“How old were you when you were Monkee crazy?” is typically a question I get from fellow music nerds because, like pretty much everyone ever, I was, at one point, obsessed with the Monkees. It is not a question I ever expected Michael Nesmith to ask me.
In fact, when we spoke, I hardly had any intention at all of bringing up his most famous musical outfit. He’s had a rocky relationship with America’s answer to the Beatles in the past, what with abruptly dropping off reunion tours and subtly avoiding the topic altogether.
More than that, though, I really wanted to talk about what he’s been up to lately: resurrecting his post-Monkees group, the First National Band, and, now, performing the entire 1972 And the Hits Just Keep on Comin’ album live.
But Nez brought up the Monkees. There was a time in my life not even 10 years ago when I never thought I’d get to interview Nez, never get to meet him, and certainly never get to see him live. But since around 2011, he’s had a change of heart about the road — and, presumably, about the Monkees, too. (In fact, he’s headed to the East Coast at the end of February with Micky Dolenz for a few more dates on the uber-popular “Mike and Micky Show” tour.)
I’m grateful to get to watch one of what I consider to be one of the greatest living songwriters showcase his songbook onstage, and I’m even more grateful he’s decided to revive the much-beloved Hits album in its original form: two guitars, one pedal steel. Or, as Nez would say, “Just me ‘n’ Pete.” (That is, Pete Finney, the ethereal wizard of the pedal steel guitar and Nez’s sole bandmate for this upcoming jaunt.)
It’s funny — I know the album so well, but it wasn’t until the tour was announced that I realized that Nez and Finney are presenting it as it is on the record. It’s not like I heard an errant drum here or an accordion there; it’s that the tracks are so rich and deep (“Tomorrow and Me”! “Roll with the Flow”! “Harmony Constant”!) that the simple instrumentation is all that’s needed to create fully fledged arrangements. Ones that we, on the West Coast, will be privileged to see live starting January 17 in Seattle. (Stay tuned after the interview for the full schedule!)
But before that, Nez and I chatted from our respective California hideaways — mine Southern, his Central. We talked about music, yes, but a whole host of other “stuff” (one of his go-to, catch-all terms): World of Warcraft, weed, peanut butter, weed in peanut butter, Trump, and… well, you’ll see.
REBEAT: How are you doing these days after the crazy year you’ve had?
MICHAEL NESMITH: Well, I’m doing great. If you’re talking about my heart episode, I’m completely back. I’m 100% recovered, I’m happy to say. I mean, who knew how I was going to come out? But it’s perfect. Everything’s normal, and I’m feeling strong and in the saddle, and so, that’s a good report.
For the rest of the stuff, like my companies and all that kind of thing, I don’t know. I feel like I’m semi-retired these days and just waiting for the next step. I’m really enjoying playing music and I’m loving going out on this tour I’m about to do, which is just me and Pete Finney, who’s a pedal steel player.
The music just lifts me up. It’s what makes life worth living these days, playing live music. It’s something I’d never thought I’d say, because I never did enjoy it that much, but this is really a good time.
So, you say you’re kind of in semi-retirement. What’s your typical day like?
Well, I go on about my business and there’s a dozen things to handle, but I’m not like a retired politician or retired head of state where the phone never stops ringing. I get up late. Have a leisurely, late breakfast or go over to the club and work out a little bit. I come back home, get in the hot tub, and that’s it.
I mean, that’s seven days a week, pretty much. It’s embarrassing on one hand. On the other hand, you know, I worked hard to earn it, so I’m just gonna enjoy it.
Do you listen to a lot of music? Do you go online a lot or have a ton of media filling your days?
Yes, but it tends to revolve around lectures and exchanges of ideas and hanging out. I smoke a lot of grass, a lot of cannabis. It’s legal in California, so you can get some really nice stuff. Late in the day — usually my sun over the yardarm is around 4:30 or 5:00 — is when I like to light up and lean back and puff and just turn off my mind and float downstream like Lennon said.
A big part of my day is reverie and thinking about, you know, the deeper things of life and so forth. And sometimes I do it stoned, and sometimes I do it completely straight. Being stoned doesn’t do much except just really relaxes me and makes it so I can just sink into my easy chair.
