Remembering Michael Nesmith of The Monkees – and so, so much more

I just saw this afternoon that singer/songwriter/music video pioneer Michael Nesmith had died of natural causes today at age 78. Here’s what I wrote about him back in 2003 for what I think must have been the first edition of my textbook. I’ve made a couple of corrections to the text to account for the passage of time.

Music trivia fans know that the Buggles’s song “Video Killed the Radio Star” was the first video to be played on MTV when the cable service was launched on August 1, 1981. But few know that the idea of MTV and music videos has its roots in the work of a musician and video visionary named Michael Nesmith in the 1960s and 1970s.

Nesmith, along with Davy Jones, Peter Tork, and Mickey Dolenz, made up The Monkees, the world’s first “manufactured” rock band.  At the time, Nesmith was generally considered to be the only “real” musician, something Nesmith later disputed. Be that as it may, the four performers were primarily picked as actors for a television show about a rock bank from out of the 440 who appeared for an audition in 1965.

The idea that rock music could be the basis not only of movies but of popular television programming was firmly established by The Monkees, but in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Nesmith took the concept a giant step further.

Following his stint with The Monkees, he wrote songs for a number of stars, including Linda Ronstadt, produced the cult classic film Repo Man, won a Grammy award, started a successful home video company, and wrote at least one novel.

https://youtu.be/SMkiZ9tO-Zs

Nesmith performing his song Different Drum that was an early hit for a very young Linda Ronstadt.

But his biggest contribution to popular culture was the development of the modern music video.

“In the mid-‘70s, I had been asked to do a promotional film for a record that I had done called Rio, to be distributed in Europe,” Nesmith told a reporter from the Los Angeles Times. “I made something very lavish, not understanding that what they wanted me to do is stand in front of a camera and just play my guitar and sing the song. And it met with great approval in Europe. One of the ways European records were promoted at the time was to play these clips on state television…. What I said was, ‘Gee, you mean to tell me they’re using television to promote hit records?’ That sounded like a pretty good idea to me.”

https://youtu.be/WnpcTsy10dE

While Nesmith’s Rio wasn’t the first music video, it did establish that videos could be surreal, stylish, and more important than the song itself. Just as recording technology would make the record more important than the live performance, so did the video take on more importance in many cases than the record.

Nesmith’s work on music videos was financed by his $47 million inheritance (his mother was the inventor of Liquid Paper). It was this money that allowed him to create his long-form video Elephant Parts, which won the first video Grammy Award.

https://youtu.be/L951UPDh_CU

My favorite part of Nesmith’s hour-long video album Elephant Parts wasn’t actually a music video but rather the biting comic sketch “Neighborhood Nukes.”

Following the success of Rio, Nesmith thought he could put together a good youth-oriented television show using music videos. He created the program Popclips for the then-new cable channel Nickleodeon. Nesmith produced 56 episodes of the program, and it was successful enough to become the model for an entire cable channel – MTV – which was created by Nickelodeon’s then owner, Warner-Amex, in 1981.

A history of the music video and MTV, with their debt to Michael Nesmith and his show Popclips from the series Nick Knacks – a retrospective show about the cable channel Nickelodeon.

Music videos were a way of promoting records, and in some respects they have more in common with a commercial than with a Hollywood film. The music often takes second place to the stunning visuals included in these short films, which have little to do with the actual narrative of the song.

Nesmith saw music videos as a development that is something more than “radio with pictures”:

“[It’s] a whole new art from – the natural marriage of music and visuals. If you put them together you have supercharged the medium. . . .

“The long-term vision, I think, is when the musicians and the filmmaker come together as a team, or in one individual, and begin to marry the grammar of the two forms…. Then we’ll see something really spectacular.”

Memories of Michael Nesmith on Twitter: