MICHAEL NESMITH - THE PRISON @ 50

 

Marking its golden jubilee this month is the seventh solo album from Michael Nesmith, The Prison, which was released 50 years ago, in November of 1974. After a half dozen LPs mostly focused on the laid back country-rock sound he'd helped pioneer after leaving The Monkees in 1969, Nesmith was looking to do something different as he kicked off the first release for his very own label imprint, Pacific Arts.

Nesmith spent the previous few years creating incredibly sophisticated music that was mostly ignored by the public, and barely acknowledged by critics. With his obligation to a record label now moot, given that he was his own boss, Nesmith undertook an entirely different kind of conception for this record. The idea was to present a box set with an LP and a book containing stories intended to be read along with the songs on the album. The combination of the music, lyrics and narrative of the texts were meant to offer a philosophical musing on the nature of life, delving into existential conceptions that were a kind of mix of Buddhism and Christian Science, which was the faith he was raised in by his single mother.

Musically, while the album still lingers in a kind of country/folk landscape, the use of electronics, like the Arp Odyssey synth and Roland Rhythm 77 drum machine, take the music into a surreal sort of progressive tangent, almost akin to a countrified version of Pink Floyd, to some extent. The album's seven, often lengthy songs, took on the air of dream-like meditations, in some cases with mantra like vocal repetitions extending off into infinity. It was all meant to function as a contemplation on the nature of existence and, especially, the meaning of mortality.

Upon its release, it met with mixed critical responses. Robert Christgau called it a "ghastly boxed audio-allegory-with-book." It sold poorly and was largely overlooked by even fans of Nesmith, though it remained a favourite of the artist, who reissued the album on CD a couple of times over the years, first in 1994 and again in 2007. Each reissue, however, did not release the original 1974 mix. Subsequent editions drastically altered the recordings, adding keyboards and even updating some of the lead vocals, while some of the original elements, like the drum machine, were obscured completely.

I first encountered the 2007 version, which I initially really loved, but then discovered I could order an original sealed copy of the 1974 LP box set, directly from Nesmith, even getting it signed! Once I got the original LP and got a chance to hear it in its original mix, I was immediately sold on that version, finding the cheesy drum machine and primitive synth sounds far more charming than the updated keyboards from the "enhanced" reissued version. Though the original mix was never reissued on CD, Nesmith did finally take one of the sealed LPs and made a digital transfer of the album, which he then sold from his website as a high resolution MP3 set.

Personally, it's one of my all-time favourite solo releases from Nesmith, both because of the sophistication of the music and its themes, and the ambition of the project. In the use of printed stories with music, it's surprisingly similar to The Residents' Eskimo LP. The Prison would also turn out to be the first entry in a triptych of releases that would appear throughout Nesmith's career. The second part, The Garden, would be released in 1994, while the third instalment, The Ocean, would come in 2015 as a web only release.