![]() ![]() Producer John Lacks decided that the series could be expanded into an entire network, and when he offered Nesmith to join the new station, Nez politely declined.Īnd of course, there’s the comedy. ![]() Excited by the potential of the form, he created the music video TV series PopClips for Nickelodeon, which was a huge hit. Okay, the genesis of MTV is a little convoluted, but simply put it goes like this: Michael Nesmith made his first music video, “Rio,” in 1977. In 2009, his second novel, The America Gene, which he dedicated to his friend Douglas Adams, was released as an e-book that could only be downloaded through his website. In 1998, he wrote his first novel, The Long Sandy Hair of Neftoon Zamora a magical realist Americana journey about a musician named “Nez” on a quest to find the titular Neftoon Zamora, a mysterious singer who may be a half-Martian trickster goddess. In the ‘80s, Nesmith produced the films Tapeheads, Timerider: The Adventure of Lyle Swann, and the cult masterpiece Repo Man. In 1994, he released a sequel called The Garden, which included a CD-ROM, at a time when most people (including a baby-faced Greg Kinnear), didn’t really know what that was. It came with a novella that was to be read at the same time as the album played. In 1974, he released an instrumental album titled The Prison. Not content to simply churn out the folk-country-rock music he was so adept at writing, Nesmith experimented not only with different sounds and musical styles, but also with musical forms, questioning what an album or a song could be, a curiosity that would outline the rest of his career when he transitioned to video. When the group broke up in the early ‘70s, Nesmith would be the only member to consistently record and release music. And it goes without saying that he is the only person in the history of the Earth to pull off the “wool cap” look. His sense of humor was a little bit smarter, a little dryer, a little more adult. With his string bean physique, slight Texas drawl and his twelve string Gretsch, he was the unspoken leader of the band, oscillating between acting as straight man and ringleader to group’s cartoon antics. Sure, the others all had their appeal: Davy Jones was the pretty boy teen idol, Micky Dolenz was the funny one, and even Peter Tork had his own dimwitted charm. To me, as a kid watching The Monkees, it was all about Michael Nesmith.
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