse in a suit of light, me in a tux in front of a 1920s microphone, me in a Palm Beach suit dancing with a woman in a red dress, women with fruit on their head flying through the air with me,” he said.
“As we edited these images,” Nesmith added, “an unusual thing started to emerge: The grammar of film, where images drove the narrative, shifted over to where the song drove the narrative, and it didn’t make any difference that the images were discontinuous. It was hyper-real. Even people who didn’t understand film, including me, could see this was a profound conceptual shift.”
Almost by accident, he had made one of the first music videos as that term came to be understood. It got some play in Europe, but Nesmith was struck by the fact that there was no outlet in the United States for showing such works, which a few other pop and rock stars were also beginning to make (and some, like the Beatles, had made earlier).
In 1979, he and director William Dear developed a TV show, “Popclips,” for Nickelodeon, a recently inaugurated channel for children that was looking to add teenagers to its audience. “Popclips” showed nothing but music videos, introduced by a VJ. The show is often said to have helped inspire the creation of MTV in 1981, although accounts of the various people who claim to have had a role in MTV’s emergence differ widely.
Robert Michael Nesmith was born Dec. 30, 1942, in Houston. His father, Warren, and his mother, Bette (McMurray) Nesmith, divorced in 1946, soon after Warren returned from fighting in World War II. His mother later remarried, took the last name Graham and became wealthy from inventing Liquid Paper and running the company that produced it. That money would give Nesmith the financial security to follow his varied interests.
His mother moved to Dallas, where he grew up. In his book, he described himself as an indifferent student in high school.
In 1960, he enlisted in the Air Force (earning a high school equivalency diploma
while in the military). The Air Force, though, was not a good fit, and he requested and received an early discharge in 1962.
He enrolled at San Antonio College, where he began performing on a guitar he had received as a Christmas gift from his mother and stepfather in 1961. He also met a fellow student, Phyllis Barbour. In 1964, the newly married couple resettled in Los Angeles, where Nesmith sought to further his fledgling performing and songwriting career. Among the songs he wrote in 1965 was “Different Drum,” although its best-known incarnation, a hit version by Linda Ronstadt and her group the Stone Poneys, would not come out until 1967, after the Monkees were famous. Nesmith was playing in local clubs and sometimes serving as MC at one of them, the Troubadour, when someone showed him the Variety ad.
The Monkees gave their first live performance in December 1966 in Hawaii, the start of a tour that took them all over the United States.
“The Monkees have been practicing more, and are learning to pull off live concerts,” The Boston Globe wrote in March 1967. “On their first tour, the continuous screaming drowned all imperfections in the music.”
The mania, though, soon played itself out. “The Monkees” ended after two seasons, in March 1968, and Tork and Nesmith left the band shortly afterward. Nesmith formed his own group, the First National Band, and released an album in early 1970, “Magnetic South,” which included a minor hit, “Joanne.”
Several other musical ventures followed, but Nesmith was growing increasingly interested in video. He thought that videodiscs, which had come on the market in the late 1970s, were the future of music, and after “Rio” and “Popclips” he made “Elephant Parts,” an hourlong disc of music videos and comedy sketches (including a parody of his own song “Joanne” that featured the Japanese movie monster Rodan instead of a woman).
In 1982, “Elephant Parts” received the first Grammy Award for video, a category called video of the year at the time (soon to be split into short- and long-form awards, the first of several title changes as the art form and technology evolved).
“Elephant Parts” led in 1985 to “Michael Nesmith in Television Parts,” a short-lived TV sketch show. Nesmith had also begun producing movies, most notably “Repo Man” in 1984.
And he continued to be a Monkee — when it suited him. In varying combinations, Tork, Dolenz and Jones (until his death in 2012) toured and recorded periodically as the Monkees. Nesmith only occasionally joined them onstage, but all four played and sang on, and wrote songs for, the group’s 1996 album, “Justus.” In 2016 the group released the album “Good Times,” which included some archival material recorded by Jones.
Nesmith also wrote and directed “Hey, Hey, It’s the Monkees,” a television special made to promote “Justus,” which was broadcast in early 1997.
Nesmith became more willing, or perhaps more available, to embrace his Monkee past in recent years. He joined Tork and Dolenz for a tour after Jones’ death.
Tork died in 2019. Dolenz is now the last surviving Monkee.
Nesmith’s first marriage ended in divorce in 1975. His marriages to Kathryn Bild, in 1976, and Victoria Kennedy, in 2000, also ended in divorce. He is survived by three children from his first marriage, Christian, Jonathan and Jessica Nesmith, and a son from a relationship with Nurit Wilde, Jason Nesmith, as well as two grandchildren.