MICHAEL NESMITH - FROM A RADIO ENGINE TO THE PHOTON WING @45

 

Released in March of 1977, Michael Nesmith’s eighth post Monkees solo album, From A Radio Engine To The Photon Wing, is celebrating its 45th anniversary this month. While his trademark country-rock fusion is still present here, this album finds Nesmith pushing the “country” side into more of a background augmentation. Being that the era was the height of the disco craze, there’s even a bit of a beat on a couple of tracks, though he never allows it to become a distraction to the song’s integrity. Despite the emphasis on being more aligned with the contemporary pop motifs of the day, lyrically, it retains the whimsical esoteric philosophizing which was at the core of its predecessor, the conceptual multimedia box set, The Prison. The songs offer meditations on life, love and loss in a way that always retains a steadfast grip on optimism, regardless of the underlying emotional strain. It’s a characteristic that underlies all of Nesmith’s work as it did his attitude towards life in general.

The most notable track on the album is the opener, Rio, which, in its edited single incarnation, became the little acorn that sprouted the oak tree of the music video industry of the 1980s and helped birth MTV. Looking to promote the single, Mike had been asked to prepare a video of the song which could be distributed to various TV markets. Nesmith misinterpreted this as a request for him to make a short story out of the song, so he set about crafting a video narrative to illustrate its lyrics. While there were other music videos on the market before it, they had all only featured the performer lip-syncing to their song, usually on a blank stage. Even Queen’s famous Bohemian Rhapsody video adhered to this basic format, albeit in its most elaborate incarnation. What Nesmith brought was nothing less than a mini-movie, complete with plot, characters, sets and settings. This was virtually unheard of in the industry at the time. Its existence eventually lead to the creation of a TV series, Pop Clips, featuring other similar productions and, ultimately, the inauguration of an entire TV network to feature this content.

This album was the second to be released on Nesmith’s own Pacific Arts label imprint, but it was his penultimate album to be released in the 1970s before he would effectively abandon the music industry for over a decade to focus on film & TV production. He would only release Infinite Rider On The Big Dogma in 1979 before packing up his guitar until 1992’s Tropical Campfires, an album which was stylistically predicted 15 years early by …Radio Engine….