In appreciation of the one with the wool hat 

We were Beatle fans and the idea of an upstart band, name deliberately misspelled to ape (sorry) the Beatles and starring in a weekly TV series seemed exploitative, even if nobody in the show’s pre-teen demographic range knew what that meant. But we watched anyway because there was nothing else on television Monday nights (Gunsmoke? Really?) and their first album had an awful lot of good songs. 

As things worked out, Micky was the most comfortable on camera and a lead singer with some R&B flair. You had to look a little harder to find something good to say about Davy and Peter’s contributions. There was nothing rock & roll about maraca-shaking Davy, whose drippy ballads forced you to get up and place the needle on the next song, while Peter seemed to play a pretty mean banjo when called upon. Their TV personas, cute guy with the British accent and eternally bewildered bandmate willing to trade everything for a bag of magic beans, were reliable plot engines throughout the show’s run. 

Which leaves Mike. He was always the Monkee who didn’t seem to be in the middle, a reluctant actor but veteran songwriter and performer who wrote two songs right out of the gate for their first album.

Concerned about the amount of musical content needed for a weekly show about a rock band, Don Kirshner was hired as “musical supervisor,” allowing him to choose the songs the Monkees recorded and who got to play on the sessions. Known by music insiders as a guy with a golden ear for his ability to pick hit songs, he also seemed to have an iron fist, not allowing Nesmith to play guitar on the band’s albums and rejecting a song Nesmith wrote called “Different Drum.”

“Different Drum” instead got picked up by an LA band fronted by Linda Ronstadt, the Stone Poneys, and it rose up the charts in late 1967 in parallel with “I’m A Believer” (#1 for four weeks while “Drum” stalled out at #13). Nesmith’s legitimacy as a songwriter was growing: around this time the Paul Butterfield Blues Band did a groovy cover of his “Mary Mary.” 

With tensions rising between the band members, mostly Mike, and Kirshner over artistic control, Nesmith led a revolt and Kirshner, who’d overstepped his responsibilities one time too many, was dismissed for violating his contract.* Released from Kirshner’s constraints, the band chose the material for their next album, Headquarters, and played most of the instruments. And as they had more say in the TV show, some episodes grew trippier and the band earned the kind of hip prestige that allowed Nesmith to hang out with the Beatles during their party/recording session for “A Day In the Life” and Peter to introduce the Buffalo Springfield at the Monterey Pop Festival.

Without Kirshner holding him back, Nesmith’s contributions were all over the place stylistically: psychedelic-jazz (“Writing Wrongs”), folk-rock (“Door Into Summer”), heavy rock (“Circle Sky”) – at least heavier than anything Monkee fans came to expect from their heroes – and country rock, where Nesmith can rightfully be considered a pioneer as much as Gram Parsons, who usually gets the “father of country rock” title. After the Monkees, Nesmith recorded several Nashville-meets-LA albums that gave him a cultish status.

(Ironically, Parsons and Nesmith came from wealthy backgrounds: Parsons from old money as his parents were Florida citrus-orchard royalty, while Nesmith’s mother, divorced and trying to make ends meet as a typist in suburban Dallas, invented Liquid Paper typewriter correction fluid. From my days working in an office supply warehouse, I can tell you we sold a lot of Liquid Paper).

Nesmith’s lyrics were sometimes idiosyncratic and felt way too labored over (“Darkened rolling figures move through prisms of no color,” “phantasmagoric splendor,” “a world that glitters glibly,” all from “Daily Nightly” about the Sunset Strip youth riots; maybe it doesn’t handle the subject quite as directly as “For What It’s Worth”). But his singing, writing and production is all over the band’s last two hit albums, Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn and Jones, released in May 1967 (#1 for a week; Sgt. Pepper came out seven days later) and 1968’s The Birds, the Bees and the Monkees. To this day both records are more fun to listen to than those of many of their hipper contemporaries. All the Monkee albums were out of print through most of the 70s. When Rhino Records began re-releasing them in the mid-80s, and later on CD with bonus cuts, it was like welcoming back an old friend. 

After Peter died in 2019 (Davy died in 2012), Mike and Micky began touring as a duo borrowing the Brian Wilson model of playing plenty of deep cuts for the loyal fans along with the hits and backed by a group of likeminded musicians. I passed on buying tickets to see them locally several years ago but regret it now. You gotta see ‘em while you can. 

*In response to his experiences with the Monkees, Kirshner later declared “I want a band that won’t talk back” and he found one when he became the music director for the Archies, who only existed as a cartoon. Something else that possibly only I find interesting is that Kirshner and another vilified music executive, Allen Klein, the thuggish manager of the Beatles who drove a wedge into the band that eventually hastened its breakup, were both graduates of Upsala College.