Michael Nesmith born 30 December 1942

Robert Michael Nesmith or Mike Nesmith, (December 30, 1942 – December 10, 2021) was an American musician, songwriter, and actor. He was best known as a member of the pop rock band the Monkees and co-star of the TV series The Monkees (1966–1968).

Robert Michael Nesmith was the only child of Warren and Bette Nesmith, who divorced when he was four. Bette remarried and relocated to Dallas where, in her capacity as executive secretary at Texas Bank and Trust, she developed her own typewriter correction fluid. In 1979, a few months before her death, she sold her Liquid Paper Corporation to Gillette for $48 million. Her son and heir finally acquired financial freedom. 

As a teenager Nesmith dabbling in music and drama at school before enlisting in the US Air Force in 1960. Two years later he was honourably discharged at his own request, swapping mechanics for music. Cutting his teeth in touring folk, country and rock’n’roll bands, he moved to Los Angeles and fell in with the fertile singer/songwriter scene at the legendary Troubadour venue on the Sunset Strip. 

A publishing and recording deal followed, Nesmith released his first single, “Wanderin’,” in 1963. It didn’t garner much attention, nor did recordings he released in 1965 under the pseudonym Michael Blessing, but his songs started to find an audience through other performers. Frankie Laine cut Nesmith’s “Pretty Little Princess” in 1965, and the Paul Butterfield Blues Band recorded “Mary, Mary” on its groundbreaking 1966 LP, “East-West.” 

Despite these achievements, Nesmith struggled to make ends meet, so he decided to audition for “The Monkees,” a television show that producers Bob Rafelson and Bert Schneider patterned after the Beatles’ comedic films. Each of the four members of the Monkees was chosen to fill a certain archetype. Nesmith was pegged to be the “serious” member of the Monkees, standing in contrast to the wacky Micky Dolenz, cute heartthrob Davy Jones and convivial Peter Tork. Nesmith didn’t lack humor: He was laconic and sardonic, qualities that served him well on screen. 

The Monkees became a pop phenomenon after the television series debuted in September 1966. While the Nielsen ratings were solid, the group’s record sales were staggering. “The Monkees” and “More of the Monkees,” their first two LPs, topped the Billboard album charts for 31 consecutive weeks spanning 1966 and 1967, led by such hits as “Last Train to Clarksville,” “I’m a Believer” and “A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You.” But when their television show was cancelled after its second season wrapped in 1968, the Monkees made one more venture into visual arts, filming the trippy, postmodern comedy “Head” with director Rafelson and co-screenwriter Jack Nicholson, but the movie flopped, bolstering the notion that the Monkees were in commercial decline. Soon, Tork left the group, and Nesmith followed him after completing work on two Monkees albums in 1969. 

                              

He struggled to gain a commercial foothold as a solo artist, although the three albums he recorded as Michael Nesmith and the First National Band have long been considered classics of the nascent country rock genre. The Second National Band duly followed (with Jose Feliciano on congas) but when this too ended in commercial failure, he turned to production, working on Bert Jansch’s 1974 album LA Turnaround. His Pacific Arts production company, formed in 1974, pioneered the home video market, but collapsed in a dispute with PBS over licensing rights. When a federal jury eventually awarded Nesmith $47 million in 1999, he quipped, “it’s like catching your grandmother stealing your stereo – you’re glad to get your stereo back, but you’re sad to find out that Grandma’s a thief”. 

The inadvertent innovation continued when Nesmith created a makeshift music video for his 1977 single Rio. Intrigued by the promotional possibilities of the embryonic format, he produced the PopClips music video show for cable TV channel Nickolodeon, then sold it to Time Warner, who used it as a template for MTV. In a satisfying twist, MTV repeats of The Monkees introduced the group to a new audience in the Eighties, while the Nesmith-produced videos for Lionel Richie’s Hello and Michael Jackson’s The Way You Make Me Feel received heavy rotation on the channel. 

Nesmith’s involvement in the various Monkees reunions was sporadic and often confined to one-off appearances. However, he did rejoin his three amigos in 1996, marking the band’s 30th anniversary with the Justus album and accompanying TV special Hey, Hey, It’s the Monkees, before contributing to the 50th anniversary album Good Times! Jones passed away in 2012 and Tork in 2019. Latterly, Nesmith toured with Dolenz as the Mike and Micky Show. 

Following quadruple bypass surgery in 2018 and the pandemic shutdown of live music, he had made sufficient peace with the band’s legacy to embark on the Monkees Farewell Tour, which ended in Los Angeles less than a month before his death at his home in  Carmel Valley, California from heart failure on December 10, 2021. He was 78. 

(Edited from obit by Fiona Shepherd @ The Scotsman, Los Angeles Times  & Wikipedia)