By Patrick Runkle

Michael Nesmith released "Rays," his newest album, in April, 2006. We caught him at home a couple of years ago at his home near Monterey, when this project was all still in thought and/or various stages of undress. Enjoy this extremely insightful discussion with a Mac-user and Pro Tools-using home studio guy who helped change the way the world would look at music.

GRAMMY-winner Michael Nesmith is a legendary media innovator whose creations have gone beyond the realm of pure music to include video, film, and prose. In this exclusive interviewthe first he has granted in a number of yearshe shares his thoughts on current trends in the industry and his three decades of making music and movies.

Nesmith gained instant celebrity as a member of the Monkees upon their debut in 1966, and began his solo career just two years later, with the release of Wichita Train Whistle Songs. 1968 was also the year that he had his first hit as a songwriter, with the Stone Ponies's A Different Drum, which featured a young Linda Rondstadt on lead vocals.

Thirty-five years since his solo career launched, Nesmith still enjoys a cult-following of fans who keep his VideoRanch.com website pumping out new releases and re-releases of old material on CD and DVD. In the singer-songwriter circles of Nashville, Nesmiths solo work is often spoken of with reverence and great appreciation for the clever lyrics and song stylings that went on to influence many of todays musicians in several genres of music

One of the two cast members who actually were musicians, Nesmith fought successfully to have the Monkees play instruments and perform their own material, but left the group in 1970 and formed the First National Band with pedal-steel player Red Rhodes, bassist John London and drummer John Ware. The First National Bands three early-seventies LPs pioneered the country-rock sound that influenced Poco, the Flying Burrito Bros., the Eagles and many others.

After the First National Band period, Nesmith released music under his own name, including his solo hits Some of Shellys Blues (on Pretty Much Your Standard Ranch Stash) and Rio (on From a Radio Engine to the Photon Wing). He also released 1974s The Prison, which was a concept album including a Nesmith-penned novella that accompanied the LP.

Increasingly interested by the possibilities of blending music and image, Nesmith made a video for Rio and conceived a TV show called Popclips that would present music videos to television audiences; Warner Amex bought the idea from him and developed it into MTV.

The eighties found Nesmith devoting more time to his video and film work. In 1981, he released Elephant Parts, which he called his first video record. Its 62 minutes long, and features several long-form music videos interspersed with Kentucky Fried Movie-style comedy sketches. It won the first Video GRAMMY and led to a mid-eighties comedy show on NBC called Television Parts. The DVD of Elephant Parts, with a new commentary track by Nesmith, was just released by Anchor Bay Entertainment. In the film world, Nesmith is known for producing the cult classic Repo Man as well as Timerider, Tapeheads and Square Dance.

Nesmith and his wife, Victoria Kennedy, were kind enough to invite us to their home for this interview. He is one of the more thoughtful interview subjects Ive encountered, with valuable, copious thoughts on every aspect of the media business. We started by talking about this years GRAMMYs and the music worlds newest sensation:

"I like her," Nesmith said of Norah Jones. "Its going to be interesting to see. Her voice is a unique voice for her age. Theres something about being grown up and young; its almost the same thing as Bogart or the Beatles. They started out young but they had the presence of adults. And Norah Jones has that presence."

"Itll be interesting to see what her next move is. You know, those things can really kill you. Sheryl Crow, (Joan) Osbourne. They get that GRAMMY, sell 5 million records, and then gone. Not exactly one-hit wonders, but its really strange."

We quickly got a few questions about Nesmiths early career out of the way. Was there ever an artist who gave you a musical epiphany? I asked.

"No, not in the sense you mean it. I saw Hoyt Axton perform live and that was the point at which I said I probably want to do that," Nesmith said. "The first time that I ever saw someone use their thinking in a musical way was when I was very young and saw an organist playing in a music-store window. He had a B3, and he was using both hands on two standards, and he had this whole foot-pedal array that he was working with his feet. And that was where I realized that there was something more than walking, talking, hitting a baseball or throwing a football."

I ask about his favorite memories working with longtime collaborator and legendary pedal-steel player Red Rhodes.

"He was a wonderfully free spirit, and his playing had an extraordinary quality to it that I can only describe as microscopic. I would watch Red play every once in a while, and he would make these motions on the foot pedal that I dont think were discernable by any machine. But they seemed to have an effect on the way the thing sounded," Nesmith said.

"And Red had a willingness to try anything and do anything. He was the kind of player who said, If I could pick this up and throw it across the room and it would sound good, I would do that. When I would go over to his house, he would always have some new rig figured out in his living room or in his shop that would generate some new sound or musical moment. Typically, they were of so little use and of so little value compared to the amount of work that it took to get the thing to occur, it was amazing."

