Steven S. Drachman on the Michael Nesmith You Never Knew
I’m going to say a few things about Mike Nesmith, who died today at 78, and none of them will involve The Monkees, the short-lived 1960s-era TV show with which he was involved in his very distant youth.
Nesmith was a novelist, film producer, composer, visionary and solo artist, whose achievements are somehow legendary yet obscure.
His brilliant 1998 novel, The Long Sandy Hair of Neftoon Zamora, tells the story of a musician named Nez who seeks the singer behind a scratchy recording and finds the priestess-goddess of a mythical desert city instead. It is one of my favorite books, a novel both immediately accessible and obscurely weird, a romance, satire and religious tract all in one, which was praised effusively upon its publication by luminaries such as Wendy Wasserstein and Douglas Adams, among many others.
Elephant Parts, his 1981 video-only release (before people made content for video-only), was a music video-comedy show that, along with his late ‘70s show, PopClips, ushered in the MTV era. Elephant Parts sprang in part from the success Nesmith achieved when he filmed “Rio,” the first modern music video; the weekly TV version, Television Parts, surmised, years before Cosby and Roseanne, that if you set well-known comedians’ personas into a TV format – for example, Nesmith proposed, how about Jerry Seinfeld and Garry Shandling? – you might come up with something amusing and worth-watching. Yes, Seinfeld made an appearance.
He produced the classic indie film, Repo Man, directed by Alex Cox.
His music was breathtaking, and innovative without being inaccessible. His 1990 album, “The Prison,” was a book with a soundtrack, a published novel meant to be read along with the recording, a concept he revived in 2017 when he released a soundtrack album to his memoir. His song “Cruising” (often incorrectly referred to as “Lucy and Ramona”) is an instantly recognizable non-hit (listen to the recent Pharrell Williams mashup), which is also paired with one of the earliest music videos, and his profoundly moving performance of the song, “Texas Morning,” from his Nevada Fighter album, is one of the all-time great songs that you have probably never heard of.
He won the very first Grammy for music video, in the 1980s. Just ten years ago, he dabbled in a VR-world-building concert series that prefigured the metaverse. (In his world, VR stood for “Video Ranch.”)
His mother invented Liquid Paper, so it ran in the family.
This final word: Douglas Adams wrote that Neftoon “rises in the imagination like a fantastical building in the desert …. To read it is to be enchanted.”
All these years later, I am enchanted still.
^^^
Steven S. Drachman is the author of a science fiction trilogy, The Strange and Astounding Memoirs of Watt O’Hugh the Third, which is available in paperback from your local bookstore, Amazon and Barnes & Noble; it is also available as a Kindle e-book.
