His journey
Ex-Monkee Michael Nesmith spins ‘an autobiographical riff ’ in his newly released book, titled ‘Infinite Tuesday’
The signs were there pretty early on, had anyone been paying attention, that the young Texas kid who eventually would be dubbed “the smart Monkee” was, well, traveling to the beat of his own drummer.
“When I was 14, I applied for a job at the music store … and I was refused,” Michael Nesmith writes in “Infinite Tuesday,” a new reflection on his life suitably subtitled “An Autobiographical Riff.” “Obviously I was too young, but I just started working there anyway, on my own.”
That incident, which sounds like the blueprint for the classic “Seinfeld” episode in which Kramer reported every day to a job for which he’d never been hired, is fairly indicative of the way Nesmith has moved through life for 74 years.
In his memoir, which Random House published April 18, he writes of inventing his own high school schedule, attending those classes that interested him, skipping those that didn’t. “My self-designed school day consisted of three lunch periods, three choir periods, two speech and drama periods and a homeroom,” he writes.
The same free-spirited mind-set prompted him, at 20, to leave the Dallas home of his single mom — Bette, who would go on to invent Liquid Paper and amass a fortune — for the bright lights of Hollywood.
“I was in flight,” Nesmith explains now at a hole-in-the-wall restaurant across the street from the Burbank hotel where is he camped out during a quick trip to L.A. from his longtime home in Monterey.
“When you do that, you think, ‘I’ll head to a beach in Mexico — or Africa, or the South Pacific — and live off coconuts and whatever rum you can bargain.’ But those are fanciful. When you are really out there in full-scale flight, you think about the weather, and where you might know somebody and Hollywood is where it’s at.
“At least,” he adds, “at 20 years old that sounds like the truth, and you hope it is the truth.”
After several years as a starving artist — some of which he spent emceeing weekly hootenanny sessions at the Troubadour in West Hollywood — he was cast in “The Monkees,” a television show created and co-produced by Bert Schneider and Bob Rafelson in response to Beatlemania.
But Nesmith was a maverick, not a teen idol, emerging in the mid- to late’60s as a pioneer of country-rock music.
In 1974, that same mind-set fueled the launch of his own Pacific Arts record company as an alternative to the major label system and most recently led to “Infinite Tuesday,” a lively and unconventional reflection on his life. He’s scheduled for a Thursday question-answer session with moderator D.A. Wallach as part of the “Live Talks L.A.” series at the Moss Theatre in Santa Monica.
The book’s title — for which he quickly credits his publisher — references a single-panel comic by Paul Crum first published in 1937 in the British magazine Punch, which appealed to his absurdist sense of humor: Two hippos stand side by side in a pond, nearly submerged, and one says to the other, “I keep thinking it’s Tuesday.”
“The cartoon was a window into a playground where other people thought as we did,” Nesmith writes in the first chapter of the book, which ping-pongs from decade to decade, subject to subject in a manner not unlike Bob Dylan’s autobiographical “Chronicles, Vol. 1.”
The book, Nesmith explains in the soft, slightly sandpaper-edged voice that’s been a signature of his vocals, is “anachronistic in a way, because I certainly didn’t plan on saying ‘And then I wrote, and then I did this, and then I learned, and then I found out…’ That was never part of it.”
Just a single chapter is devoted to his years with the Monkees, even though the TV show’s relatively brief two-season run made him a bona fide pop star and provided lifetime recognition for him and the guys with whom he once monkeyed around: Davy Jones, who died in 2012, Micky Dolenz and Peter Tork.
His experience in “The Monkees” brought fame but was accompanied by a plethora of challenges, one of which he shorthands in the book as “Celebrity Psychosis,” an affliction that causes the sufferer to inflate his own importance beyond all reason.
For years after that he distanced himself from the show, and his former band mates, but over time reached a sense of acceptance about what he’d been part of. “To watch the internal dynamics of the Monkees persist — that is to say, what was good about it — was gratifying,” he says. “But it’s not the topic of the book.”
After joining Dolenz and Tork on a 50th anniversary Monkees tour last year, Nesmith indicated he’s hung up his wool knit Monkees cap for good, leaving Dolenz and Tork as a duo.
Although “Infinite Tuesday” is Nesmith’s first formal foray into longform nonfiction, he has also written and published two novels: “The Long Sandy Hair of Neftoon Zamora” in 1998 and “The American Gene” in 2009. “I’ve never really been happy as a performer,” he says.
“I think I’m really cut out for the writer’s life,” he says, sounding not a little surprised at this late-in-life realization. “I like the long hours of solitude and thought. It’s really my cup of tea.”