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Michael Nesmith
By Simon Steinhardt
What is a good idea?” The question is both a practical and rhetorical one for Michael Nesmith, who has spent decades coming up with various correct answers while keeping in mind a precise, highly personal definition of the term. “Essentially, a good idea is one that eliminates pain and suffering,” he reasons. “We’re all slogging through this mess of mortality, and any help we get is better than nothing. If it benefits your thinking and benefits your existence, if it entertains you and makes you feel better, it’s good, and I think the arts can do that better than anything else.”
Best known for his role (and his trademark wool hat) in the made-for-TV pop-rock band The Monkees, Nesmith has done much of his most notable—though widely unrecognized—work since The Monkees disbanded in 1970. Among his groundbreaking achievements, he tinged rock music with some of his native Texas flavor and created a style that has come to be known as altcountry, won the first Grammy for Video of the Year in 1981, and created one of the first companies to distribute movies and TV programs on home video. But perhaps most significantly, Nesmith pioneered the TV music-video format that eventually became MTV.
During his tenure as a Monkee from 1965 to 1970, Nesmith endured the strains of being a musician under creative lockdown, as the show’s producers were often reluctant to let him write and perform his own music as part of the manufactured band. He occasionally penned songs for other artists, including Linda Ronstadt and Frankie Laine, but Nesmith felt that his efforts to transform The Monkees into a serious band were spurned by money-hungry TV executives who simply wanted to market the band to kids. Ultimately, he bought his way out of his contract, and embarked on his country-rock career.
In 1977, while touring Australia to promote his eighth post-Monkees album in as many years, Nesmith was inspired by TV programs that aired video clips of various Top 40 musicians. Upon returning to the States, he put together his own version of a music video clip show and later pitched it to the fledgling Pinwheel children’s cable network. Pinwheel’s parent company, Warner- Amex Satellite Entertainment, liked the concept so much that in 1981, when they relaunched Pinwheel as Nickelodeon, they decided to devote an entire new network to music videos. On August 1st, the spaceman landed, the new-wave graphic squiggled, The Buggles became instant trivia fodder, and we all know what happened from there.
It was a landmark year for Nesmith. Not only did his music-video brainchild make an indelible mark on broadcast media and earn him a Grammy for his hour-long Elephant Parts video, but by another stroke of foresight, Nesmith decided to convert his record label, Pacific Arts, into a home video publishing and marketing company. Today, the global home video market is three times the size of the theatrical market, with annual sales hovering around $24 billion per year.
Though his biggest innovations are behind him and/or ahead of him, Nesmith still actively writes and records music. His most recent album, Rays, released in April 2006, is both a continuation of and a departure from his previous body of work, as he evinces on the opening track, “Zip Ribbon.” Named after the lines used by cartoonists to indicate when a character has run out of the frame, the song samples a phrase from “Cruisin’,” one of the bigger hits of his solo career. Nesmith has also penned a novel, 1998’s The Long Sandy Hair of Neftoon Zamora, a science-fiction/folklore tale of the search for the “part Zuni, part Martian, and part Delta blues player” title character.
For Nesmith, good ideas are not simply byproducts of creativity and innovation – they are the results of a greater spiritual process of inspiration. Much of his philosophy comes from his mother, who raised Michael by herself for the better part of his childhood, and their shared Christian Scientist beliefs in helping and healing. As a single mother, Bette Nesmith Graham supported her only son and herself by working as both a secretary and a commercial artist. In 1951, when Michael was nine years old, she realized that her process of correcting mistakes as an artist could be applied to her typing as well, and she developed “Mistake Out,” otherwise known as Liquid Paper or Wite- Out, as an aid to herself and, more importantly, typists everywhere. “One of the places we both connected was in our appreciation of the spiritual nature of the artistic and innovative experience, and how to bring that into practical, everyday use,” Nesmith recalls. “She was very interested in taking this idea that she had pieced together from her work as a commercial artist and secretary and making it available to a lot of different people. She was always combing and rinsing her thinking to make sure that she was developing the idea according to a higher spiritual sense of it.”
Bette died in 1980, leaving Michael with a fortune of over $50 million, most of it from the sale of her company to the Gillette Corporation the year before, part of which he used to establish the Council on Ideas, a biannual think-tank gathering of distinguished individuals brought together to brainstorm big ideas that can help heal the world. The Council is an operating program of the Gihon Foundation, created by Bette in 1978 for the purpose of implementing “inspired, productive ideas.” Fittingly, her son is the president and chairman of the Gihon Foundation’s board of trustees.
Though his biggest ideas have proven wildly successful, at least financially, Nesmith is quick to point out that there’s a significant difference between a successful idea and a good one. “The word ‘success’ is misused all the time to mean money or fame,” he notes, “but it’s really just a sequence of one thing following another until there’s a favorable outcome. An idea that’s successful is right for the time, right for what it’s being used for, and very likely to be short-term and discarded after a certain period of time. A good idea is bedrock, and tends to stay and last for a long time and benefit everyone who comes in contact with it, regardless of the conventions of the time.” And by that definition or any other, Nesmith has repeatedly answered his own question.