Nesmith’s household mentioned he died peacefully in his residence, surrounded by family members.
LOS ANGELES — Michael Nesmith, the singer-songwriter, creator, actor-director and entrepreneur who will possible be greatest remembered because the wool-hatted, guitar-strumming member of the made-for-television rock band The Monkees, has died at 78.
Nesmith, who had undergone quadruple bypass surgical procedure in 2018, died at residence Friday of pure causes, his household mentioned in an announcement.
Nesmith was a struggling singer-songwriter in September 1966 when “The Monkees” tv debut turned him and fellow band members Micky Dolenz, Peter Tork and David Jones into in a single day rock stars.
After the group broke up in 1970, Nesmith moved on to a protracted and inventive profession, not solely as a musician however as a author, producer and director of movies, creator of a number of books, head of a media arts firm and creator of a music video format that led to the creation of MTV.
Nesmith was working “hoot nights” on the fashionable West Hollywood nightclub The Troubadour when he noticed a commerce publication advert in search of “4 insane boys” to play rock musicians in a band modeled after the Beatles.
The present featured the comical misadventures of a quartet that tooled round Los Angeles in a tricked-out Pontiac GTO referred to as the MonkeeMobile and, after they weren’t chasing ladies, pursued music stardom.
Every episode rolled out two or three new Monkees songs, six of which turned Prime 10 Billboard hits throughout the present’s two-year run. Three others, “I’m a Believer,” ″Daydream Believer” and “Final Practice to Clarksville,” reached No. 1.
Jones, together with his British accent and boyish attractiveness, was the group’s cute lead singer. Dolenz turned the wacky drummer, though he needed to be taught to play the drums because the present went alongside. Tork, a folk-rock musician, portrayed the comically clueless bass participant. Nesmith, together with his twangy Texas accent and the wool hat he’d worn to his audition, turned the intense however naive lead guitarist.
A prankster by nature, he’d arrived on the audition carrying a guitar and bag of soiled laundry he mentioned he deliberate to scrub instantly afterward. With a harmonica round his neck, he stormed right into a casting workplace, banging the door loudly. After pausing to stare upon a portray as if it had been a mirror, he sat down and instantly put his ft up on a desk.
However he rebelled nearly instantly when producers informed him they had been going to name his character “Wool Hat.” He demanded they use his actual identify, as they did with the opposite actors.
It will be the primary of many confrontations Nesmith would have with producers throughout a tumultuous two-year run wherein “The Monkees” received the 1967 Emmy for greatest comedy collection.
Nesmith and Tork, the group’s two most completed musicians, railed towards this system’s refusal to permit them to play their very own devices at recording classes. However when Nesmith revealed that reality to reporters, music critics rapidly turned on “The Monkees,” dismissing the present as a fraud and the band because the “Prefab 4,” a mocking reference to the Beatles’ nickname, Fab 4.
Nesmith, in the meantime, had written a number of songs he hoped to debut on the present, however nearly all had been dismissed by music producer Don Kirshner, as sounding too nation.
Amongst them was “Completely different Drum,” which Linda Ronstadt recorded in 1967 for her first hit single, validating to Nesmith his opinion that Kirshner, hailed by the pop music business as “The Man With The Golden Ear,” didn’t know what he was speaking about.
Issues got here to a head when all 4 Monkees demanded they take management of the music. They had been warned they’d be sued for breach of contract.
At that, Nesmith rose from his seat and smashed his fist by means of a wall, telling Kirshner it may have been his face.
For years Nesmith would refuse to verify or deny the incident, whilst the opposite three gleefully recounted it to reporters. In his 2017 memoir, “Infinite Tuesday,” he did acknowledge it, saying he’d misplaced his mood when he felt his integrity was being questioned.
“It was an absurd second in so some ways,” he wrote.
It did give the Monkees management over their music, nonetheless, starting with the group’s third album, “Headquarters.”
After the present concluded in 1968 the band launched into a prolonged live performance tour the place members sang a lot of their very own songs and performed their very own devices earlier than crowds of adoring followers. Jimi Hendrix was typically their opening act.
Following the band’s breakup Nesmith hardly ever rejoined the others for reunion excursions, main many to imagine he disliked the band and the present, one thing he steadfastly denied.
“I actually loved being within the present. I actually loved working with Davy and Micky and Peter,” he informed Australian Musician journal in 2019.
It was, he would typically say, that he was just too busy doing different issues.
Over time he recorded greater than a dozen albums and toured with the First Nationwide Band, the country-rock-folk group he assembled.
He wrote scores of songs, together with “A few of Shelly’s Blues,” “Papa Gene’s Blues,” You Simply Could Be the One” and “The Woman That I knew Someplace” that he carried out with the Monkees. Others, carried out with the First Nationwide Band, included “Joanne,” “Propinquity (I’ve Simply Begun to Care)” and “Completely different Drum.”
For the Monkees’ thirtieth anniversary he induced the others to reunite to document a brand new album, “Justus,” for which all 4 composed the songs and performed the devices. He additionally rejoined the others for a short tour and wrote and directed their 1997 TV reunion movie, “Hey, Hey, It’s the Monkees.”
Nesmith additionally wrote and produced the 1982 science-fiction movie “Timerider: The Journey of Lyle Swann” and earned government producer credit on “Repo Man,” “Tape Heads” and different movies.
His 1981 comedy-music video “Elephant Components” received a Grammy and led to “PopClips,” a collection of music movies broadcast on the Nickelodeon cable community that in flip led to the creation of MTV.
Nesmith even revealed two nicely obtained novels, 1998’s “The Lengthy Sandy Hair of Neftoon Zamora” and 2009’s “The America Gene.”
In 1999 he prevailed in a bitter courtroom battle with the Public Broadcasting System over royalties from a home-video deal his media firm, Pacific Arts, had struck with PBS. A federal jury awarded him $48 million, concluding the favored purveyor of youngsters’s exhibits and documentaries had defrauded him.
Nesmith, displaying he hadn’t misplaced his Monkees humorousness, mentioned afterward: “It’s like catching your grandmother stealing your stereo. You’re glad to get your stereo again, however you’re unhappy to search out out that Grandma’s a thief.”
Each side agreed on an undisclosed settlement and Nesmith based one other firm, Videoranch.
After Jones died in 2012 he started to rejoin the Monkees extra steadily, their live shows now incomes glowing evaluations from critics. He attributed that to many of the group’s unique critics having died or retired.
Following Tork’s demise in 2019, Nesmith and Dolenz took on the identify The Monkees Mike & Micky.
Robert Michael Nesmith was born Dec. 30, 1942, in Houston, Texas, the one little one of Warren and Bette Nesmith.
His dad and mom divorced when he was 4 and his mom typically labored two jobs, as a secretary and painter, to assist her son and herself. It was that latter job that impressed her to whip up a typewriter correction fluid referred to as Liquid Paper in her kitchen blender. By the mid-Seventies it had made her a fortune, which she ultimately left to her son and to nonprofit foundations she endowed to advertise ladies in enterprise and the humanities.
Her son, who was married and divorced thrice, is survived by 4 kids, Christian, Jason, Jessica and Jonathan.
Former Related Press author John Rogers was the primary author on the story.