Theres a storya legend, perhapsthat you worked at Stax Volt, I said.

"No, thats not true, Nesmith said. I went to Stax and I met everybody and we stayed there for a weekend, but I had nothing to do with those guys. I met the band and Cropper, and got a sense of the whole scene. But when something like that happens, you really cant get into it from the outside. Its like Motown; its a done deal. You dont walk up and say, Hey, do you need any help?"

MUSIC AND VIDEO
"The MTV that exists now is very far from the MTV idea I had when there was no MTV," Nesmith said. "When I made the video for Rio, I felt an electric shock, like a spiritual supercharge. Its like the best party youve ever been to, or the best meal youve ever eaten, the best afternoon, the best picnic Its the best of times, and not the worst of times."

"After I stumbled into that whole video thing, and how powerful it was, the notion of having television be integrated with that and having it be part of the general consciousness wasyou cant really classify itmore than interesting. It was enchanting, captivating."

I asked," When you saw music video turn into really a global revolution in the way music is marketed, did you feel connected to that?"

"Well, no because I had a different notion of it. The whole idea that video would be a way by which the music was brought forward hadnt occurred to me. I was of the mind that it was a different art form. I thought of the balance between the music and the images, and the difference between going to a movie and playing it at home was important at the time."

"When it exploded as a marketing toolwhen the video became the marketing driver for the musicI didnt respond to it, because I didnt want it to be that way. I didnt think it was a good idea, Nesmith said. When I say it wasnt a good idea, I mean aesthetically. Obviously, it was a good idea for marketing and invigorating the industry."

Nesmith isnt too thrilled by the videos he sees today. "I keep looking for some sort of breakthrough past the original breakthrough. I look back at the stuff that we did, and its very dated now. It looks creaky, but there were some fundamental principles there in film grammar that really havent been expanded on very much. The heartbeat of it was the ability to create a structure for the music visually that didnt depend on a continuity of narrative."

He continues, explaining the music video in cinematic terms, "In the modern motion picture era, there were important aspects of continuity; you had to go from A to B to C to D. There were certain things that were jarring and looked strange. If someone was walking down the steps, and you cut away from him before he got to the bottom, and then you cut back to him, there has to have been enough movie time for that to have happened, or it was discontinuous."

"What happened in the music video was that we found you could take images that were essentially disparate, or seemingly disparate, and if the music was continuous underneath it, it created a seamless whole. And if the music underneath it was of the same spiritual nature as the pictures, even though it was discontinuous, there was a new narrative flow," Nesmith said.

"And that was brand new. When we saw that happening in the edit bay, and we realized what we had fallen into, it was very exciting. The thought was, we have this new vocabulary now. And to some extent, filmmakers have used it, certainly commercial makers have used it, video makers have used it, but no one has really gone beyond it. Youre basically just smoothing over the discontinuous narrative shift with music."

"We also found out, going the other way, that if you take the image and graphically represent what the song is about, it goes horribly corny and it looks really bad. And if its utterly unrelated, that looks bad too. You see kids trying that at home, Ill take the camera in the backyard, Im giving the dog a bath, Ill put a song underneath it, and Ive got a music video. Well, it doesnt exactly work that way. "

"And if the song is about going out on your first date, and you set up a first-date scene, its like God, this is so horrible. Theres some sort of space between those two bookends. When you understand the spirit of the song, and youre able spiritually to get images that represent that, and a continuous flow that matches the flow of the music, then youve got something. And there are some music videos that have done that. Theyre really strange too, theyre not always what you think they would be. As an artist, you think, I wouldnt have called that shot."

"Having that as the way I look at music videos, I keep looking for someone to push that envelope a bit further, and I havent seen it."

CUTTING LOOSE
Nesmith looks at the big picture when he talks about the evolution of popular music.

"Music so often labors under the tyranny of its science. When the classical composers were writing, they were writing well inside this science. From them, we got our harmony theories and Western musical sense. I think that musical sense began to fold in on itself, which is why the later composers arent held in as high esteem as some of the earlier ones," Nesmith said.

"But whatever happened, at a certain point music suffered from this despotism, and the big bands sort of blew past some of it. It was the first time you heard those little blues curly-Qs in there, that little strange flatted fifth, Nesmith said. If you want to hear a great record, listen to Bing Crosbys You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby; its one of the great records and performances. Its because its got this blues tension, and heres this white guy doing it, when Basie and Ellington and those guys were really knocking it back. But as it transmuted through the Glenn MillerBenny Goodman big band thing, it lost something again because of the despotism and the science of it."

