![]() ![]() ![]() Popclips showed nothing but music videos, introduced by a VJ. In 1979, he and director William Dear developed a TV show, Popclips, for Nickelodeon, a recently inaugurated channel for children that was looking to add teenagers to its audience. It got some play in Europe, but Nesmith was struck by the fact that there was no outlet in the United States for showing such works, which a few other pop and rock stars were also beginning to make (and some, like the Beatles, had made earlier). ![]() Even people who didnt understand film, including me, could see this was a profound conceptual shift.Īlmost by accident, he had made one of the first music videos as that term came to be understood. ∺s we edited these images, Nesmith added, an unusual thing started to emerge: The grammar of film, where images drove the narrative, shifted over to where the song drove the narrative, and it didnt make any difference that the images were discontinuous. I wrote a series of cinematic shots: me on a horse in a suit of light, me in a tux in front of a 1920s microphone, me in a Palm Beach suit dancing with a woman in a red dress, women with fruit on their head flying through the air with me, he said. They wanted me to stand in front of a microphone and sing, Nesmith was quoted as saying in the 2011 book I Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution, by Craig Marks and Rob Tannenbaum. In 1977, he recorded a song called Rio for the Island Records label, which asked him to make some kind of promotional film for it. Nothing was further from the truth.īut he was musician enough to have a modest solo career after Monkee mania faded at the end of the 1960s, and that led him into a role in music television history. It would always seem wildly ironic to me that I was the one given credit in the press for being the only musician in the Monkees, he wrote. Nesmith, who wrote and produced some of the Monkees songs, had the reputation of being the only real musician in the group, but in his 2017 memoir, Infinite Tuesday, he disputed that. The show made its debut in September 1966, and although it lasted only two seasons, the Monkees became a cultural reference point, thanks largely to their bestselling albums (which featured a lot of studio musicians and backup singers, especially early on). Thats probably one of the reasons they cast him. He has that dry Will Rogers sense of humor, Dolenz told Rolling Stone in 2012, characterizing Nesmiths real persona. Nesmith, a guitarist and occasional singer, was variously described as the cerebral Monkee, the introspective Monkee, the sardonic Monke and the quiet Monkee. Davy Jones, a British vocalist, was the cute scamp Micky Dolenz, the drummer and primary lead singer, was the wild jokester and Peter Tork, the bass player, was the lovable dim bulb. The four members were picked to fit types. Nesmith was a struggling 23-year-old singer and songwriter when he saw an advertisement in Variety seeking four insane boys for acting roles in new TV series. Two aspiring television producers, Bob Rafelson and Bert Schneider, inspired by the Beatles movies, were hoping to make a TV series about the zany antics of a rock band not a real rock band (although the Lovin Spoonful was briefly considered for the job), but actors with musical backgrounds who could create the illusion of a band. Jason Elzy, head of public relations for Rhino Records, the label that represents the Monkees, said the cause was heart failure. Michael Nesmith, who rocketed to fame as the contemplative, wool-cap-wearing member of the Monkees in 1966, then went on to a diverse career that included making one of the rock eras earliest music videos and winning the first Grammy Award for video, died Friday at his home in Carmel Valley, California. ![]()
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