Michael Nesmith, much more than a Monkee

Michael Nesmith (Nez, or Papa Nez, to his fans) who passed away on Friday, December 10 at the age of 78, will be best remembered as a member of The Monkees, the pre-fabricated rock band that was America’s answer to the British Fab Four, The Beatles. The television series, The Monkees, aired on NBC for two seasons (1966-1968), during which time the group released five LPs on the Columbia Pictures-owned Colgems label. The first four of these LPs went to number one on the Billboard chart. The band also released a string of hit singles, including “Last Train to Clarksville,” “(I’m Not Your) Steppin’ Stone,” and “I’m a Believer.” None of the members of The Monkees wrote these hits or played any instruments on them. They were largely the efforts of seasoned songwriters from New York’s Brill Building: Tommy Boyce & Bobby Hart, Neil Diamond, Gerry Goffin & Carole King among others. The musicians, including drummer Hal Blaine and bassist Carol Kaye, were members of the famous Wrecking Crew, who played on some of the greatest records of the 1960s.

Nesmith, who landed the role after reading an ad in Variety magazine calling for “Folk & Roll Musician-Singers for acting roles in new TV series,” would quickly become frustrated with the recording arrangement. A folk singer-songwriter himself (he often performed at clubs on the Sunset Strip), Nesmith wanted not only to record his own songs, but play on the records as well. Thanks to his tenacity, and the support of the other Monkees–Davy Jones, Micky Dolenz, and Peter Tork (also a folkie on the L.A. scene)–the group wrested artistic control from their boss, producer Don Kirshner, and started making their own records, beginning with the 1967 LP “Headquarters.” With songs like “Papa Gene’s Blues,” “Sunny Girlfriend,” and “Auntie’s Municipal Court,” Nesmith is considered a pioneer of Country-Rock, later made popular by The Eagles, The Flying Burrito Brothers, and Linda Ronstadt (whose group the Stone Poneys had a hit with the Nesmith-penned country rocker “Different Drum”).

After Nesmith left The Monkees in 1970, he formed his own group: The First National Band, and released three albums on RCA, to critical acclaim but dismal sales. He continued recording as a solo artist and, in 1977, had a modest hit, “Rio.” What was so groundbreaking about the song was not the record itself, but the music video that accompanied it (you can view it here). Music videos were hardly new (indeed, one might argue that The Monkees television series was a vehicle for promoting the group’s singles and LPs, as the group would mime, romp, and goof around to the songs). So Nesmith didn’t invent the concept of the music video, but he took the medium more seriously than anyone else and turned it into an industry. In 1981, four years after his video for “Rio,” Nesmith was awarded the very first Grammy for a music video, his hour-long collection of sketches and songs entitled Elephant Parts. You can view an excerpt of Elephant Parts, the video for his song, “Cruisin,'” here. That same year, MTV was launched, forever changing the music industry.

This is pretty much where most stories about Nesmith end, with a detailed history of his time as a Monkee (both during the show’s initial run and in subsequent reunion tours throughout the past thirty-five years) and a nod to his contribution to the music video genre. You’ll also see an odd but well-known fact that Nesmith’s mother invented liquid paper (which corrected typewriter typos) and left her son a vast fortune. You’ll also see that Nesmith used his inheritance to create Pacific Arts, a media company that produced not only Nesmith’s own music videos, but also distributed television programs (such as Ken Burns’s acclaimed documentary series on the Civil War) and backed a few mainstream films. Nesmith was executive producer of the cult classic Repo Man (dir. Alex Cox, 1984).

And it’s Nesmith’s long and varied role in film and filmmaking that needs more attention. Yes, he also was executive producer on the odd-ball John Cusack and Tim Robbins film Tapeheads (dir. Bill Fishman, 1988). And there’s more to be said of Pacific Arts, which in 1995 launched Videoranch, a company devoted to multimedia projects. Three years later, Videorach began developing technology that would combine live content with virtual environments. In 2006, Nesmith launched Videoranch3D.

But wait, there’s more! And to know the fuller story we need to go back to 1968, when The Monkees were still a hit group with a popular TV series. You see, The Monkees NBC series was the brainchild of two men: Bert Schneider and Bob Rafelson. Inspired by The Beatles’ 1964 film A Hard Day’s Night, they imagined something similar, but based in Los Angeles and featuring four, wacky, out-of-work folk singers. After securing their four Monkees, including Michael Nesmith (who was given the dumb nickname Wool Hat, because…well, he wore a green wool hat), a pilot was filmed based on a script co-written by Paul Mazursky (best known for his Academy Award-nominated screenplay for An Unmarried Woman, and more recently for his role as Norm on the HBO series Curb Your Enthusiasm). Schneider and Rafelson pitched the pilot to NBC, and it bombed badly. The worst NBC pilot ever, at that time. But when they re-edited the pilot and added footage from the screen tests of Nesmith and Davy Jones, suddenly they had a hit on their hands.

Schneider and Rafelson formed Raybert Productions and made a deal with Screen Gems, the television production wing of Columbia Pictures. The show did moderately well in its Monday, 7:30 slot, going up against CBS’s Gilligan’s Island and ABC’s Western series, The Iron Horse. When the show became a hit, thanks to the success of the records which were released on the Colgems label formed by Columbia Pictures and Screen Gems, Schneider and Rafelson became stars.

