The promotional image for the Monkees’ 50th anniversary tour is exactly what casual observers of the group’s nostalgia-circuit phase would expect: vibrant pastel colors and smiling cartoon faces frame the promise of “Good Times!” guaranteed by the familiar guitar-shaped band logo. But, like pretty much every point of intersection between pop music and old age, the 50th anniversary of the Monkees is shot through with pathos if you know where to look.
The smiling cartoon faces on the poster belong to Micky Dolenz and Peter Tork, the only two Monkees participating in the tour. Davy Jones died of a heart attack in 2012. And though Michael Nesmith has been performing with the group regularly since then, he only agreed to perform at a handful of dates on the golden anniversary tour, culminating in what he declared would be his final performance with the Monkees, held September 16 at the Pantages Theater in Hollywood. This news was disappointing but not surprising to Monkees devotees, who are accustomed to Nesmith being an infrequent, if not entirely reluctant, participant in the ongoing resurrection of the project.
MTV started showing reruns of the series in 1986, hastening an of out-of-nowhere pop-culture comeback. The show, and the band, were a perfect match for the network at that precise moment, when its initial radio-for-the-eyes presentation started to give way to a more anarchic and ironic visual style that proved more influential than any of the individual bands it promoted. Influential enough, in fact, to revive the career of the then-largely forgotten show/band/concept.
Dolenz, Tork, and Jones dived right back into being full-time Monkees, staging reunion tours, and creating new albums, singles, and videos. (Dolenz and Jones had never entirely stopped being at least part-time Monkees, appearing together throughout the ’70s.) Nesmith always limited his participation to the odd drop-in—a two-song guest appearance at the Greek Theatre here, a short UK tour to promote a one-time-only new album there. In the post MTV-years, as the series became a cable rerun evergreen, work remained steady for the trio configuration, though the sheds and theaters they started off playing became state fairs and casinos in reasonably short order. But when Nesmith came in from the cold to write and play on the band’s 30th anniversary reunion LP, Justus, the quartet played Wembley. “I’ve seen the Monkees show and I think it’s very professional and very good,” he told me in a 1996 interview to talk up that record. "But when all four of us get together on the same stage, there’s an order of magnitude shift.”
Whether that shift is detectable to the casual fan, I could not say. But in the world of Monkees adepts, Nesmith’s participation is a big fucking deal. In the same proportions that the Monkees are equivalent to a “real band,” Nesmith’s coyness is roughly similar to when Neil Young deigns to play a few gigs with Crosby, Stills, and Nash, or when Brian Wilson shows up for a Beach Boys tour. Nesmith is the lone figure in the group that even its detractors will admit is cool—the quality that has always eluded the Monkees, no matter how acceptable they have become among music snobs.
So what made Nesmith stand apart from his three fellow cast/bandmates? How did he manage not to allow the two years he spent on a low-rated kids TV show about a fake rock band define the 48 years that followed? How, in short, did Michael Nesmith become the one Monkee it was acceptable to dig?
Partly, it’s because he has led an artist’s life. His pedigree as a film and video producer (including Repo Man, Tapeheads, and the influential—though damaged by age—1981 “video album” Elephant Parts), novelist, and solo recording artist is long and eccentric, but full of fascinating work. The cynical line on Nesmith’s refusal to be a full-blown Monkee anymore is that unlike his confreres, he never needed the money, because his mother invented Liquid Paper and he inherited her fortune. (Whether or not that’s true, he also had more songwriting credits on Monkees albums than all the others combined, so the royalties from the 75 million records they sold couldn’t have hurt.) Still, Nesmith has never seemed like the kind of guy to let money interfere with his creative impulses.
His musical influence pushed Monkees records towards substance, heaviness, weirdness—their very bandness. The songs he wrote and sang introduced elements of country (“Sweet Young Thing,” “What Am I Doing Hangin’ Round,” “Listen to the Band”), garage rock (“Mary, Mary”), acid rock (“Circle Sky”), and psychedelia (“Daily Nightly”) into a preteen pop context where vacuous material like “Sugar, Sugar” would have been preferred. That’s not an exaggeration: Monkees music producer and bubblegum kingmaker Don Kirshner was fired after repeated clashes with Nesmith over issues of integrity and control, and dove right into working with the Archies, because cartoons never want creative input.
After the show ended in 1968, Nesmith’s Monkees output grew weirder (as did the band’s—see: Head). He recorded ornate, almost perversely experimental numbers like “Tapioca Tundra,” “Writing Wrongs,” and “Calico Girlfriend” under the well-funded but increasingly uncommercial Monkees brand name. In 1968, while the band was still technically a going concern, he holed up for a very expensive weekend recording session with the best players in L.A. to make his first solo album, The Wichita Train Whistle Sings, an instrumental collection of Sousa-esque orchestral arrangements of Monkees numbers he’d written.
