MICHAEL NESMITH - TANTAMOUNT TO TREASON, VOL. 1 @ 50

 

Marking a half century since its release is Michael Nesmith’s fourth solo LP after leaving The Monkees, Tantamount to Treason Vol. 1, which was issued in February of 1972.

While the previous triptych of LPs were credited to Nesmith and “The First National Band”, after dismissing all his musicians, save pedal-slide player, “Red” Rhodes, he hired a fresh crop of players and re-Christened them “The Second National Band” for this album. Among the new faces for the album was none other than José Feliciano on congas! The rest of the band consisted of Michael Cohen, who had worked on Mike’s previous LP, on keyboards, big-band drummer Jack Ranelli and bassist Johnny Meeks (who had played lead guitar years before with Gene Vincent). Though the end results were another exceptional set for Nesmith, this would be the only album where this incarnation of his backing band would appear.

Stylistically, though he was continuing to explore the crossroads of country and rock music as he had done on the previous records, for this outing, the electricity seemed to be amped up a bit more and the production introduced a few more surreal effects and editing to give the end result a distinctly psychedelic feel. I guess you could call it “acid-country-rock”, for lack of a better term. Though the presumption of the title implied the intent for a followup “Vol. 2”, no such record ever materialized and, despite the rumors that one was recorded and then shelved, Nesmith dismissed them as no more than hearsay. To date, no unreleased material sufficient enough to constitute a “missing LP” has ever surfaced.

As with all the albums released by Nesmith during this period, he was innovating in a vacuum, breaking new ground while being systematically ignored. It was a singularly agonizing position to be in as Nesmith later watched artists like Eagles soar to towering commercial heights doing much the same as he was doing. But Mike was cursed at the time to shrivel in the shadow of the bubblegum fake TV band that gave him his fame and then swept him under the rug for a decade. Aside from some middling chart success with his first singles like Joanne and Silver Moon, the public mostly turned their backs on these records and forgot about them for a long time. It’s only in the new millennium of the 21st century that people have excavated his early solo career and recognized the incredible creative achievements that were quietly revolutionizing the concept of hybridizing musical genres.