Mike Nesmith, RIP

It's early 1967 and the 10 year old me is watching 'The Monkees' TV show and listening to their first record (along with a Jewish 10 year old girl who lived vaguely near me). Whilst I appreciated Micky Dolenz's singing voice (that's him in the background of the photo, 'playing' drums), I didn't like his on-screen persona; the Monkee I most identified with is Mike Nesmith: guitarist (note the electric 12 string guitar!), singer and songwriter. He is the third Monkee to die (yesterday?), leaving Dolenz as the sole survivor.

I find it intriguing now to note what were the qualities that attracted me: the musical parts (Nesmith was a 'real' musician) but also the somewhat shy and introspective character that he played. I remember very much liking the song "Papa Gene's blues" that got played a few times in the series and was on their debut record - this was a song that Nesmith wrote.

Of course, writing about The Monkees requires that one describe how the group was put together, what the goals of the producers were, how they were considered to be manufactured and how the group members expressed their dissatisfaction with all this, but I'm not going to go into this.

Several years ago, I looked for the Monkees' songs; there are a few on the first album  (especially "Take a giant step") that I think are very good and stand up well today, but for me, the most interesting song was written by Nesmith, entitled "You just may be the one": the rhythm of the opening verse lines is not exactly the simple fare for which the group are supposedly known. A tape of the recording sessions can be heard here: this is a fascinating audio documented about how the song was recorded and produced (by Nesmith). This version shows that the time signature of the song is 4/4; the opening lines are placed at odd places over the instrumental rhythm.

I listened somewhat to Nesmith's post-Monkees music but this was in a style that did not appeal to me. An obituary can be found here.