Mike Nesmith: So Much More to Music Than Just a Monkee

Michael Nesmith, who died Friday at his California home of heart failure at age 78, never lost his ambivalence about his best-known musical endeavor: The Monkees. On the one hand, most people know him as a member of that made-for-TV rock ‘n’ roll band during its two-year run on NBC-TV, 1966-1968. On the other hand, he was proudest of the music he made as a struggling folk singer before the TV show, and as a pioneering country-rocker and music-videographer after the show.

Those mixed feelings were obvious the last time I saw him. Michael Nesmith & The First National Band headlined the Country Music Hall of Fame’s CMA Theatre on Sept. 11, 2018. The 19-song set included only a single Monkees song—and that tune, “Papa Gene’s Blues,” dated back to Nesmith’s pre-Monkees folkie career.

And yet Nesmith had just done a summer tour with his old bandmate, billed as “The Monkees Present: The Mike Nesmith & Micky Dolenz Show.” Dominated by Monkees songs, the tour proved so successful that the duo reprised it in 2019 and 2021. Clearly, he was torn between the two sides of his career.

To keep reading this article, click here.

Comments

The Very First Super Bowl Was Blacked Out on Local TV

Fifty-five years ago, fans across the United States had the choice of two networks to watch the first Super Bowl. A giant exception was in the host city of Los Angeles, where fans didn’t even have one network to tune into. Back then, the National Football League blacked out every game in the local market, convinced that televising the game locally would cause fans to watch on TV rather than pay for tickets. The league refused to make an exception for the Super Bowl, which debuted on Jan. 15, 1967. In fact, the first six Super Bowls — which rotated among the warm-weather cities of Los Angeles, Miami and New Orleans — would be blacked out locally. Super Bowl I — officially called the AFL-NFL World Championship Game — pitted the American Football League’s Kansas City Chiefs against the National Football League’s Green Bay Packers, just months after the two leagues had announced a merger. The game fell far short of a sellout at cavernous Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, even with the bla

50 Years Ago, the Electric Company Makes Its Debut

When The Electric Company debuted in October 1971, television hadn't seen anything quite like it. Psychedelic graphics, wildly creative animation, mod outfits, over-the-top characters and sketch comedy all functioned to serve the same goal: teaching kids to read. Brought to you by the Children's Television Workshop (CTW) — the same producers behind Sesame Street , which debuted in 1969 — The Electric Company won two Emmys, aired on more than 250 public TV stations and became a teaching tool in thousands of classrooms nationwide. To keep reading this article, click here.

The Beatles Definitely Reshaped American Culture

Peter Jackson’s new, nearly eight-hour edit of the 1969 film “The Beatles: Get Back” is getting plenty of attention, along with its fair share of rave reviews and withering criticism . The documentary, cleaned up with the latest technology, counters the usual story of the Beatles’s acrimonious breakup by showing them doing more than squabbling. They collaborate, joke around and wax nostalgic in studios and in their legendary rooftop concert. The film reminds us that at the end of the 1960s, they were still writing innovative music that resonates today. Just five short years before, in 1964, the group was the subject of another powerful film, which tracked a pop revolution in the making. Albert and David Maysles’s “What’s Happening! The Beatles in the U.S.A.” showed the band not only making music but reshaping the culture. Both documentaries reveal how the Beatles reoriented American music, helped the country shake off the drab conformity of mid-century consensus and, in the proc

Talking ‘Bout My Generation: The Baby Boom Experience

Search This Blog