The pair had their eyes on the feature films, so naturally the first Raybert Productions project was a film based on The Monkees. To bring the film to life, Schneider and Rafelson enlisted the help of Jack Nicholson, whom Rafelson had met at a movie screening. So it was in late 1967 when Nicholson, Rafelson, Nesmith, Jones, Tork, and Dolenz retreated to Ojai, California, to brainstorm ideas for a Monkees movie script. It was decided that the film should put an end to The Monkees phenomenon once and for all. Head (which then had the working title Changes) would not only expose the “manufactured image” of The Monkees, but the culture it fed as well.

In 1967, Jack Nicholson was an unknown actor, having appeared mainly on television (as Jaime Angel on the popular NBC series Dr. Kildare) and in low-budget horror films produced by Roger Corman’s American International Pictures, such as The Raven and The Terror. His most recent acting gig was in a low-budget exploitation movie directed by Richard Rush entitled Hells Angels on Wheels. Now he was was co-writing the screenplay for a movie about one of the biggest rock groups in the world. “I co-wrote Head,” Jack would later proudly repeat to friends. “Nobody ever saw that, man, but I saw it. A hundred fifty-eight million times. I loved it. Filmically, it’s the best rock ‘n’ roll movie ever made.”1

Only one Michael Nesmith composition was featured in the film, his high-powered “Circle Sky,” which the group performed live in Salt Lake City, May 17, 1968. But it captured the raw energy of a Monkees concert, and put onto celluloid the evidence that the pre-fab four could really play. The footage of The Monkees, led by Nesmith, perfoming live for enraptured teenage girls, cut with images of horrors of the Vietnam War, must have baffled teenagers and adults alike (you can view a clip here).

Indeed, when the film was released, it receive negative reviews, notably from the New Yorker‘s Pauline Kael, perhaps America’s greatest and most influential film critic: “the doubling up of greed and pretensions to depth is enough to make even a pinhead walk out,” she wrote (she would later revise her opinion of the film).2 The film bombed at the box office.

Yet Head has gained respect over the years, and is now widely regarded more classic than cult. More importantly, it spawned the career of Rafelson as a feature film director. While Head didn’t make any money, it proved to be an important step forward, as it brought together an important creative team: Nicholson, Rafelson, and Dennis Hopper. In fact, Hopper has a brief appearance in Head in a cafeteria scene, (which you can view here), along with Nicholson and Rafelson.

Still flush with money from their deal with Screen Gems, Raybert Productions financed a film that would go on to change the movie industry and help usher in what is referred to as the New Hollywood. The film was Easy Rider. Directed by Hopper and starring Nicholson in a minor role that would be his big breakthrough, Easy Rider went on to gross $60 million on a $250,000 budget. It garnered numerous award nominations, including the coveted Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival (Hopper would win the Best First Work award at Cannes).

Yet while film historians single out Easy Rider as the game changer, the film that changed Hollywood forever, we have to credit its predecessor: Head. There would be no Easy Rider without the Monkees, and there would be no Monkees without Nesmith (“he was our leader the whole time,” Dolenz said, in his first public statement about the loss of his friend).3

As the careers of Rafelson, Nicholson, and Hopper took off, the careers of the individual members of the Monkees went into a tailspin. But it wouldn’t take long before Nesmith righted his own ship, releasing the First National Band and other solo albums and establishing his multimedia empire–and returning to feature filmmaking.

Sometime in 1984, a draft of the script for a strange, sci-fi punk film about a car repossessor landed on his desk. A budding filmmaker by the name of Alex Cox, with his friends Jonathan Wacks and Peter McCarthy, had been trying to get the film financed, but without any luck–until he heard from Nesmith, who was knocked out by the script. “I just fell crazy in love with these guys. I thought they were so smart and they were funny and they were way off the meter. Way off the side,” Nesmith recalls. “And Alex was particularly inspiring to me; he was very edgy and very in-your-face. He’s a big guy, he was about 6-foot-4, and thin as a rail, and I thought, ‘This guy is going to be able to do this: I’m going to have to figure out how to enable him in the way that can get the most of the film.’”4

Today, Repo Man rides very near the top of virtually every list of greatest cult films of all time. And while we rightly single out the performances of Emilio Estevez (as Otto) and Harry Dean Stanton (as Bud), as well as the direction of Alex Cox (who would go on to make the critically acclaimed Sid and Nancy and adapt Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, directed by Terry Gilliam and starring Johnny Depp), we shouldn’t forget Nesmith, and his legacy and influence not just in music and television, but movies as well.

References

1. Scott Edwards, Quintessential Jack: The Art of Jack Nicholson on Screen. McFarland, 2018, p. 243.
2. Paul B. Ramaeker, “‘You Think They Call Us Plastic Now…’: The Monkees and Head.” Soundtrack Available: Essays on Film and Popular Music, edited by Pamela Robertson Wojik and Arthur Knight, p. 98.
3. Andy Greene. “Mickey Dolenz Remembers Mike Nesmith: ‘He Was Our Leader the Whole Time.” Rolling Stone, 10 Dec. 2021. https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/monkees-micky-dolenz-michael-nesmith-tribute-1270342/. Accessed 11 Dec 2021.
4. Jamie Laughlin, “Nobody’s Monkee: Michael Nesmith on Repo Man, Corporate Pressure and Creative Control.” Dallas Observer, 30 Sep. 2016. https://www.dallasobserver.com/arts/nobody-s-monkee-michael-nesmith-on-repo-man-corporate-pressure-and-creative-control-8757153. Accessed 11 Dec 2021.