When you say you’re watching talks and lecturers, are you’re watching TED Talks on YouTube, or…?
Not TED Talks, per se, but obscure lecturers and writers and so forth. There’s a professor — I think he’s at Cambridge, and his name is Rupert Sheldrake. He wrote this book called Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home. He put it together as a scientific work and the scientific community just ran him off, and he got his hackles up. And he said, “Well, then, I’m just going to do anything I want. I’m not going to pursue the hard academic track. It’s too tough, and I don’t agree with a lot of stuff you guys are doing.”
So he’s opened a whole world of travels and thoughts. He’s got some ideas he’s advancing. And he was friends with Terence McKenna, who was sort of a cybernaut, because he took massive amounts of DMT and smoked grass every day and hung out on that manifest plane. He was a wonderful lecturer, so he’s great to just sit and listen to — high or not.
That’s my internet stuff. I do a lot of cruising — shopping — and stuff, but none of that counts for anything more than just shopping.
What’s your relationship like with social media? I still remember your Twitter from years ago.
Well, it’s attenuated considerably, which is to say I’m not on socially very much. For a long time — past two, three years — I was an avid World of Warcrafter. I had a stack of characters and played, you know, several hours a day and had a lot of friends in that. And then, that began to slow down as I got more and more interested in doing music again.
I took my characters out to the highest level at the time and you know, completely played everything, and then it started to get kind of boring, so I just withdrew and, now, I don’t really play anything.
Videoranch 3D, the virtual site that I built for performing live music has been really, really slow going; there’s not much going on in there. I don’t have a big online presence as far as that’s concerned.
Is that how you felt sort of about quitting Twitter — it was tapped out and kind of boring?
Frankly, I never understood Twitter. There’s the table of two, and then there’s a table of four, and you still have a table of two twos, and then there’s the table of six, and now you got trouble. Unless you can coalesce everybody into just one conversation among the six. Which, by the way, the English have mastered in some miraculous way so everybody talks about the same thing and a lot of humor comes out of that.
In the virtual world, that started to be a real thing, but it was such a heavy weight to keep the virtual world up and running that I just shut it down. I thought, I can’t do this on my own and started looking around for partners and didn’t find any willing partners. So, I just left it at that, and now I’m down to nothing but just a Gmail, which I have other people sort through for me. I guess I’m completely weaned.
Well. that’s not a bad place to be. I’m sure it’s easier to be productive and do the things you really want to spend quality time on.
Well, maybe. I mean, it’s hard to know. I certainly don’t have any online morality. I don’t have any idea of what’s right and wrong, online or off. In terms of my life, I know what’s best for me, my family, and my loved ones. And so, I try to do that.
Online steals. It takes you away from time that you could have focused on other things. I’m an avid student of metaphysics and spiritual writings, but you can’t do that and be online unless you’re using it for research, which I do a lot. If you’re beginning to start farting around and looking at all the silly pictures, you look down, and six hours have passed, and you don’t come away any richer.
That’s enough about the internet for me. Let me tell you, because nobody cares about what I have to say about it.
I want to talk a little bit about the First National Band, because I’m such a big fan.
Oh, yeah? Did you get the Live at the Troubadour album?
I was actually at the Troubadour Show [in January 2018], and at Pappy & Harriet’s, which, I’ve got to say, it was one of my favorite shows I’ve ever been to. Period.
Well, why? I’ve got my reasons, but please, tell me yours.
I waited my whole life to hear those songs live, and the energy of that club is just so great. I was close to the front, so it was sort of like being with you guys in the music. Fantastic.
It was that way for me, too. Onstage, though. I realized that I was face to face with this guy [in the audience — Pappy & Harriet’s has a very low, small stage]. He was on the other end of the microphone, and everybody was jammed up in there.
It was okay; I figured, “Look, they’re here to look at me, I’m not here to look at them, so I’m going to leave them alone. I’ll sing my little heart out, and maybe that’ll do the trick.” And it did. It was a great show. I really enjoyed it.
View this post on InstagramI was born for this show.
