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
This article appears in November 15 • 1996 and November 15 • 1996 (Cover).