Monkees

Hey Hey with the Monkees !

Peter Paton

MICHAEL NESMITH  http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/4931168.stm




He was a member of The Monkees, the original boy-band, yet he went on to become a respected musician, a pioneer of the pop video, a film producer and author. Michael Nesmith has just released a new album after a five-year break.





The Monkees were a phenomenon of the 1960s, brought together artificially in America, as a commercial attempt to cash in on the popularity of the Beatles; critics dubbed The Monkees the Pre-fab Four.

They had a long-running TV show of wacky comedy and a host of hit records like Daydream Believer and I'm a Believer.

The TV series ran for 58 episodes and the group sold an estimated 65 million albums.

Michael Nesmith was the one in the woolly hat, the quiet one, but the one with the most musical talent. He had already written hit songs for Paul Butterfield and Linda Ronstadt.

Nesmith sold his mother's patent for £30 million

At first, all the Monkees records featured session musicians. Later on in their three-year existence, it was Nesmith who threatened to quit if they weren't allowed to write and record their own material.

He famously punched a hole in a wall to make the point.

By 1970, Nesmith had bought himself out of the band, and without his creative inspiration, The Monkees soon fell apart. Whereas, some of the other Monkees struggled to maintain even a modicum of success, Nesmith never looked back, at first writing and recording gentle country rock songs.

He'd been born in December 1942 in Texas to a young mother of 18. His father abandoned his wife and son when Michael was an infant, leaving him to be brought up as a single child to a single mother.

As Michael was achieving fame with The Monkees, so his mother, Bette Nesmith, a secretary, hit on the idea for Liquid Paper, the first typing correction fluid. When she died in 1980, Michael inherited the patent and sold it to Gillette for a cool £30m.

But his accumulated wealth did not blunt his creativity.

Pop Video

After recording his best-known solo single Rio, European TV networks requested he supply them with an accompanying film for their pop shows. He and some friends from the film and advertising world got together and made a discovery that was soon to become standard knowledge.

"When you put music and images together, they tended to make each other more powerful, and you could do things when they were together that you couldn't do alone," he said.

He had stumbled into inventing the pop video. In fact, his Elephant Parts was the first video to win a Grammy.

On the Monkees reunion tour of 1997

There was, as yet, nowhere in the States for videos to be broadcast. So, as the cable TV era dawned, Nesmith stitched together a series of videos he called Popclips, for the Nickelodeon channel and sold the idea of a 24-hour video channel which soon became MTV.

In the meantime, he formed a company which pioneered the selling of home videos of TV shows, and he began producing such movies as Repo Man, Tapeheads and Timerider. He even had time to write a novel, The Long Sandy Hair of Neftoon Zamora. A second novel The American Gene appeared last year.

With wealth came philanthropy, and, in his late fifties, he began bringing together American intellectuals from all walks of life to discuss the big issues of the day at brains trusts entitled Councils of Ideas. They were sited at his mother's former studio in New Mexico.

But beneath the layers of entrepreneurism, authorship and philanthropy, Nesmith is still at heart a musician. His 1994 album The Garden was awarded a Grammy, and he even reunited with The Monkees again for a brief tour and subsequently produced their Justus album.

A pioneer of country-rock and the pop video, Michael Nesmith has continued to embrace the opportunities that new technology has offered for musical creativity, particularly on the internet.

"When you get into these big sampler engines and computer-based sequencing, the world opens up to you," he told Wired News this month. His new Rays album is a multi-layered "cinematic journey of sound" incorporating elements of swing, jazz and funk. It's currently only available as a download.

Mike Nesmith may no longer be the young generation, but he's still got something to say.