"It wasnt until rock and roll came along, and the abandon of it, that made it ok, Nesmith said. You could pick up anything, and as long as it was musical, you could make sounds by dropping bolts on the floor. Its like Chomsky; theres something hard-wired in us that hears it."

"That was a nice step forward and I felt like people took that to heart very deeply, especially the early American rock and rollers. I have a great love for the British rock and rollers, but they were basically selling us our own stuff back. Seeing it cycled through that wasnt as invigorating as going down to clubs and seeing Ike and Tina, Bo Diddley, Jimmy Reed, and these guys who were making it up as they went along."

"So when the video came along, it looked to me like an extension of that new dynamic where music had been cut loose from something that had restricted it for so long, Nesmith said. I thought, This is another step. Yes, its another dimension, yes, its visual, yes, you have to think about it differently. But still, the music is primary, and why wouldnt it just continue to expand the music?"

"And that is what I tried to do. Well, I didnt try to do it; I did do it. I was very conscious about doing it. So I was dismayed when this revolt happened, when a jazz trumpet player said, I cant do videos. Well, you dont have to do them, but if you can grok it, and see how it would fit spiritually and musically with what youre doing, then yeah, its a great way of expressing yourself musically. But between No, Im a musician, I dont do that and the fact that video had suddenly become this giant marketing locomotive, that whole notion of music video as an art form was mostly lost. I think it is presently lost."

"Theres still a chance to explore it in the cinema, I think. Nobodys done it, but when I see something like Chicago or Moulin Rouge, I think theyre getting close, no cigar, but its close," Nesmith said. "Chicago was closer than Moulin Rouge because it was off the stage. The stage has that deeply embedded musical presence about it, but in Chicago the cinema started to impress itself more."

STRUMMING ALONG
We return to more tangible matters by talking about some of Nesmiths favorite instruments.

I'm pretty much a Fender player. I had a 1956 [Gibson Les Paul] Black Beauty for a while that I played during the seventies. Fender always played better for me, and I liked the electronics of it. I had a Fender rigged so it would plug into the VG-8, and I have a regular Fender with a couple of Duncan pickups," Nesmith said.

"In terms of amplifiers, I havent really found a great amplifier since the early Fender Twins. The only reason I like the Fender Twins is that the tremolo and the reverb just had a great sound, and you could overdrive it a bit and get that barbed wire sound, although I never really had the call to play any of that stuff. I'm not much of a guitar player, so I didnt really build a repertoire of instruments."

"I played an acoustic guitar in Santa Cruz a little while ago that was just a revelation. I've been around the whole Nashville scene, and everybody makes a guitar. And in every nook and cranny, people come up and say youve gotta hear this. But I had never heard anything that got me past a Martin, the Martin is just a good, solid workhorse that you know is going to play right and fret right. But I heard this Santa Cruz Guitar, and I dont think Ive ever heard wood like that. Hes got some sort of bracing structure, and I dont know what hes doing."

NEZ IN THE 21ST CENTURY
"On the subject of recording digitally," Nesmith said, "My stuff was analog because it had to be, but when digital hit, I was there. Sonic fidelity and clarity to the original instruments are very important to me, and getting rid of the artifacts of analog recording was great because it cleaned everything up. And with the addition of new informationmachines and synthesizersthe whole world was digital."

"I dont know that I can tell the difference between 44.1 kHz and 48, but I can tell the difference between 44.1 and 96. It depends on what youre listening for; the high end is there in 44.1. Its not the sonic range; its the granularity of it. Theres a granularity to digital. I first noticed it in the early digital stuff; it really did sound like sand through an hourglass. And the more refined it got, the better it sounded. It got smoother and smoother and smoother."

"Analog has all these strange artifacts in it. It has all these things in it that really arent there. So, if Im gonna have a distortion, Id rather have a highly-resolved digital signal rather than chase down all the junk thats inside an analog system. I love an analog sound, its a beautiful sound and theres nothing like it. But digital has so many advantages."

When it comes to recording these days, Nesmith could have any equipment he wants in his home studio, but we found his setup surprisingly modest. He said, "I'm running a Pro Tools HD3 6.0, theres not much more to it than that. I mix on-screen. Hands-on mixing is really silly compared to what you can do on-screen. Theres all these very fine adjustments that you just can't make on a mixer."

