Michael Nesmith’s back catalogue is a long-hidden treasure trove

By D.B.

THE COUNTERCULTURE of the 1960s produced a number of musicians who were simultaneously nourished by its spirit of change yet deeply rooted in, and fascinated by, America’s past. It would be mistaken to call this a movement; it was more an attitude. Its standard-bearers were The Band, whose mix of ramshackle rock’n’roll and old-timey aesthetics would form the basis of the Americana genre. Folk and country music were its principal sources, but such diverse figures as Van Dyke Parks, Harry Nilsson and Randy Newman would draw on more metropolitan sounds, including ragtime, vaudeville, musicals and American classical, as well as those of the American Gulf coast and the Caribbean.

A key figure is often left out of this story. The omission might seem odd, given that he was a member of one of the decade’s most successful bands: the Monkees, assembled by television producers for the comedy show of the same name. It made no odds that Michael Nesmith, like fellow Monkee Peter Tork (who died in February), was a product of the folk-music scene. His five-year tenure as a teen idol in a “manufactured” pop group (a dismissive phrase which overlooks how all groups are manufactured in one way or another, as well as Mr Nesmith’s revolt against that interference) would define him in the mind of the public, while his subsequent recording career would go overlooked.

A new box set, “Songs”, contains the first 11 of Mr Nesmith’s 14 (thus far) solo albums, along with a compilation from 1989. It offers an opportunity to reassess his body of work, and discover why he is so influential among musicians—acts as varied as the Breeders, the Jayhawks, Susanna Hoffs and Run-DMC have covered his songs—and cherished by a small but ardent following which at last has easy access to the bulk of his catalogue.

The set divides neatly into two parts. The first six discs cover a creative flurry between 1970, when Mr Nesmith took a hefty financial hit to be released from his Monkees contract, and 1973. These are the country-rock albums he recorded with his short-lived backing group, the First National Band, its successor of even briefer tenure, the Second National Band, and finally as the sole credited artist (now going by Michael, to distinguish him from the woolly-hatted television character “Mike”). The first of these albums, “Magnetic South”, would yield the only top-40 single of his solo career, “Joanne”—a reversal of fortune for the former member of an act which had scored five top-three singles and four number-one albums in a two-year period. Mr Nesmith’s fifth solo LP, in 1972, would bear the sardonic title “The Hits Just Keep On Coming”.

It was not that Mr Nesmith wished to be obscure or uncommercial, and there was nothing about his solo material that determined it should be. His composition “Different Drum” had five years before been a substantial hit for Linda Ronstadt’s group, the Stone Poneys, whose version stands as a minor classic. It is Mr Nesmith’s most celebrated song, and it says a great deal that many who enjoy it will have no idea he wrote it. His own, folksy take—strikingly different from the chiming, driving Stone Poneys number—underlines his distinctive qualities as a writer and performer: his way with a melody, his phrasing of concise narrative detail and his capacity to be at once wry and rueful.

Timing and circumstance condemned those first six records to obscurity. Mr Nesmith signed to Nashville’s leading label, RCA, but the burgeoning hip country-rock scene—for which his music would have been a natural fit—was suspicious at best of the ex-bubblegum pop star. Monkees fans, meanwhile, had already abandoned that group as it strove for artistic independence; they would have been bewildered by what they heard, if they heard it at all. Today, those albums make up a treasure trove, liable to delight the first-time listener.

Mr Nesmith became notably less prolific as other interests intervened: it took him two decades to issue as much music as he did in those first three years. The video clip he made for “Rio”, one of his better-known songs, led him to devise a show called “PopClips” for Nickelodeon, a children’s cable channel. Acquired by TimeWarner, “PopClips” became the basis for MTV, the standalone channel that transformed music, and the music business, in the 1980s.

“Rio”, with its Latin lilt, demonstrated how Mr Nesmith’s palette expanded from the mid-1970s onwards, as he released music on his own Pacific Arts label. The second half of “Songs” shows him becoming ever more experimental, with such pieces as the soundtrack to a book (“The Prison”, 1975) and its chiefly instrumental companion album, “The Garden” (1994). His more overtly pop albums utilise the sounds of the Americas in a way that prefigures the work of David Byrne. Never compromising, never anything other than amiably inventive, never sounding—no matter what form he works in—like anyone other than himself, Mr Nesmith has lived up to the pseudonym he once used in the 1960s: Michael Blessing.