There’s No Monkee on Nesmith’s Back

Michael Nesmith has made a career out of walking a few steps ahead of the crowd.

True, he first came before the public eye as a member of what critics have called the first prefabricated rock band. But after that, he became a true pioneer of country-rock, and later won the first video Grammy Award. He continues to parlay his visions of the future into a business empire that still is on what he calls a “rocket ride” of growth.

Not the sort of fellow you’d peg to spend much time reminiscing about salad days. Nevertheless, that’s what Nesmith is doing this month with a series of concerts that mark his first public performances in more than a dozen years (not counting a couple of on-stage cameos with his former fellow Monkees during their late-’80s reunion tours).

Following a warm-up show two weeks ago in Nashville, the four-weekend tour officially opens tonight at the Strand in Redondo Beach and will continue with stops in San Francisco, Cambridge, Mass., Chicago, New York City, Alexandria, Va., Atlanta and Dallas, where it concludes Feb. 29. Nesmith will be working in a mostly acoustic setting with keyboardist John Hobbs, bassist Joe Chemay and guitarist Billy Joe Walker Jr.

Tonight will be the first time Nesmith has showcased his own music since the late ‘70s when he toured to promote his last album, “Infinite Rider on the Big Dogma.” He’ll be looking back even further than that, drawing songs from six critically admired but commercially ignored albums he released for RCA after the Monkees broke up.

Not coincidentally, the music will cover the same period (1970-73) surveyed on a compilation album called “The Older Stuff,” recently released by Rhino Records as a companion to “The Newer Stuff,” a collection of Nesmith’s work from 1976-79.

“I’m very interested to see if there is a broad base of interest in this music now,” Nesmith, 48, said during a recent early-morning phone interview from his home in Beverly Hills.

The question partially has been answered by the enthusiastic reception the albums have received in Europe since 1989, when he licensed them for re-release on compact disc (Ultimately, he said, all his albums will be re-released on CD in the United States as well).

“The (European) press sort of went ga-ga,” he said. “Keep in mind, these were albums that sold about 20,000 copies each--we’re not revisiting (Jimi) Hendrix or Rolling Stones masters. These are records that basically nobody ever heard.” But once reissued, “they were received so warmly, and so uniformly, it was wildly encouraging to me. . . .

“I’ve always loved the songs, but it may have been that the times weren’t right” for mass acceptance of music that married an anything-goes rock attitude, the lyrical depth of folk music, and country instrumentation. Nor, probably, were Nesmith’s chances with rock radio helped by lyrics that often sent listeners scrambling for a dictionary, to look up such words as “ennui,” “propinquity” and “didactic.”

As an ex-Monkee, Nesmith had a doubly difficult time establishing his own career. Monkees’ fans by and large weren’t much interested in country rock, while rock fans following the Byrds and other soon-to-be country rockers didn’t put much stock in anything a former Monkee was up to.

Nesmith did land one Top 30 single, “Joanne,” in 1970. He also wrote hits for other artists, notably “Different Drum” for Linda Ronstadt’s Stone Poneys in 1967 and “Some of Shelly’s Blues,” a minor hit for the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band in 1971.

Born in Houston, Nesmith moved to Los Angeles in the early 1960s. Struggling for recognition, just another unknown singer-songwriter, he became part of the same fertile music scene in which the likes of Roger McGuinn, Gram Parsons, David Crosby and others were sowing the seeds of country rock.

Even after being cast in 1965 as one of the Monkees, Nesmith often incorporated steel guitar, banjo, fiddle and other instruments foreign to the standard rock quartet format. Still, it wasn’t until he bought his way out of his Monkees contract that he was able to pursue his musical vision, unhampered by considerations of what Monkees fans would or wouldn’t tolerate.

He harbors no resentment about the group, though. “It was a business struggle,” he said. “As such, it didn’t have very far-reaching emotional effect . . . . I don’t count the Monkees as a burden in any sense. . . . I’m real peaceful with what that was.”

His return to music now comes after nearly two decades spent building up his Santa Monica-based Pacific Arts Corp., which he launched in 1974 selling by mail order his concept album “The Prison,” which he called “a book with a soundtrack.”

Pacific Arts now produces and distributes home video programs and feature films. Because of its expanding activities, Nesmith relocated the company from Carmel to Santa Monica last year.

Indeed, a deal he made in 1990 to distribute PBS Home Video programs has panned out “beyond anyone’s wildest dreams,” he said. Though he wouldn’t reveal specific figures, Nesmith said the tapes have generated more than $20 million for his company. “I’m doing more business now on a Wednesday morning than I used to do in all of 1986,” he said with a laugh.

Even on his slowest days, though, it wasn’t as if Nesmith had to worry about where his next meal would come from. His mother, Bette Claire Graham, invented Liquid Paper typing correction fluid and sold the business to Gillette in 1979 for $47.5 million, leaving the money to Nesmith when she died in 1980. The inheritance financed “Elephant Parts,” the innovative long-form video for which he won the first video Grammy Award. It also paid for “Timerider,” a comic sci-fi adventure film Nesmith produced in 1982 starring Fred Ward, Belinda Bauer and Peter Coyote.

But even with his mother’s money and the PBS deal, Nesmith declines to label his company’s financial footing as “stable.”

“I think we’re still in a very steep gradient of the ascent curve, and while it’s fun to get the rocket ride, I don’t think you can ever lose sight of the fact that you’re on a very sheer face of the cliff,” he said.

“I’m at the point now where the business has grown to such a magnitude that it can stand on its own,” continued Nesmith, the company’s sole owner. “But at the end of the day, the freedom you get from money is just . . . monetary. How’s that for solipsistic?” he added with a laugh.

In addition to his concert tour, Nesmith is working on his first new album since “Infinite Rider.” Entitled “The Garden,” another book with a soundtrack that represents “the second part,” he said, of “The Prison.”

Now that he’s adding more music back into the business mix, Nesmith feels he has found a virtually ideal balance.

“If I can go out and make concerts, do movies and films and still work at Pacific Arts 9 to 5 Monday through Thursday,” he said, “that’s a real happy life.”

Michael Nesmith plays tonight at 8:30 at the Strand, 1700 S. Pacific Coast Highway, Redondo Beach. Tickets: $21.50. Information: (213) 316-6076.