Nesmith has also stayed on the cutting edge by undertaking a number of surround-sound projects.

?In the First National Band era, the beginning of this whole technology started with Quad. I mixed all three of the First National Band albums in Quad, and it was confusing. I didnt know why you wanted a piano in the back of you, or what the deal was. There is a kind of stereo landscape to life; there are indeed things in back of you, but I didnt know quite what to do with that."

"The first album that I mixed in Dolby Surround was Tropical Campfires [1992]. That was the first time the aesthetics ever came off at me in a way that I really enjoyed," Nesmith said, "although I have to say that some of the musicians didnt like it. In the surround mix, I would open up the stacked voices in the front and rear speakers, like a choir. I thought that was good, but whenever I wanted to move an instrument behind me or pan something across the sky, it was something I couldnt really make musical sense of. Then, I did The Garden, which I got (GRAMMY) nominated for, and I conceived of that as a surround event. That was better, but what I found was that I was putting reflections in back of me instead of actual instruments."

I ask about his 1992 live concert release, Live at the Britt, which I read was video taped and recorded in surround and later released on DVD.

"I did record Live at the Britt in surround, Nesmith said. What I meant by that is I put microphones up in the back where I wanted the surround information to be: two in the rear, and one in the front center. But it didnt work. It was much better for me to create that delay synthetically and mix in the crowd sounds."

"Speaking more generally about the future of multi-channel and high-resolution audio," Nesmith said, "The home theater system is the place in the house where the highest fidelity audio is, so records should be there too. Records should get off the computer and out of the CD player and into the home theater system. Theres something so cool about listening to music in 5.1."

"I did a lot of sound design for the audio book version of my novel The Long Sandy Hair of Neftoon Zamora (St. Martins Press, 1998)," Nesmith said, "and I found that musicians can learn so much from sound designers in motion pictures. Thats a great next step for audio. Sound design and multi-channel soundyou just have to think that way now as a musician."

SONGWRITING
I asked Mike about his method of songwriting. Does he write words and music together? One first and then the other? He replied, I havent written a song in so long, I dont really know anymore. When I was first writing songs, the song format was very obvious to me. You started, you sang, you stopped. And usually that was about two to three minutes. It was pretty easy for me to write a song a day. The only hits I ever had as a songwriter, A Different Drum, Some of Shelleys Blues, and Rio (in Europe) came from that state of mind, which was that its just a song. You express a song the same way you turn on a light. Its a unified whole that I never did in pieces."

"As time when on, I sort of quit that because the song format got really strange to me. It seems odd to me now that that would be a song. It also seems very old-timey, from the forties and fifties. Im not saying that Begin the Beguine isnt a great song, but theres something in my own musical mind that songs don't completely express anymore. I've been doing a lot of prose writing."

TECH-NEZ
So what is Nesmith doing musically if its not songwriting?

"The music that Ive gotten intrigued with is the electronic music, and loops and remixing. Theres something thats compiled about it that makes it really attractive to me. What I mean by compiled is something like C++, a compiler in the truest computer-science sense of the word. You take a little bit from here and a little bit from there, and you build it, and there it is."

"I really love the synthetic atmosphere and environment, because the sonic possibilities are so big. There is something in music that is central to all language. I think that it boils down to rhythm. "

"Not only can you define a rhythm that you want to lay down, but you can have the rhythm play exactly the same every time, which is unique in history. The idea that a bass part can come in and play one way, and then play the exact same way again, is the musical equivalent of discovering the arch in building. The only people who are really after this are the rappers, who unfortunately have a different social agenda that doesnt seem to mind this vein, and the Europeans, who do seem to have a better sense of it. Theyre also snuggled right up against the Arabic 12-bar, which just gives it all sorts of interest. You can put the simplest stuff over the top of that, and it makes these great landscapes. "

"So up until now, you've got the tension being created with the 5 chord, and you dont need that anymore. You dont have to create the tension by wandering around the circle of fifths; you can create tension in a completely different way, and thats all buried deep inside the computer, deep inside contemporary music, and deep inside compiling. And were only just now at the dawn of this. I cant wait until someone really gets out there; some male heterosexual dancer gets a hold of it, look out below."

"I bought the (Roland) 505 as a drum machine just so I would have something to keep time. It has some interesting drum patterns, but the one thing is that drum machines cant shuffle. Krupa didnt play the skip, he just plays the accent beat, and he makes it swing. But drum machines wont do that. I use the Roland G1000 for compiling, because it has all these pre-sets. And I can play the pre-sets by playing a key. Im getting close to getting a Karma or a new V-Synth."

