Rant #2,666: Different Drum

How was your Memorial Day weekend?
 
Mine was wet, to say the least, so we pretty much begged out of the weekend, staying mostly indoors as the raindrops fell.
 
No barbecues for us this year … we will hold that until Father's Day and July 4, when the pool well be open and hopefully it will be warm enough to use it.
 
But I did have an ear-opening experience this weekend, finally receiving in the mail, and listening to, what amounts to the album of the year in a period where most "music" is completely unlistenable to these ears.
 
No kidding, yes, I said it, the album of the year.
 
When most new music is little more than processed sound bites, I actually listened to an album with a theme, which used real instruments and real vocals to draw you into its world, even if that world was only about an hour in length.
 
What album am I talking about?
 
It is an LP—and yes, I listened to it on vinyl, but it is available on CD too—that features a classic voice and his interpretations of songs written by another classic musical performer, someone that he has been on pretty much equal footing with for the past 50-plus years.
 
OK, I will tell you what album I am talking about, and please don’t laugh or roll your eyes, because let me tell you, if you dare listen to this collection, you will be blown away at just how good it is—
 
The album I am talking about is “Dolenz Sings Nesmith,” where Micky Dolenz presents his interpretations of songs written by Michael Nesmith.
 
Yes, we are talking about the Monkees here, and personally, that alone could direct me to give a glowing review of this album, but let me tell you, I was quite skeptical when going into this LP.
 
How could Dolenz pull this off without it sounding like simply a modern karaoke record?
 
Sure, the two have toured as the surviving Monkees for the past few years, and will be revving up for a final go around later this year, but how could Micky do Mike, and do him not as a caricature of this music, but as a whole new ball of wax?
 
Well, it helped to have Nesmith’s son, Christian, as a producer, and the union of Dolenz, the younger Nesmith, a great bunch of songs to choose from, and a stellar cast of musicians made this thing a keeper for today and an album that might just be the best album of the 2021,

The story goes that Nesmith and Dolenz became friends as part of the Monkees, more so than with Peter Tork and Davy Jones, partly because they shared the same type of out of leftfield humor.
 
But as musicians, there was also some type of kinship, as Dolenz’s vocals always matched pretty perfectly with compositions that Nesmith wrote during their time with the Monkees, in songs like “The Girl I Knew Somewhere” and several others.
 
Anyway, flash forward several decades, and Nesmith finally joined the Monkees’ tours after resisting to do so for years … and he found them to be quite rewarding, as he continued to do his own musical thing with both new recordings and various rereleases and re-examinations of his work with the First National Band, the post-Monkees space cowboy/country/rock band that he headed that put out a couple of albums with very little fanfare, or sales.
 
Anyway, flash forward to a few years ago or so, and Micky says to Mike while they are on tour as “The Mike and Micky Show” the following:
 
“I want to record my versions of your songs, including your catalog with the Monkees and with the First National Band.”
 
I kind of paraphrased here, but whatever the two spoke about, it clicked, and when the time was ripe, Dolenz and the two Nesmiths went over the senior Nesmith’s vast musical catalog, and came up with more than a dozen songs that could be reimagined by Dolenz.
 
With the younger Nesmith at the production helm, work was begun on the project several months ago, and the album finally came out this past week.
 
Again, I was very skeptical about this project. I have always thought that cover versions of songs were an insipid way to fill out a project if they were not done to make the particular version unique, and here, you had to have 13 versions of songs sounding unique.
 
The first spark of genius that the trio decided was that they would not do any of the obvious songs that you would think Dolenz would “obviously” cover for “instant recognition” status, like “Papa Gene’s Blues” or “Listen to the Band” from Nesmith’s Monkees catalog and “Joanne” or “Silver Moon” from his First National Band catalog.
 
I think that they felt covering those songs would be too obvious and too easy, and would not fit their mandate of not making this a karaoke album.
 
So what they did was pick 13 songs that some people might know, others might not have ever heard of, mix in a few songs that people might know—and when I use the word “people,” I mean probably mostly Monkees fans, not all of whom were First National Band fans—and put them all together with brand new arrangements … and what they got was pure musical bliss.
 
Monkees fans and pop music fans will certainly know “Circle Sky” and “Tapioca Tundra,” but they have almost created new songs from the well-known originals  by either slowing the beat—as they did with the latter song—or turning it into a raga freak-out—like they did with the former song.
 
Even many long-time Nesmith fans didn’t know much about his First National Band, a too-far-ahead-of-its-time aggregation that put out a couple of LPs that had Monkees fans often shaking their heads, including me.
 
So the inclusion of tunes on the new album like “Little Red Rider” and “Propinquity” (I’ve Just Begin To Care)” was a revelation, reimagining these songs into something brand new and different from the original recordings.
 
And yes, if you are wondering, Dolenz does sort of a throwaway version of Nesmith’s “Different Drum,” which might actually be the most familiar song on the record to most people but is probably one of the weakest redoings on the LP. Oh, don’t get me wrong, it is great, but the other new twists on these old songs are so good that “Different Drum” almost gets lost in the mix.
 
And you must listen to songs like “Carlisle Wheeling,” “Don’t Wait For Me,” and “Nine Times Blue”—even die-hard Nesmith/Monkees fans have never heard them done this way--and it is a true revelation.

 
The 13 songs on the LP—14 on the CD with an extra track, “The Grand Ennui” from the First National Band days—come in a gatefold album package that is patterned after Harry Nilsson’s “Nilsson Sings Newman” LP of 50 years ago. Nilsson was a very good friend of Dolenz, and Dolenz pays homage to that wonderful LP of yore with an album package that has the look and feel of an LP from that era, to the art used on the front and back to the inclusion or song running times right on the cover.
 
Let me tell you, the entire LP was a revelation, and made even this skeptic so eager to listen to the entire album right away, and I want to listen to it a second time, a third time and beyond.
 
Dolenz and Nesmith have gone down this road before. In 2016, to honor the Monkees’ 50th anniversary, they--an Tork, with the grace of Jones' family--put out “Good Times!” a collection of older tunes that had never been finished and newer ones written by some of the best current rock songwriters, and it garnered incredible praise from the music media, getting into Billboard’s Top Album charts at No. 14 and being the most positively praised Monkees album ever.
 
So here they go again with “Dolenz Sings Nesmith,” and although it is only out as an import from 7A Records, the CD has completely sold out, it is one of Amazon’s top-selling LPs of the current time, and it has received great praise from the music media.
 
If you are as skeptical as me, read some of the reviews and go out of your way to backorder this LP/CD, because I can guarantee that you will be quite pleased with this product … it really is that good.
 
Go to http://www.7arecords.com/product/dolenz-sings-nesmith/ for further details.