Monkee Dues

Dallas-born Michael Nesmith is a strange animal. He's known for quite a few different achievements: He's one of the pioneers of music video -- sometimes called the inventor of MTV; he was a trendsetter rivaled only by the Byrds in the melding of country and rock in the early Seventies with his group the First National Band; he's produced cult favorite movies such as Repo Man; and he's a multimillionaire, having inherited the riches his mother made when she created Liquid Paper. And of course, as far as what kind of strange animal Nesmith really is, he's a Monkee.

That's right. Not was, but is. I spoke briefly to the never-still Nesmith by phone, literally catching him on the way out the door, about his return to the band and their new album Justus, the first album ever to feature Nesmith, Micky Dolenz, Davy Jones, and Peter Tork on their own in the studio, without any help from outside songwriters, auxiliary musicians or production assistance. Since his language is often colorful and occasionally leaves itself open to interpretation, I decided to leave his part of our conversation largely uniterrupted

"We just got together to do this for the fun of it, and there is a real kind of `Who knows what's going to happen' sort of mentality, and the way it got together was just because we wanted to get together. I mean, there wasn't anything to prove, and we don't anticipate we're gonna get any airplay. The only people who are going to buy [Justus] are Monkees fans. Now, of course, there's millions of Monkees fans, so it could sell a whole bunch of records, but the idea that we're gonna go out and really work hard to try to get the record accepted or played or anything is not anything we're doing any more than when we started making the record. It's a question of making it because we wanted to and 'cause it was a good time and it seemed like the right time to do it for us. We're getting pushed along by the logic of events."

At this point, I reel off a list of deja vu projects from Sixties legends like the Beatles (Anthology), the Rolling Stones (Rock and Roll Circus), and the Kinks (To the Bone), that have recently hit the market. Were the Monkees consciously trying to jump on this big nostalgia bandwagon? Nesmith laughs, and his response is uncharacteristically brief:

"Probably if we'd thought of that we wouldn't have done it."

Perhaps, I thought, the current popularity of bands that emulate the Sixties sound of the British Invasion -- which led to the Monkees' creation in 1965 -- had a hand in the band's reuniting? Here Nesmith eschewed brevity and waxed, er, philosophical.

"We just wanted to play. You can't measure this record against those other records, either, because those records are by bands. The Monkees are not a band. The Monkees is fictional. It doesn't exist. There is no Monkees. It's characters in a television show. It's an out-of-work rock & roll band. The fact that the four of us got together and made this music... It's more performance art than it is anything else, and you have to consider it not so much as an album but as an artifact of what it is we're doing. An artifact in the most precise sense of the word, which is to say a by-product of the central event. I don't expect we're going to be competing with anybody who buys a Rolling Stones record.

"There are a stack of people who are convinced that the Monkees were a conspiracy. These tend to be people who live in the desert in a house made out of hubcaps, and they also tend to be people who think that the oil companies are keeping hidden a carburetor that gets more than 200 miles per gallon, but nonetheless there are some around who think that -- and we won't be selling any records to them, and we're not going to be selling any records to the Beatles Anthologists. We just exist in a world of our own, which is real happy for us."

The band may not have intended Justus as a high-profile project (and in truth fans have been reporting difficulty in finding the album, radio has shown almost complete disinterest, and the record has yet to chart on Billboard's Top 200 list), but that hasn't stopped a new juggernaut of Monkeemania products from entering the market. Their zillionth greatest hits package just hit the "Special TV Offer!" circuit, the Disney Channel has a bio special ready to run in January, and a CD-ROM and coffee table book have come out for the holidays. But those products all center around the fictional "out-of-work rock & roll band" Monkees, not the four fiftysomething Monkees (or are they not the Monkees? I disremember). So what do the Monkees-who-are-not-Monkees have planned next?:

"It's sort of falling together the same way the album did. We're thinking about doing a movie -- you know, people keep coming and knocking on the doors all the time: `Wanna do a movie? Wanna do a TV special? Wanna do a group of concerts?' `Wanna-do this, wanna-do that?' And what they mean is, you know, `Do you guys want to get together as the Monkees and go do that?' So we're thinking about a movie. Some friends of ours who are pretty good filmmakers have come up with some very interesting ideas and we're taking a long hard look at it. I'll tell ya, this movie's pretty well-developed, so we know what it is, and I can promise you, it is spectacular. If we go ahead and do it. But it is not anything like anybody would expect, not even slightly."

Of course, I tell Nesmith that was exactly what I was expecting. Again he laughs, quite loudly:

"Yeah! Well, given my film background, and given just who this whole thing is, you can just go from there. Actually, I've just finished a novel, and I'm going through the finishing touches on that -- it's very time-consuming. It'll be out next year in September and then I've got a couple of films I'm working on in addition to that, that are just starting up, and I'll just see how it all plays out...

"Well, have ya got everything, Ken? I've gotta go to work. The boys are waiting for me down at the studio." n