But no matter how far afield his inspiration might have wandered, Nesmith’s musical cornerstone was always the intersection of country and rock. During his pre-Monkees days, he had been the regular MC at the Troubadour’s Monday night hootenannies, a famously fertile songwriting laboratory where the folk revival began its descent into Southern California country rock. Having brought that sound to the Monkees from their first LP onward, Nesmith doubled down on its hard twang, strong groove, and vaguely mystical lyrics on several solo albums after the group ended. But in the early ’70s, it was as impossible for him not to be an ex-Monkee as it was for the credible country rock establishment to extend itself to one. It would be decades before discerning music culture became elastic enough to go digging for the wealth of songs and albums he made during that period.
Nesmith’s undeniable country rock bona fides have always been a point of pride among his ardent defenders—sometimes to the point of hyperbole. “In terms of the country rock hybrid sound, Nesmith—clearly—was a visionary of the form,” wrote Dangerous Minds’ Richard Metzger.“He can be credited as much as ANYONE—including the Byrds, the Flying Burrito Brothers, even CSNY—with inventing the sound.” Whether a form with so many forbears can even be said to have been “invented” at all, it’s undeniable that Nesmith was years ahead of the curve of that sound becoming fashionable in the more credible hands of the artists Metzger names, and another former TV star, Rick Nelson. Nor is it out of the question that Nesmith’s country-rock contributions helped soften the ground for the subsequent coolness of Laurel Canyon country, as kids reared on Monkees LPs and TV episodes grew into more discerning teenagers.
To say Nesmith’s star power resides in pop subversions, however, is to ignore something more fundamental about his appeal. In the ecstatically goofy frame of the Monkees TV show, while Dolenz clowned, Jones mooned, and Tork dummied up, Nesmith was the clear leading man, with impeccably dry comic timing and a gentle drawl that set him apart not only from his co-stars, but from anyone else you were likely to find on network television. The representation of Southern men on TV between 1966 and 1968 mostly consisted of cornpone dipshits on “The Beverly Hillbillies,” “Green Acres,” and “Gomer Pyle USMC,” with family-friendly entertainers like Andy Griffith and Roger Miller thrown in for good measure. Nesmith’s cool, witty, moral, unmistakably Texan persona offered a sweet inversion of conventional masculinity on the small screen. I’ll stop shy of calling him a great actor, but check out the speeches he makes in “Monkee Mayor,” “The Devil and Peter Tork,” and the Christmas episode, to name a few. Within the patently plastic confines of the show, he seems irreducibly real—the voice of reason. You trust him, even in the midst of all that artifice.
Speaking of sincerity in the midst of artifice, Nesmith’s final concert as a Monkee last month was a master class. Dolenz, Tork, and the backing band ran down an airtight, 32-song set list—primarily the hits (with textbook banter thrown in), but some surprising deep cuts too. Nesmith only came out for the songs he sang lead on—11 in all—and to add rhythm guitar to a couple of songs from the recent album that gives the tour its name, Good Times! He’d play one or two of his numbers—the polite string band shuffle of “Papa Gene’s Blues,” the unlikely source of a RUN-DMC sample (“Mary, Mary”), the gnarly anti-Vietnam thrasher “Circle Sky,” the all-time showstopper “Listen to the Band”—and then step off with a sprightly smile and a wave.
Not one of these songs is anything less than a pop gem. But something about the occasion—the knowledge that it was meant to be the last time, or maybe (and there’s no delicate way to say this) the dramatic contrast between the images of the young TV pop star on the video screen and the 73-year-old man bounding on and off stage—made every one of his songs into an ugly-face tearjerker for roughly 90 percent of that audience. His solo number was almost too much to bear.
In its original iteration on the 1968 LP The Birds, The Bees, and The Monkees, “Tapioca Tundra” was—as its title suggests—a jazzy, psychedelic oddity. Alone with his Gretsch 12-string, Nesmith told the story of writing the song after the very first Monkees live show in 1967, when he first encountered the audience’s role in the group’s phenomenon. “There was another presence up there with us,” he explained before playing. Stripped to its Western swing essentials, “Tundra” became a haunted cowboy plaint in the tradition of Hank Snow, but with Nesmith’s trademark elliptical lyrics. “And softly as I walk away in freshly tattered shoes,” he sang, voice weathered but still unmistakably his, “it cannot be a part of me, for now it’s part of you.”
It was such a good exit line, you almost didn’t want them to come back on for the one-two-three finale of “Daydream Believer,” “Pleasant Valley Sunday,” and “I’m a Believer.” But of course they did, and Nesmith stayed up there with them, enthusiastically playing the Monkees’ three biggest hits as tears rolled down the smiling faces of 2,700 people singing along to every word.
The 50th anniversary tour is still rolling along for a few more dates, without Nesmith. It’s well produced and adroitly performed entertainment, awash in nostalgic fun. Yes, it’s square. Yes, it’s corny. And yes, it’s Boomer City, USA. But to truly get the Monkees—and Nesmith in particular—is forever to feel the sting of being underestimated by strangers, so it’s nice to commune every so often.