I ask Nesmith what audio software he uses outside of Pro Tools.

"With lots of the new software, he said, I feel the learning curve is just so steep. You stand at the foot of those stairs and look up."

"One of the things that really intrigues me," Nesmith added," is light on a screen as it relates to sonic values. I think you may be able to find the light equivalent of the envelope controls of a synthesizer or percussion hit, the ADSR envelope. Video jockeying is close to what Im talking about; any step in that direction is interesting to me."

"But there are limits to the technology. On this new album," Nesmith said, "I finally hired Luis Conte and Gregg Bissonette to come in and swing. They laid down some very nice stuff, and that s what it came down to. I was trying to get it out of the drum machine, but I thought, Why don t I just hire Luis Conte?"

THE BUSINESS
Nesmith's communications company, Pacific Arts, was a pioneer in VHS releases to the home-video market. Also a record company, Pacific Arts released all of Nesmith s back catalog and contemporaneous material on CD, as well as the debut CD from the guitar band the Hellecasters. As one of the biggest independent video companies of the early home-video era, Pacific Arts had a contract to release notable programs from PBS, such as Eyes on the Prize and The Civil War. This relationship eventually went sour and led to a protracted legal battle between Nesmith and PBS, in which Pacific Arts prevailed, but which also led to the demise of the record label and video business.

"The record company was unfortunately in the hip pocket of the video company, and the video company got into a bad situation with PBS," Nesmith said. "It resulted in a terrible lawsuit which we won but at the end of the day these things are so destructive that nobody ever really wins. And so Pacific Arts Records ended. It was doing very well with the Uni distribution system because a lot of people wanted this stuff, but Uni also distributed the videos, so it all ended."

Nesmith is excited about the possibilities of media distribution today.

"It seems to me like it s a better time to be an independent artist than it ever has been, Nesmith said. There was a bottleneck in the early days of media that was created by the big distributors, and you had to really fight your way through it. And unless you fell into something like I did with the [Monkees], you really couldn t do it. You had to have a machine somewhere in there pushing you along. From the Byrds to the Beatles to Dylan, it was all about getting access to that system."

"Now, it s a lot less about that, because the means of distribution are electronic, and they re instant, Nesmith said. As an independent artist, all you have to do is figure out the economic engine. Most performing artists are pretty much set, because the more people that know about you and want to see you perform, the more people that come to the club, there are lots of ways to make money off of that."

DOWNLOADS
"The problem, of course, is how do you get paid for your intellectual property, your recorded material?" Nesmith continued, "The CD is obviously moribund, so what do we do? How do you get paid? The new services that people are signing onto like Listen.com's Rhapsody, Pressplay, MusicNet, and so onare probably part of the answer."

"I just licensed my stuff to Listen.coms Rhapsody. I think thats the new model. I signed on to Rhapsody, and its $10 a month, and you have access to like 25,000 CDs on demand. If you take an 8-year-old kid and show her how to play songs through Rhapsody on the computer, and then you take the same kid and say, Lets go buy a CD, the kid will say, Why?"

Nesmith continued, "Theres also something else coming along, and thats the return of patronage. Its no longer the court of the Swedish king, its BMW and car commercials. I dont know whether thats good or bad, it just sort of is."

"As long as everything is equal economically, [downloading] is the death knell to the CD process. I have access to 25,000 CDs, and I only want to hear Duke Kimoho and His Hawaiian Steel Guitar Players once at a pool party. Im more than happy to pay a tenth of a cent to play it once, but I dont want to pay $20 for the CD."

Michael Nesmith Solo Discography

1968 - Wichita Train Whistle Songs - Dot

1970 - Magnetic South - RCA

1970 - Loose Salute - RCA

1971 - Nevada Fighter - RCA

1972 - Tantamount to Treason - RCA

1972 - And the Hits Just Keep on Comin' - RCA

1973 - Pretty Much Your Standard Ranch Stash - RCA

1974 - The Prison - Pacific Arts

1977 - From a Radio Engine to the Photon Wing - Island Records

1978 - Live at Palais - Pacific Arts

1979 - The Michael Nesmith Radio Special - Pacific Arts

1979 - Infinite Rider on the Big Dogma - Pacific Arts

1989 - Newer Stuff - Rhino

1992 - Tropical Campfires - Pacific Arts

1994 - The Garden - Rio Records

1999 - Live at the Britt Festival - Cooking Vinyl

2000 - Timerider: The Adventure of Lyle Swann - Rio Records

2006 - Rays - Rio Records

---