![]() ![]() There was more expenditure in 1974, when he set up Pacific Arts Productions, a multi-tentacled outfit that distributed videos, financed films (including the culty Repo Man and Tapeheads) and released Nesmith’s music. He had paid $450,000 to break his Monkees contract, and immediately afterwards had founded a well-reviewed but commercially unsuccessful country group, the First National Band (the name was a play on First National Bank, a characteristically sardonic bit of humour). ![]() Michael Nesmith taking part in the Monkees farewell tour in Los Angeles last month. At her death in 1980, Michael inherited half her fortune. By the time she was bought out by Gillette for $47.5m in 1979, her product, known as Liquid Paper, was selling 25m bottles a year. She paid Michael $1 an hour to bottle it in their garage, but the business quickly outgrew her expectations. He was in his early teens when she created a correction fluid that painted over typing errors – the first of its type – and began selling it to other secretaries. Bette and son moved to Dallas, where Michael had a “dirt poor, just miserable” childhood, with his mother struggling to make ends meet as a bank secretary. His father was serving overseas during the second world war when Michael was born, and his parents divorced soon after Warren returned. Eventually he even made peace with his Monkee past, occasionally joining the others on tours and new albums from 1996 onward.īorn in Houston, Texas, he was the only child of Warren Nesmith, an automobile parts clerk, and Bette (nee McMurray). Along the way he established the Council on Ideas, a brains trust that convened biannually to discuss the problems of the day, from overpopulation to lack of respect for cultural diversity. ![]() Later he was among the first to buy up licences to various films and TV series, profitably releasing them as home videos. He was also farsighted enough to buy the master tapes of his solo albums from RCA Records, allowing him to profit when he reissued them through his own company. There was the 1977 album, From a Radio Engine to the Photon Wing, whose songs were written as mini-film scripts – predating the idea of the “visual album” by decades – while The Prison (1975), a novel with a companion “soundtrack” album, was an early example of a multimedia release. Nesmith was in the vanguard of two major cultural developments, country-rock and the music video, and also turned out to have an eye for groundbreaking media projects. Receiving no satisfactory answers, in 1970 Nesmith bought himself out of the remaining three years of his contract and plunged into a solo career that showed him to be not just the smart Monkee but the prescient one. ![]() “What constitutes a critical path for a band? What defines the band? What makes it turn into a band?” he asked an interviewer – questions that probably never troubled his more phlegmatic co-Monkees, Davy Jones, Peter Tork and Micky Dolenz. Photograph: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images He thought he was signing up to be a musician in a real group, only to find himself an actor playing one. Michael Nesmith struggled with the idea of the Monkees. ![]()
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