Dallas-raised Monkees member Michael Nesmith dies

Michael Nesmith, the deadpanning Dallas native who rose to fame as one of The Monkees, died Friday of natural causes at his home in Carmel Valley, Calif. He was 78.

His family released a statement to the news media: “With infinite love we announce that Michael Nesmith has passed away this morning in his home, surrounded by family, peacefully and of natural causes.”

Nesmith, who enrolled at Thomas Jefferson High School on Walnut Hill Lane in 1958, was a musician. He was a singer and guitarist for the 1960s group. He wore a green wool hat and didn’t hide his thick Texas drawl.

He is now the third of the four members of The Monkees to have died. Davy Jones died in 2012 and Peter Tork in 2019. Micky Dolenz is the remaining band member and performed a final show with Nesmith in November at the Greek Theater in Illinois.

Nesmith’s mother, Bette Graham, a Dallas native and the inventor of Liquid Paper, brought Nesmith to Dallas from his birthplace, Houston, in 1949. Despite his roots here, Nesmith didn’t get to Dallas much. In 2013, he performed in a concert at The Kessler and at a Monkees show in Grand Prairie.

”It’s very hard to find someplace that’s got a lock on your roots,” he told The Dallas Morning News’ Robert Wilonsky in 2016 before he received the Ernie Kovacs Award in 2016 from the Video Association of Dallas and Dallas VideoFest. “We grow up, leave, see the world and remember the first 15, 20 years of our life. And it’s a fond memory, but it fades over time.”

Founder Bart Weiss, who recently shuttered the Dallas VideoFest, said in a statement Saturday that he was “very sad” to learn of Nesmith’s death. He recalls the night of the awards ceremony in Dallas that the former Monkee’s star was “was deeply honored and spoke eloquently about his work and what he believed in.” Weiss recalls that the evening started with a special video made by AMS Productions about Nesmith’s mother “and how her company was so ahead of its time, hiring a multicultural workforce and giving paid maternity leave.” Weiss stated that Nesmith “will be missed, and he will be remembered.”

Nesmith took part in choral and drama activities in high school before enlisting in the Air Force without graduating. He admitted he wasn’t a good fit for high school.

”Then the proms started coming up, and I thought, ‘OK, this isn’t going to go well,’ and then graduation started coming up, and I thought, ‘Yeah, I’d better get out of here,’” he recalled, laughing. “So I guess what was supposed to have been my senior year, I joined the Air Force. I thought, ‘Time to duck and run.’“

After basic training at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, he was training as an aircraft mechanic at Sheppard Air Force Base in Wichita Falls. He obtained a GED certificate in 1962 and enrolled at San Antonio College, where he met musician John Kuehne and started writing songs and performing. He took his talents to Los Angeles and his biggest break came when he auditioned for a new TV series called The Monkees.

The show lasted two seasons (1966-68) and developed a cult following over the years. The Monkees’ prefabricated image for TV didn’t always sit well with Nesmith. He wrote some songs for The Monkees — “The Girl I Knew Somewhere,” “Mary Mary and Listen to the Band” — but the producers turned to other sources.

“We were kids with our own taste in music and were happier performing songs we liked – and/or wrote – than songs that were handed to us,” he told Rolling Stonein 2012. “It made for a better performance. It was more fun. That this became a bone of contention seemed strange to me, and I think to some extent to each of us — sort of ‘What’s the big deal, why won’t you let us play the songs we are singing?’”

In 1977, Nesmith promoted his single “Rio” with a music video. Its global success had Nesmith thinking about the melding of music and video.

He realized that “radio is to records as television is to video,” he told Rolling Stone in 2013. “Then it was like, ‘Of course!’ and thus MTV was born. I just took that idea and put together some programs and sent it over to Warner Bros. and so forth. Next thing you know, there it was.”

He was recognized for the music-to-video transition when he received the first Grammy Award for video, which, at the time, was called video of the year. He created an hourlong disc of music and videos and comedy sketches called “Elephant Parts.”

In the 1980s, he didn’t participate in Monkees reunion tours, giving the impression he was not on board with his past.

”Quite the contrary,” he told Rolling Stone in 2013. “It was a nice part of the résumé. It was fun for me, and a great time of my life. I mean, where do you want be in the Sixties except the middle of rock & roll, hanging out with the scene? London was an absolute blast, and so was L.A. back then. There was so much going on back then.”