Michael Nesmith, singer and guitarist for the Monkees, died on Friday from natural causes at the age of 78.
“With Infinite Love we announce that Michael Nesmith has passed away this morning in his home, surrounded by family, peacefully and of natural causes,” his family said in a statement, according to Rolling Stone. “We ask that you respect our privacy at this time and we thank you for the love and light that all of you have shown him and us.”
The Monkees were a pop and rock band that took over the music world from 1966 to 1970.
The original group consisted of Micky Dolenz, Peter Tork, Davy Jones and Nesmith.
Jones died in 2012, and Tork passed in 2019. Nesmith and Dolenz, 76, performed in Chicago on their farewell tour just last month, with Nesmith saying the group’s impact was “more than I ever imagined.”
Nesmith was famous for penning hits including “Mary, Mary,” “Circle Sky,” “Listen to the Band” and “The Girl I Knew Somewhere.”
The Monkees launched as America’s answer to The Beatles with “The Monkees Show,” a scripted series about a four-member rock group on the road to stardom that premiered on CBS in 1966. Despite its short-lived television lifespan, only two seasons, hit songs from the show, such as “Daydream Believer” and “I’m a Believer,” have endured in popular culture, even today.
And although the Monkees occupied a realm somewhere between parody and reality, the made-for-TV band of bona fide musicians would continue their careers in the music and entertainment industries.
Nesmith, dubbed the quietest member of the Prefab Four, published his memoir “Infinite Tuesday: An Autobiographical Riff” (Crown Archetype) in 2017, revealing his struggles beyond legitimizing his commercially manufactured rock group, such as his fraught relationship with his mother, businesswoman and Liquid Paper inventor Bette McMurray. Four years after the cancellation of “The Monkees Show,” the self-proclaimed “loony son of their chief executive” would attempt to enlist McMurray in a partnership to launch a country music record label called Countryside in 1972 — a deal she would decline.
Nesmith continued to perform solo and with his group the First National Band in the years after the Monkees’ split, which led him to create what some have called the first pitch to launch the television network now known as MTV. In 1977, Island Records asked him to create promotional footage for his single “Rio,” and Nesmith took the offer as an opportunity to get creative. Rather than a standard performance video, he created a comedic short film, which featured “women in fruit hats danc[ing]” and Nesmith flying through space.
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There was no outlet for the medium at the time, but it sparked an idea in Nesmith. “Audio records are played on radio, so a video record should be played on video — on television,” he thought. “There should be a broadcast component for the music video just like there is for records.”
In a pitch to Warner Bros., he also came up with the idea of video jockeys, or VJs, and described it as “a new kind of TV that played videos 24 hours a day, like a radio station,” calling the programming “PopClips.”
Warner Bros. and partner American Express ran with the idea and launched the new round-the-clock music-television network on Aug. 1, 1981. Nesmith was offered the role of production head at MTV, but he turned it down to pursue other endeavors.
Nesmith is survived by his four children: Christian, Jessica, Jason and Jonathan.