#michaelnesmith #firstnationalband #themonkees #livemusic #concerts #music
#michaelnesmith #firstnationalband #themonkees #livemusic #concerts #musicAre you comfortable when people classify the First National Band’s music as country-rock?
Well, I’m comfortable. I mean, it doesn’t cause me any angst. I don’t feel the least bit misrepresented, but it’s not correct. It’s really not. It’s not country music. It’s more like… the words that come to mind just sound absurd, so I can’t say. I don’t know what to call it, but it isn’t country music in the sense of Johnny Cash and Hank Williams singing country music.
Trying to describe the music of the FNB to various people and the albums and how it’s structured and arranged, I point to the fact that a lot of it came from altered states of mind, and that a lot of those altered states of mind came from just grass. We would sit around high in the afternoon and take these excursions up and down the musical scales.
The guy who had the spaceship, we all quickly found out, was [FNB pedal steel guitarist] Red Rhodes because this pedal steel is a starship. In the right hands, it takes off, and it goes into this fantasy land that lives in the mind of every fantasy maker.
I was trying to attach some sensibility into my music to ideals similar to [filmmaker] Hayao Mizayaki. I don’t have a way to shade colors necessarily or do high-resolution imaging except in one’s mind. And that would be a product of carefully constructed poems in carefully constructed melodies that furthered the ideas in the poems.
Then it would just take letting the band, especially Red, go sailing in the universe with those songs, which they did. When Red would take off, everybody’s jaw would hit the floor. I haven’t come across anybody that could do it like Red could. Except for Pete.
It’s a completely different kind of sideways approach to a folk sensibility that’s been covered with a “medicated Jif.” That’s the way I describe it, but that doesn’t tell anybody who hasn’t heard it what it sounds like. Do you know what “medicated Jif” is?
No, I don’t think I do. Can you explain it?
Pete’s the one that coined the phrase “medicated Jif,” because I told the story about when Red got loaded off of grass, he mixed into a big jar of Jif peanut butter. You started to understand how crazy it was because Red couldn’t smoke flower. He could only do edibles.
And so that’s the thing that makes the music powered, empowers the music. And it’s very, very different then the acid flashes of the Sixties, but it’s not that different. You’ve got this place where it connects. It’s the most fun and where I really enjoy putting my efforts, because I can say anything I want to and have it express the music that I want to hear in my life — and then, suddenly, there it is.
Take me back to 1972 when you’d released the first trio of FNB albums and one of my favorites, Tantamount to Treason. You’re staring down the next project. Where were you sort of musically and mentally at that point?
That was an odd spiral, and I didn’t really have a lot that was motivating me at the time. I was kind of floating along and just singing whatever song popped into my head. But I didn’t have a focal point — I didn’t have the same focal point, that is, the First National Band. Even though Red was still around.
There was so much during that particular time in my life. It was real pushback on the Monkees and from the anti-Monkees fans. I just couldn’t get work, and nobody wanted to come and hear me sing my music, especially when people said, “He’s singing country songs these days.” They start thinking about George Jones driving his lawnmower to the liquor store.
The album you made next, And the Hits Just Keep On Comin’, is obviously one of your most consistently loved albums by critics and fans. Most of the tracks on that album you wrote pretty early in your career, right?
Yeah. I mean, it was back in the Sixties, I guess. It was right after Jonathan Livingston Seagull came out [in 1970].
On the album, we see your recording of “Different Drum” pop up. Most people are probably familiar with Linda Ronstadt and the Stone Poneys’ version, but yours, as the songwriter, is quite different.
Well, that was the way I wrote the song — the way it is on Hits. It’s got the twang, and it’s got the balance, and it’s got all that stuff. That’s real kind of mountain music. That’s home-style backyard, a hot Saturday afternoon, and fruit jars full of ice tea. That’s where that comes from.
I sang “Different Drum” for John Herald of the Greenbriar Boys like that. He took it home and turned it into the ballad that it became. Linda heard the ballad and made us all rich. So it was great, fantastic.
I’ve heard that the title of the album was a jab at your record company.
