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 There are five things I remember about my interview with Mike Nesmith of the Monkees and none of them had to do with the interview.
There was the map he drew for me, with directions to his residence, which he mailed to my office; the big guard dog that greeted me just inside his front security gate; his “California groovy” indoor-outdoor swimming pool; the two big eggshell type chairs in his luxurious living room, equipped with the stereo speakers, and all the television security facilities throughout his residence.
Before we did the interview, I asked Mike if I could sit in one of the eggshell chairs and dig the vibes from the built-in speaker system. What a trip! It was like sitting inside a giant headset. The indoor-outdoor pool was more than a conversation piece, it was a wonderfully functional showcase in Mike’s elegant pad, depending on the season and the occasion. Nesmith’s security system was nothing short of amazing. There was even a color television monitor in the bathroom.
Mike said he had invited me to his home on Mulholland Drive for dinner and the interview session because we wouldn’t have any privacy if we went out to a popular Hollywood restaurant. It’s a good thing he drew me the map, because I would have never found his residence, otherwise.
When I heard his chow dog barking and read the sign posted on the locked iron gate, I knew I was in the right place. The sign simply said: Beware, Dog Trained to Kill. I was a little nervous about the dog, until Mike’s houseboy instructed him to cool it, and, truthfully, I was a little nervous about interviewing Mike, because I had heard all sorts of stories about how arrogant he was when it came to relating to people, especially journalists.
As it turned out, Mike wasn’t such a bad guy at all. In fact, he was quite the opposite. We got along fine, right from the “git-go,” maybe because we were both from Texas. Fellow Texans are just naturally friendly, even if one of them is rich and famous. Once inside Mike’s spacious home, I relaxed and felt very comfortable.
We talked about a lot of cool stuff over dinner, mostly about Mike’s own philosophy of music and, specifically, his experience with the recording industry in Nashville. We sat around the fireplace after dinner and rapped for a couple of hours. I asked him what it was like working with the studio musicians in Nashville. He said they were “a pretty strange breed of cat,” and added they were not particularly a poor one either.
Nashville musicians who work regularly, he said, earned about $130,000 a year (and that was in the ‘70s before the recording industry accelerated into the mega-type business it is today). “There were many times,” he noted, “that I pulled up for a date in my Cadillac limo only to be met by the drummer in his Rolls Royce.”
 Mike had really done his homework on the music scene in Nashville and I gained a new respect for him as a result. The studio musicians, he told me, became in vogue in Nashville during the big band era before the heyday of Elvis Presley. “The big bands would come in and play and that was sorta what recording was all about then,” he observed. “A vocalist was always a sideline. They never paid much attention to them.
“All of a sudden, there was Frank Sinatra and Doris Day and more people began to not really care whether Gerry Mulligan or Miles Davis was playing on the date, but wanted to hear Sinatra with ‘whose-ever band.’”
Mike said the big bands gradually became more and more faceless, as the whole music scene started centering around the singers. Then, there was the Presley era, which came directly out of Memphis and Nashville. Elvis had no use for the type of musicians who played with Sinatra (the big brass sounds of the big bands) nor did the rhythm and blues people (that funky B.B. King guitar, Bobby Blue and guys like T-Bone Walker). They were instrumentalists, but their “side men” didn’t seem to make a difference.
 Then, all the singing groups came along, like the Diamonds, the Four Preps, etc. Still, the pre-occupation was not with the studio musicians. So, in order for the musicians to stay alive, because they were no longer considered stars, they migrated to the studios where they became extremely flexible and could do almost anything the artists wanted, frankly, because of the pressures of the almighty dollar.
Nashville, however, Mike observed, and the southern recording empire that was built primarily out of the Presley era, had no use for strings and horns at that time, so all the so-called “legit musicians” went back to New York where they played in the pits for the Broadway musicals. Then, all of a sudden, a whole new thing opened up – the Hollywood movie scores.
“That’s why the bulk of these musicians moved to Hollywood,” Mike commented, “then the Beatles came along and played all their own stuff. So then the studio cat really ‘went down the toilet,’ because it became ‘the big thing’ with all the new groups to sit there in the studio and try to imitate the Beatles by doing their own thing.”
