[Today: A Monkee makes good...]
He was the Monkee in the wool cap, and Michael Nesmith was also the only genuinely talented musician in that group. Peter Tork bought out his contract and left The Monkees in early 1969, but they soldiered on and released two more albums as a trio, before Nesmith split in March of 1970. Nobody could have guessed that with his next musical project, Nesmith would become a country rock pioneer. Gram Parsons and The Byrds got there first, but Michael Nesmith & The First National Band weren’t far behind. Part of this group had played with The Monkees, including bassist John London and pedal steel guitarist O.J. “Red” Rhodes, but the rest came from Nashville, where this was recorded. Magnetic South is 95% country music and 5% rock, and sounds absolutely, positively nothing like The Monkees.
But if Nesmith had gotten his way, The Monkees would have had some twang. He said that “Some of the first Monkees music, I guess, was ‘Papa Gene’s Blues’ and ‘Sweet Young Thing’ and so forth, and the guys back in New York said, ‘WAIT! This is wayyyyyyy too country! This is awful… don’t do this, don’t twang this up…’ So I sort of backed off. But when The Monkees finally went off the air and I was back doing my solo music, I went right back to that with the first three albums, the National Band albums, and it was almost in a vacuum. I was aware, of course, of… The Byrds, but, by and large, I was just pretty much out there, completely oblivious to what was happening. And none of us, nobody that I knew ever called up and said, ‘Hey, man, have you heard the fabulous new country-rock sound?’ That would’ve been bizarre in the extreme! We were all just making music.”
Amazingly, it was a hybrid that really hadn’t been heard before, but would go on to rule the 70s airwaves in the form of Linda Ronstadt and The Eagles. In his liner notes to Magnetic South, Nesmith cites the inspiration for its sound: “Hank Williams, Jerry Lee Lewis and Jimmie Rodgers are to me something of a musical triumvirate. I always get back to them.” It’s Rodgers who comes through most clearly in Nesmith’s plaintive, light yodel. This must have freaked out a bunch of Monkees fans, but it’s an album worthy of his heroes. ‘Joanne’ hit #21 on the pop charts, and ‘Little Red Rider’, ‘Calico Girlfriend’ and ‘Mama Nantucket’ are top shelf country tunes. Unfortunately the 21 seconds-long ‘First National Rag’, with a breezy rejoinder (“Well, we’re gonna take a short intermission my friends! We’ll be back… right after YOU turn the record over!”) has been excised from digital re-issues.
Nesmith used his television experience with The Monkees to help create the prototype for MTV, and he produced the cult-classic movies Repo Man and Tapeheads, but his greatest accomplishment by far was the music he made with The First National Band.
Listen: Calico Girlfriend
Listen: Little Red Rider
Listen: Joanne
Listen: Mama Nantucket
Tags: Magnetic South, Michael Nesmith, Michael Nesmith & The First National Band
13 May 2011 at 12:35 pm |
[...] notably Michael Nesmith, who would go on to make a handful of landmark country rock albums with The First National Band in his post-Monkees career. With their sixth and final effort as a four-piece (Peter Tork would [...]