Michael Nesmith invented country rock. Or maybe something even better.

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Michael Nesmith invented country rock. Or maybe something even better.



Michael Nesmith of the Monkees appears at a news conference at New York’s Warwick Hotel on July 6, 1967. Nesmith died of natural causes at his home on Dec. 10, 2021 (AP photo/RH)

By Geoff Edgers
National arts reporter
Today at 12:00 p.m. EST

There was a moment, not long after he was cast as the Monkee with the wool cap, that Michael Nesmith realized there may be some issues. He grew up in Texas, loving blues and country music. The other guys in the made-for-TV band were virtual strangers to him. Peter Tork was a Greenwich Village folkie. Davy Jones was a British song-and-dance man with a Tony nomination. And Micky Dolenz had played the orphaned Corky in the 1950s TV show “Circus Boy.”

Now they were going to be a band?

“Who would play what and who would sing and who would write and who would produce the records was of keen interest to me,” Nesmith wrote in his 2017 memoir, “Infinite Tuesday: An Autobiographical Riff. “So I was unprepared for the idea that the four of us would have nothing to do with any of that.”

This was the rub in the Monkees, who were cast by NBC to play a band on TV and also, for a time, seemed capable of fooling the public into believing they were an actual band. The truth is they didn’t play or write their own music, but that didn’t seem to matter. Neil Diamond, Carole King, Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart took care of the writing, and that led to their first two albums going to No. 1 and none other than Jimi Hendrix opening for them on tour.

[‘Infinite Tuesday’ book review: Hey, hey, it’s the Monkees!]

It was Nesmith, who died Friday at the age of 78, who seemed most ill at ease with this arrangement. He grumbled enough to eventually enable the Monkees, however briefly, to become as real a band as they ever would be. They wrote and played on their third album: 1967’s “Headquarters,” which featured three songs by Nesmith and Dolenz’s stunning closer “Randy Scouse Git.” And yet “Headquarters” didn’t really solve anything. They still weren’t a real band, the TV show tanked, and by 1970, Nesmith was sick enough of being a Monkee to quit. Which is when things really got interesting.

[Michael Nesmith, deadpan singer-songwriter with the Monkees, dies at 78]



Michael Nesmith performs at the Birchmere in Alexandria, Va., in April 2013. (Kyle Gustafson/for The Washington Post)

These days, there are debates over whether the Byrds, Gram Parsons or the Eagles invented country rock. To me, nobody married the two like Nesmith. The records he made with his First National Band between 1970 and 1973 were flawless, ranging from achy ballads to swaggering jams and all of it soaked in echo, pedal steel and the singer’s dry wit. The music itself was fantastic, thanks, in part, to Nesmith’s decision to center so much around Red Rhodes and his pedal steel. He also collaborated with the legendary guitarist James Burton and drummer Ron Tutt. Then there was the material. Nesmith had his Texas twang, but he was not afraid to blend it with the kind of quirky wordplay and sarcasm you might hear from Frank Zappa or Captain Beefheart. I don’t know anyone else who yodeled and yee-hawed with as much ease, even as he wrote songs titled “Propinquity” and “Grand Ennui.”

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By Geoff Edgers
Geoff Edgers, The Washington Post's national arts reporter, covers everything from fine arts to popular culture. He's the author of "Walk This Way: Run-DMC, Aerosmith, and the Song That Changed American Music Forever." He is also the host of "Edge of Fame," a podcast co-produced by WBUR Boston. Twitter https://twitter.com/geoffedgers

One of the commenters links to this:

The Monkees: What Am I Doing Hangin Round
30,428 views Aug 21, 2015

JustWilliam LostChord
49 subscribers

[lastlib]

1. This under-appreciated gem is my favorite of theirs:

[luvs2sing]

2. Yes, indeed..

He was a genius.