As a kid, it was pretty obvious to me that Mike Nesmith was the coolest of the Monkees. Peter Tork – dopey; Davy Jones – vain and effete; Mickey Dolenz – the funniest. Wooly-capped Nesmith came across as quiet and thoughtful.
In my teens, I got The Monkees’ Greatest Hits, a Music For Pleasure budget release. There was a Nesmith track on there, Listen To The Band, that sat uneasily among all the Help! homages. Country-tinged, but with brass, and psychedelic effects to boot. What was going on?
Then a couple of years ago I picked up a copy of Magnetic South in a great used record and book shop in Howarth in Yorkshire. What a revelation. Nesmith is a beautiful singer. As a songwriter, he is innovative and witty – with a beautiful melodic ear (witness the glorious “Joanne”). His adventures in country rock sound less ego-driven than contemporaries the Byrds and Gram Parsons, presumably because he was struggling to be taken seriously because of his boy-band past. But he’s every inch their equal. All his pioneering albums with the First National Band are superlative.
Here’s Frank Zappa and Nesmith in a weird clip found on YouTube:
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