Most of the studio musicians fell on hard times. Some joined a group to make ends meet or simply faded into non-existence. That left a hard-core group who played electric guitars and electric bass and they were still there in Tennessee. The best brass players, the best violin players and the best “legit musicians” remain in Hollywood, but the best banjo pickers, the best fiddle players, the best electric guitar players, pedal steel guitar players and bass players remain in Nashville.
There are good brass and string players in Tennessee, but, of course, that’s not why people in the recording industry go there. Nashville became known for its hard-core, good tight rhythm sound. And, as Mike observed, it wasn’t a question of “who you knew” in Nashville, but rather, “what you could do.”
And, that’s why the cats in Nashville play much better and play together almost all the time. Not too many people probably know it, but Mike once went to Nashville to record some semi-country type pop songs. Back then, and even today, people tend to get the “Nashville sound” confused with “the country sound.” It’s not the same.
The “Nashville sound” is still that tight, groovin’, clickin’ rhythm thing that happens when everybody is having fun. It may be a country rhythm, but it doesn’t have to be. One of the things that Mike explained to me during our dinner interview session is that soul music is often misconstrued as black music. But, there’s a definite difference.
“South of the Mason-Dixon Line your heaviest soul comes from the white people,” Mike noted, “and north of the Mason-Dixon Line it comes from the black people.” Mike said he didn’t know why that was, but those “super narrow-minded bigoted society south people” have soul, and when they sit down to play on a guitar you can tell the difference right away.
“You can say anything else about them you want,” Mike told me, “but you can watch a guy who looks like he works in a service station, with his shirtsleeves down to his elbows and his hair slicked back in ducktails, sit down and lay out licks on a guitar that’s so full of soul. And the Nashville Sound is a soul sound. It’s white people ‘doing their soul thing,’ not white people doing some black person’s soul thing.”
Nashville really became recognized for country music when Hank Williams, with the first really white soul sound, came out of there. It was white soul. It wasn’t white being black. It wasn’t Bill Medley. It wasn’t blue-eyed soul. It was white soul. I wanted to know why it was so important to define the difference between white soul and black soul and white soul sounding like black soul. Mike cleared that up for me pretty quickly.
 “Well,” he said, “White soul is the white man being honest and dead level with whatever is inside him. A lot of people have tried to make country music ‘cute’ because they think that is the secret to Hank Williams’ white soul. But, that’s not it. When Hank Williams said ‘I got a hot rod Ford and a two dollar bill,’ it was legit. That’s where his head was then. But, of course society has changed a lot since then, and a man’s gotta be honest with himself.
“You can’t be cute. You can’t say ‘I’m gonna go to Fist City’ anymore. That’s the old school. You’ve gotta talk legit. You’ve gotta be honest and deal with something more basic that just a superficial emotion. You must deal with relationships and problems, but you’ve got to deal with them white.”
When I did the interview with Mike, I asked him how he fit into this bag. He said he didn’t know. He said a record producer once told him that he could go into a recording studio and do all the rock stuff, but he was basically a country singer. And then Mike remarked, “But I don’t like country music. So, I started thinking that guy was crazy. Then, all of a sudden it dawned on me what he was really saying. He was telling me to be honest.”
Mike admitted that if someone wanted to define the type music he sang, it would probably fall under the category of “country-pop.” And then he laid some lyrics on me to support the idea of his basic intent: “There’s a certain something in the way you looked at me that said you’d stay that let me know that I was out of line. And, in a long and involved conversation with myself, I saw precious things come into view, and when I poured through files taken off my mental shelf, I dusted off some memories of you.”
Mike wasn’t trying to be cute, and he made damned sure I understood that. He knew, if you classified them, those lyrics were country. When I suggested to him that people could identify with lyrics like that he got a little pissed off. “Well,” he commented, “I can stand up there and say something like ‘Look at me, I look like a farmer but I’m a lover,’ or do the Bo Diddley thing and go ‘gotta, gotta, gotta’ or maybe Otis Redding and stuff like that. Or I can scream and sweat and do the whole Eric Burden thing. But man, it’s all a lot of crap.”
Then Mike made a rather astute comment about the Beatles, which somewhat shocked me. “Of course,” he said, “the big secret that the Beatles kept was that they just didn’t do that. Oh, Paul played bass, Ringo played some drums and then, occasionally, John would strum a guitar, but the Beatles played about as much as the Monkees, although they were much more accomplished than we were.”
