A lot of you probably know well my affection for The Monkees. It's an appreciation which has gone through many phases and forms over the years. There was the beginning in my childhood when they were a juvenile, "Saturday morning" entertainment with the TV show. Then there was discovering the film, HEAD, circa 1989, a mind bending psychedelic blast of the lid off the nature of media and marketing. Then I started to collect their albums and delve into the depths of their recorded output in the early 2000s and, finally, discovering the solo career of Michael Nesmith about 10 years ago or so.
Of course, I knew some of Mike's solo works from my childhood as well. My mom had the single for Joanne and, I think, Silver Moon as well. I remember playing them out of curiosity because I recognized his name from the group and was expecting it to be more "I'm a Believer" kind of stuff. At the time, I just heard "country" sounding music and pushed it aside like a dog sniffing broccoli. No thanks.
So I took my time before I started to get curious enough to start digging into his solo releases in earnest. As I'd become more familiar with the "deep cuts" in the Monkees catalogue, I started to find a growing affinity with the tracks Mike was responsible for. As an adult, I was more open to that "western" Texan influence and it was just about then that his solo catalogue was seeing a revival with several CD reissues hitting the market. The first one I picked up was a dual CD containing both his first and second LPs released with The First National Band, his first post-Monkees project, Magnetic South & Loose Salute.
Recorded in quick succession and released less than a year apart, given I got them together on one CD reissue, it's hard for me to separate them or consider them individually. For me, they're a continuum of music which quickly won me over with its sophistication, charm and cunning.
Even up to the present, it's hard for me to not see a lot of country music as crude and representing a certain kind of ignorance and anti-intellectualism. Certainly, there are country artists I admire deeply, like Johnny Cash or Patsy Cline, but there's a very large arena of artists whom I have no affinity for and who represent values I find anathema to me.
Listening to Nesmith's take on it, however, showed me a kind of depth of meaning and raised consciousness in a genre which I'd rarely considered being able to support such lofty ideals. This wasn't just "crying in your beer" heartache songs. These were musings on the nature of existence and the meaning of life. It's thoughtful music, but with great hooks, cleaver melodies and sweet soul. Nesmith's secret weapon in all these albums was always pedal steel master, the late Red Rhodes, who took his instrument into ethereal and transcendental realms of luscious perfection. What a score for Mike to have found this man and he never wasted him.
In the years since assimilating this incredible catalogue of music, I've found myself open to other sounds I'd never expected to enjoy, things I sometimes despised in my youth, not understanding their sophistication and even subversion. It's opened a few more doors for me to broaden my musical experiences even more and anything that helps one open one's mind a bit more to possibilities is certainly a magical thing.
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