DALLAS — Michael Nesmith, the dead-panning Dallas native who rose to fame as one of The Monkees, died Friday of natural causes. 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. David Jones died in 2012 and Peter Tork in 2019. Mickey 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 some place that’s got a lock on your roots,” he told The News’ Robert Wilonsky in 2016 before he received the Video Association of Dallas’ Ernie Kovacs Award. “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.”
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 (1966-1968) 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 Stone in 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?’”
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