Pretty Much Your Standard Sleeve Notes Awareness Records ---------- [In 1989-1991, Awareness Records in London, England reissued all of Michael Nesmith's post-Monkees albums on CD. Included with some of the reissues was a separate booklet, 'Pretty Much Your Standard Sleeve Notes', which serves as a pretty good introduction to Nez's post-Monkees career. Since then, Awareness Records has gone out of business and Nez's albums have been issued on CD again by his own record label, Rio Records in Los Angeles, with a few exceptions as of this writing and with two new albums, '...tropical campfire's...' and 'The Garden'.] Pretty Much Your Standard Sleeve Notes For the first significant part of his career, Michael Nesmith was generally regarded more as a teenybop TV star than as a serious musician. Unless you just got in from Mars, you will surely be aware of The Monkees, a quartet who starred in a hugely successful comedy TV series about a pop group. Some felt the worst part of the joke was that the group also made records, the records were plugged on the most popular teenage show with huge ratings, and the records became huge hits. In truth, The Monkees was a brilliant marketing concept which made a lot of people a lot of money, introduced to the world directly or indirectly Neil Diamond, Jack Nicholson, Harry Nilsson, Michael Martin Murphey and Jimi Hendrix and spawned some great pop records and the weirdest feature movie your wildest nightmares could imagine, starring Frank Zappa and Victor Mature, the Kenneth Branagh and Frankie Vaughan of the late 1960s. See, an authentic psychedelic sleeve note... Nesmith wasn't the first to leave the group, but he was the first to suffer from a guilty conscience about the success of Monkees records, to which some members of the group contributed embarrassingly little besides singing. Nesmith was a working musician before The Monkees, and he saw more in music than a fast buck, even if it was a million bucks. Inevitably, democracy was the winner and commercial acumen went largely out of the window. Nesmith retreated into music. With a commercially suspect artistic triumph already under his belt (an instrumental album of his songs arranged by jazz great Shorty Rogers and performed by the hottest L.A. session men which eventually became a collector's item - for whatever reason), Nesmith decided on the singer/songwriter approach. He had already written several songs which were respected on both commercial and artistic levels, like 'Different Drum', a US Top 20 hit for Linda Ronstadt as lead singer of The Stone Poneys in 1967, 'Two Different Roads' and 'Listen To The Band', a very sophisticated country-flavoured epic which could be regarded as one of the very first country/rock records when The Monkees recorded it. Before the final demise of The Monkees in mid-1970, Nesmith had completed his contractual obligations and left to form his own hot little combo, which he called The First National Band. On bass was John London, a Texan chum from pre-Monkees days, and his rhythm section partner was John Ware, who went on to become drummer in Emmylou Harris's aptly-named Hot Band, while the main instrumental soloist was Orville J. 'Red' Rhodes, an unorthodox and often unique pedal steel guitarist from whom Nesmith was learning to play that instrument. It didn't take long for Michael Nesmith & The First National Band to find a label, RCA, and 1970 saw the release of 'Magnetic South', an album which included a million selling U.S. hit single titled 'Joanne' which Nesmith claimed - perhaps seriously, perhaps not - was actually about a cow. Encouraged by this success, the quartet quickly released a follow-up album, 'Loose Salute', whose sleeve features a picture of a general riding a rat saluting with his left hand. The music was pretty good too - a remake of 'Listen To The Band' and another (smaller) hit single, 'Silver Moon', plus a fine cover of the Patsy Cline hit written by Harlan Howard & Hank Cochran, 'I Fall To Pieces'. It would be five years before The Eagles refined the pioneering approach of these albums and topped the US chart, and Nesmith could fairly be said to have been ahead of his time. 1971's third album, 'Nevada Fighter', wasn't finished when the First National Band fell apart, so it was completed by the finest session men, including James Burton, Glen D. Hardin and Ronnie Tutt from Elvis Presley's band. The album included a cover of the Eric Clapton song recorded by Derek & The Dominos, 'I Looked Away', and Harry Nilsson's classic, 'Rainmaker', as well as the usual ration of excellent Nesmith originals. Red Rhodes was the only musician apart from Nesmith himself to also be a member of The Second National Band, whose only album, 'Tantamount To Treason Volume One' - there never was a second volume... if one was ever actually planned - was released in 1972. The names of the other musicians were included in a bizarre recipe from home-brewed beer, and include RCA label-mate Jose Feliciano! Some country, some presumably experimental stuff, which some people adore. The next two albums, both masterpieces, arrived in fairly quick succession. The heavily sarcastically-titled 'And The Hits Just Keep On Comin' featured two people only: Nesmith on guitar and vocals and Rhodes on steel, and is breathtaking. Then Nesmith got friendly with Jac Holzman, founder of Elektra Records and the man who signed The Doors, and the result was the Countryside record label, whose assets included a studio in the L.A. suburb of Sepulveda with a house band including 'Red' Rhodes and some fearsome pickers. They backed him on his sixth post-Monkees vocal album, 'Pretty Much Your Standard Ranch Stash', but when Holzman's Elektra went into partnership with David Geffen's Asylum, Countryside became redundant. Nesmith also left RCA, and launched his own communications company, Pacific Arts, which was more than just a record label. Its first release was 'The Prison', which Nesmith describes as "a book with a soundtrack". If you read the story in the book while you're listening to the album, you should finish reading when the music stops. An original concept albums boxed set which unjustly became a collector's item within a couple of years, again some way ahead of the pack. In 1975, he won an Award for a song he'd written with country singer Linda Hargrove, 'I've Never Loved Anyone More', which was Lynn 'Rose Garden' Anderson's 35th US country chart hit single - he has yet to record the song himself, by the way... Then it got commercial again, at least musically, although commercial is not the obvious description of an album titled 'From A Radio Engine To A Photon Wing'. No 'Red' Rhodes, but a Nashville album made in a Music City studio with the hottest pickers in town. Included was a hit single title 'Rio', for which Nesmith himself directed a somewhat far-out video, which is still rightly regarded as pioneering, and this was in 1976, when great videos were even fewer and farther between than they are now. The next year, a great concert album recorded in Australia, 'Live At The Palais', with a hot country/rock band including the return of John Ware and the magical Al Perkins on lead guitar. Nesmith's last album release for ten years was 'Infinite Rider On The Big Dogma' in 1979. After that, he turned to the motion picture industry for much of the 1980's, making award-winning videos. His remarkable 'Elephant Parts' video programme was an expanded version of the Rio video, with a demonstration of how the album could become a very useful cucumber slicer if it were not being played, and for this achievement - the video, not the cucumber - Nesmith won the very first Video Grammy Award. He also produced several critically acclaimed feature films, notably 'Repo Man'. In 1989, he returned to music, his first love, with 'The Newer Stuff', his first album released anywhere on CD, with unheard tracks mixed with some highlights of the later albums - hence its title. 'The Newer Stuff' was the first Nesmith album released by Awareness Records, which will subsequently also release for the first time in the world on CD all Michael Nesmith's highly rated and criminally undervalued back catalogue of post-Monkees albums, as well as - we hold our breaths collectively - a new album. John Tobler, 1991 Magnetic South AWCD 1023 Loose Salute AWCD 1024 Nevada Fighter AWCD 1025 Tantamount To Treason Vol. 1 AWCD 1026 And The Hits Just Keep On Comin' AWCD 1027 Pretty Much Your Standard Ranch Stash AWCD 1028 The Prison AWCD 1020 From A Radio Engine To The Photon Wing AWCD 1029 Live At The Palais AWCD 1030 Infinite Rider On The Big Dogma AWCD 1031 The Newer Stuff AWCD 1014