 A rumor had circulated in the Hollywood music industry that Nesmith started playing guitar to regain dexterity in his fingers after he suffered a firecracker accident. It was probably the single most often cited "fact" about any of the four Monkees to appear in the multitude of teen fan magazines devoted to the group during their heyday. It was the perfect bit of interesting information to head the sidebar to an article, especially since it helped to convince the public that at least one of the Monkees could actually play a music instrument.
And, it was completely false. Nesmith did injure his hand in an accident as a youngster, but the injury had nothing to do with a firecracker, and he didn't take up the guitar until years later.
The way Nesmith described the story, he and some of the neighborhood kids were smashing rocks with a sledgehammer one day. He was holding “the target rock.” The sledgehammer came down on his hand instead of the rock.
Because Mike’s mother followed the beliefs of Christian Science, young Mike was not taken to the doctor or a hospital for medical treatment; the bones in his hand were not set and did not heal properly. He permanently lost the use of one finger on his right hand as a result, a condition that never Improved by his learning to play guitar.
Mike's start as a guitarist didn't occur until several years later, when he was in his 20s. He had joined the U.S. Air Force not long after high school, and, while on a pass one weekend, saw Hoyt Axton performing at a folk club in Oklahoma. His stint in the Air Force ended prematurely after he "tipped over a general's plane one morning while cleaning it," and he asked his parents to stake him to a guitar, which he eventually taught himself to play.
 “I figured that the easiest way to learn was by trial and error,” he said. “I played records and tried to pick out the right chords as I listened. People told me I must be mad, that the way to do it was to go to a teacher or at least buy a tutor book. The result was that I could do a lot of things with a guitar that just ‘weren't meant to be done.’” The rest, as they say, is history.
Nesmith was the guitarist in the first manufactured band, The Monkees. TV executives actually picked the band mates from thousands of applicants, and Nesmith and Peter Tork were the only two who actually played their own instruments, at least at first. But, even they did not play much on the band's first two albums, as studio musicians played most of the songs.
The Monkees were criticized as "the pre-fab four," and it especially grated on Nesmith's nerves. He thought of himself as a musician, and went public with the widely-suspected fact that their music was not theirs.
"The music on our records has nothing to do with us," Nesmith told TV Guide, at the height of what was then known as “Monkeemania.” He added: "It's totally dishonest. We don't record our own music. Tell the world we're synthetic because, dammit, we are! We want to play on our own."
When the TV show made the Monkees famous enough to exercise their own clout, they were allowed to write and record their own music. When they got fairly competent, Nesmith invited media critics to visit later Monkees recording sessions, to prove that they were an actual band.
Somewhere in the middle of all the Monkee musical madness, Mike wrote and produced an album considered by many to be a classic, “Wichita Train Whistle Sings.” (I remember returning to Mike’s place for the gala premiere party, only, on this occasion, submerging into the indoor-outdoor pool while banjos and big brass horns were echoing majestically over Beverly Hills).
Nesmith left the Monkees in 1970, and performed "country rock" for years. His “Elephant Parts” was the first video to win a Grammy, and Nesmith's company was a pioneer in selling home videos of TV shows, including Ken Burns’ “The Civil War.” That business ended in a messy lawsuit, with Nesmith and PBS fighting in court, and Nesmith won $46-million.
Nesmith produced “Tapeheads,” an enjoyable movie about video makers and political scandal, starring John Cusack and Tim Robbins. He also wrote a novel, “The Long Sandy Hair Of Neftoon Zamora.”
When the original Monkees reunited for a tour in 1996, Nesmith performed with them only once. He thought the reunion tour would be boring, and besides, he was the only one of the four with prior commitments and an actual career.
 Nesmith is sometimes called "the stepfather of MTV" because he produced a half-hour pilot for a music video show to be called “PopClips.” The series was never made, but Nesmith sold the rights to Time-Warner, which tweaked the idea and spawned MTV.
Well, I’ll say this about Monkee Mike Nesmith: the kid wearing the stocking cap might have been a pretty zany dude, but he never “Monkee’d around” when it came to telling it like it was, like it is or like it oughta be. And, you can take that to the bank.
Well, that’s show biz, baby.
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