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.