No. It wasn’t a jab, it was just ironic. I was being a smart aleck. Saying, “Okay, you want hits? Well, let’s call them hits, put ’em out, and see what happens.” That’s definitely a Trumpism.
Speaking of Trump, I read that part of the FNB’s mission was an effort to try to reclaim American patriotism from “racist rednecks.”
There’s no better way to reclaim the heart of something than a starship. You go up in a starship, you look around, and you see the beating hearts, the broken hearts, the flowering hearts. You’re able to go and, you know, dance among the flowers.
I took my wires off of the political aspect of the music in order to energize the aesthetic and psychedelic and romantic aspects. Because that’s where you really have those feelings of love and feelings of approbation, feelings of security, feelings of the universe being held together and one intelligent grid of harmony and an orchestra of life. And when that starts to happen, the music transforms itself, and then it starts to transform me as a listener.
I don’t know what you call that exactly, but it’s a mixture of that and the polemic hard politics that we’re all living through right now.
Do you consider yourself a patriot? Whatever that means.
Whatever that means is the problem. I don’t see any definitions that worked for me politically. I’m a peacenik and have been a peacenik ever since I figured that out in the Vietnam War. In terms of finding real substance in the lawmakers and their policies, I just can’t find it right now. I’m not chasing anybody around. I’m pretty sure Trump is immoral and wrong.
I’m pretty sure you’re right. So, let’s talk about your upcoming tour performing the And The Hits Just Keep on Comin’ album.
Well, of course Red’s long gone, but I’ve hired Pete to come and take his place, because Pete is the pedal steel player for the FNB. I said, “Wanna just you and me go out and do a duo?” And he said, “Oh, that’s my dream.”
January 17, I’ll have my first show up in Seattle, and then I got a stack of dates, like four or five more dates, that brings me around California. That all will be Pete and me doing the Hits album. It duplicates the show that Red and I did and in England in 1974. And it was as well received at the time.
How has your relationship to being one of the Monkees changed over time, and what is it like now?
Well, what it’s like now is “I don’t know.” It feels a little bit old. Old timey and kind of like watching Fred-and-Ginger movies, although not quite that good. When I say it’s old, I don’t mean that it’s icky, I mean that it’s old like an old vase or some artifact. You see it representing the era if it’s apropos and emblazoned on whatever the object is by the overlay of the arts. It just has a patina to it. It’s not tattered in any way, but it’s odd in its own way.
The comedy and the dress and the music and everything’s so dated and has so much of its time that there’s almost no current contemporary resonance for it. You don’t know what this thing is referring to.
I think the people who came to it as kids treasure it and say, “No, this is how things are when they’re funny to a nine year old,” and it makes sense that way. It was just screwball, four grown men living together on the beach unattended with no parents or oversight. That’s a completely radical idea. And I don’t know why kids got it. I think they just got it because the Monkees were cute, but who knows.
You can’t really get your arms around what the thing was — is. It persists even though all of us are old men now or dead.
How is your personal relationship with “Monkee Mike”?
It’s very peaceful. As an actor and a performer, playing a part that gets continuously associated with you can be bad, and it can be good. In any case, it’s never not a fact and not a factor. It’s always a factor. And that’s always a fact.
And since that’s the case, it becomes an old friend. It becomes a worn patch on the welcome mat. A place that you’re comfortable in, your easy chair, those sorts of things. They settle in, and the Monkees settled in that form. But I’m an adult with the Monkees as memories for me, that’s all.
Upcoming dates for Michael Nesmith’s And the Hits Just Keep On Comin’ tour:
Thursday, January 17 — Neptune Theatre, Seattle, WA (with Ben Gibbard & Scott McCaughey)
Saturday, January 19 — The Rogue Theater, Grants Pass, OR
Sunday, January 20 — Sofia Center for the Arts, Sacramento, CA
Tuesday, January 22 — Troubadour, Los Angeles, CA
Thursday, January 24 — The Coach House, San Juan Capistrano, CA
Saturday, January 26 — Sweetwater Music Hall, Mill Valley, CA
The post Different Drum: Michael Nesmith on Monkees, ‘Medicated Jif,’ and What Makes Life Worth Living appeared first on REBEAT Magazine.
