Rant #2,788: Papa Gene's Blues

Right smack dab in the middle of a Friday afternoon, I am writing a Rant, and I just felt that now was the time to put my thoughts on paper—or "electronic" paper—and provide everyone with an extra Rant for the week.
 
I just felt I had to do it.
 
Mike Nesmith, my favorite Monkee, who did so many other things in his life, died today. He was 78 years of age and was just a few days short of his 79th birthday on December 30.
 
It is hard to put into words the feelings that are swirling through me now.
 
He was part of my childhood—a major part of one of the Monkees foursome, which was a TV-concocted creation that actually became a real band with real records, real concerts, and yes, they played their own instruments.
 
He was part of my teens and my 20s—in the 1970s and early 1980s, when no one cared about the Monkees anymore, I not only sought out their records that I didn’t have from their canon, but I also sought out his records, which were a bit deep and sometimes too deep for me.
 
And into my 30s and beyond, he became a major talking point for me, as I understood his music a bit more, he progressed from singer/songwriter to running his own label and helping to create MTV, and yes, that Liquid Paper connection that we all had to him was also there, but when he came back to the fold as one of the Monkees, well, the circle was completed for both me as a fan and him as an musician.
 
As a kid, he was my absolute favorite of the foursome.
 
Heck, Davy Jones was for the girls; Peter Tork was probably next in line with me, but he was missing something that Nesmith had; and Micky Dolenz was simply the drummer who had a voice like velvet.
 
But Nesmith won me out.
 
I think he had that look, that sort of tempered-down rebellious look, that probably appealed to me, even with the wool hat on.
 
And I just loved his music, which was so different than what I was used to hearing—rock with a bit of country mixed in, but it was still rock—that his songs, whether sung by him or Dolenz, simply reverberated with me.
 
And yes, I was probably one of the few people alive at the time that realized that he wrote “Different Drum,” a subject that was rarely mentioned at the time, which I guess some radio programmers thought would somehow tarnish Linda Ronstadt’s burgeoning career if it was uttered.
 
I remember buying the Monkees bubblegum cards—I still have them—and voting for him as my favorite Monkee … and I am sure he probably came in a distant third or fourth behind Jones and Dolenz.
 
After the Monkees, I still managed to follow his career, and I bought all his First National Band recordings that I could find, usually in the cutout bins.

 
He could get away with being adventurous on multi-million-selling Monkees albums, but not as an act apart from the other three. He became something of a cult artist, but to me, he was still Mike Nesmith of the Monkees no matter what he put out, and I am sure he knew that he was fighting an uphill battle to change peoples’ minds about that.
 
He had his own record label, Pacific Arts, where, probably for the first time in his life, he took control of his recordings, and the label never really got out of “vanity” status, but you could always count on Nesmith to do something epic.
 
He had had a fairly big hit with “Joanne” right after he left the Monkees, but probably his most important release was something called “Rio,” in the late 1970s.
 
He decided to make a straight-out video for the song, which was sort of country/rock/samba type of sounding song, with a big edge thrown into it, and he decided that it was sort of a story song, and that it needed pictures to get its meaning out fully to all.
 
Nesmith created the video, and liked the concept, and one thing led to another, he created other videos to go along with his music, and he found that he had created the concept of continuous videos being shown, one after another, to entice the viewer to listen to his music.
 
He packaged this into a late-night show seen by a few hardy souls like me, but the concept was more important—and valuable—than the actual videos, and the concept was purchased by Viacom, which turned it into “Music Television”—or MTV--premiering in 1980.
 
He was asked to lead this new venture, but he refused, but I am sure between this concept and the Liquid Paper fortune he inherited from his mother, that this formerly down on his luck, bankrupt musician finally had the financial muscle to do what he wanted for the rest of his life, and he pretty much did just that.
 
He continued to record, wrote a few books, and yes, he even rejoined the Monkees from time to time to get together with his past. Little did he know that it would also be part of his future.
 
In 1996, during promotions for the Monkees’ “Justus” album, I interviewed him, and he was so smart that he turned the tables on me, the interviewer, making him the interviewer and I the interviewee.
 
I asked him a ton of questions, and right in the middle of the interview, he stopped me and said, “Let me ask you something … how old were you in 1966?” or the year that the Monkees TV show premiered on NBC.
 
I said I was nine years old, and he came right back at me and said, “Then we were created for YOU!”
 
And was he ever right.
 
When Run DMC did their version of his song “Mary Mary,” I was floored, I really was, because you could truly see how adaptable his music really was to just about any genre with a bit of tweaking.
 
And he became more adaptable too, jumping right into the Monkees maelstrom for concerts and new records here and there since the 1990s, including the recent “Good Times!” recording form 2016, which made several “Best Albums of the Year” lists, even the one published by Rolling Stone, which Dolenz used to refer to as “Rolling Stain,” for good reason.
 
The tours were a success, the records that they put out, while not generating any new hit singles, were all well regarded, and Nesmith really seemed to be at the top of his game, not only enjoying, for perhaps the first time, kudos for his work with the Monkees and enjoying continued reverence as the leader of the First National Band, whose albums were rereleased and re-reviewed and were credited with paving the way for acts like the Eagles to soar into the musical stratosphere.
 
And in the meantime, both Jones and Tork passed on, and it was Dolenz and Nesmith who carried on the Monkees baton.
 
Just a few years ago, he published his autobiography, “Infinite Tuesday,” which was subtitled “A Musical Riff.” It was just that, a story of someone who really had nothing at the start, who didn’t let that stop him from rising to the top, and when he had money, doing what he wanted to do for most of his life.
 
Monkees tours followed, he seemed to be having a great time, but a few years back, he was hit with a massive heart “event” which set him back, and several tour dates during the act’s 50th anniversary had to be postponed.
 
He got better relatively quickly, and tour dates were made up, he began to look a bit haggard … but he chugged on, often with a joint being his constant companion when doing interviews ... to the chagrin of a lot of people.
 
I guess it made him feel better, but the years were wearing on Papa Nez.
 
The coronavirus postponed another tour, which was labeled as the act’s final tour, which was picked up over the past few months and concluded in Los Angeles’ Greek auditorium a few weeks ago.
 
My son and I saw him just a few weeks back on Long Island, and he looked terrible. He could not carry his share of the load, and his voice was slurred.
 
There was one point of the show that I really thought that he was ready to keel over … but he did get back some energy in the second half of the show after intermission, but I kind of knew—and I am sure that I wasn’t the only one who attended who thought this—that this might be the end, or at least the end was nearing.

 
And it happened today.
 
Nesmith’s accomplishments are many, but it was only later in life that he was able to bask in these accomplishments.
 
Again, no matter what he did, Mike Nesmith was a Monkee through and through, and I think towards the end, he got it as well as the audience did.
 
R.I.P. to a guy that I respected from Day One, and a guy that I was lucky enough to have interviewed one on one some years ago.
 
Who ever gets to interview and speak one-on-one with one of their idols?
 
And what an education I got during that 20 minutes he spoke with me!
 
I will never forget it, and I will never forget Mike Nesmith.