Hey, Hey, It's Michael Nesmith

WIRED
By Jason Silverman
02:00 AM Apr, 13, 2006

You remember Michael Nesmith. He's the Monkee in the wool cap.

But Nesmith is more than a pop-culture icon. He's built impeccable 
credentials as a media visionary. In the 1980s, Nesmith invented MTV, helped 
pioneer the home-video revolution, won a Grammy for his music video Elephant 
Parts and produced the cult films Repo Man and Tapeheads.

Throughout the 1990s he gathered deep thinkers at his Santa Fe, New Mexico, 
ranch to participate in his solutions-oriented conference, Council on Ideas. 
And in 1998, Nesmith published his acclaimed novel The Long Sandy Hair of 
Neftoon Zamora on the web.

Now, it's back to songwriting. After a five-year hiatus, Nesmith, who 
Rolling Stone said writes "the greatest music never heard," has released 
Rays, an atmospheric, eclectic CD. He spoke with Wired News from his studio 
in Monterey, California.

Wired News: The release strategy for Rays seems inverted -- first on iTunes 
and later in the big-box stores.

Michael Nesmith: Ten or 15 years ago, I got hip to the net and thought it 
could be a great one-to-one way to sell things. I wrote Neftoon Zamora as a 
hypertext novel. Back then, the only browser was Mosaic.

From there, everything began to line up…. Online delivery started up. MP3 
scared me for a while, because I believe in intellectual property rights. 
But when iTunes and Rhapsody arrived, transaction bases with users paying 
for stuff, it made sense to reverse the distribution sequence.

So instead of going after radio airplay and trying getting into the big 
boxes and then, maybe, giving the crumbs to the downloaders, I thought, I'll 
go with the downloaders first…. It wasn't some visionary hit. I was just 
swept along in the current of events.

WN: How different would your career have looked if MySpace had been around 
in the '60s?

Nesmith: When I struck out on my own, my idea was to break a chain … (of) 
doing the same thing that my family had done and ending up in a business I 
didn't want to be in. If opportunities like MySpace had been available then, 
I would have jumped that way. But as it worked out … I went the traditional 
television avenue.

WN: Do all of these digital opportunities change the nature of music?

Nesmith: Yeah, they do. They significantly change it. You have to think in 
different ways about what a song is.

When the carrier is a 45, one of those big-hole vinyl LPs, you can only get 
so much data on there, maybe 10 minutes. Radio airplay constrains it even 
further. So you ended up in the '50s and '60s with singles that were 
two-and-a-half or three minutes long. And you have these very simplified 
musical elements, just simple 1-4-5 turnarounds and other real easy-to-do 
things.

When you get into these big sampler engines and computer-based sequencing, 
the world opens up to you.... You can explore deep musical ideas and play 
with theory in ways you weren't able to before.

Forty years ago, maybe you played the piano, maybe you played the guitar. Or 
you wrote sheet music. But at the end of the day, if you came up with 
something, you couldn't render it beyond what you and a few friends could 
play. Now you can render something the size of a mountain, with hundreds of 
instruments and all sorts of explorations of harmonies and tonal centers and 
odd improvisations.

WN: Do you get lost in the possibilities? It's not like going into the 
studio with a couple of guys and banging out some songs.

Nesmith: That's an early discipline any artist learns. You don't get taken 
with the colors of paints that you've got. You've got to narrow it down. 
It's great to have all the possibilities, but it all starts with an idea.

To sit there and hope something will happen is like dumping 400 gallons of 
paint on the floor and hoping a picture is going to emerge. It doesn't work 
that way.

WN: You helped popularize music videos. I don't suppose you'll be doing a 
new one in support of Rays?

Nesmith: No. Haven't planned it. I did music videos in the '70s and that was 
fun because it was the launch of the basis of it and I was discovering some 
really interesting principles that govern the form. But after that I lost 
interest. MTV took off and it became this maze, this massive amount of 
information. I don't want to contribute any more to that.

WN: Now that indie musicians and filmmakers are selling direct to their fans 
-- sometimes hundreds of thousands of units -- what role can the corporate 
media play?

Nesmith: I don't hold much hope for Warner Music Group or Sony being a 
player in the future…. The problem with those kind of companies is that they 
don't have any good way to add value anymore.

For years, they'd support the artist in their nascent stages and get the 
goods to market. Those are old-time, Methuselean economics…. There are whole 
new businesses that will wander in and boot these guys out.

WN: So we can write the obituaries?

Nesmith: Those obituaries were written two decades ago. What you are seeing 
here is an inertial burn (laughs).

WN: So what happens to the consumer?

Nesmith: Well, its all to the good, I think…. It's a new personal freedom, 
new individualism. The individuals who come up with ideas can make perfectly 
good or even spectacular lives for themselves with just their own little 
shop. I'm certainly one of those guys. And there is a lot faster traffic 
than me out there.

Has anybody ever put together a word that means producer and consumer at the 
same time? That's what's going to happen. We'll be both. We'll have the 
means of production and consumption under our own control. I can't imagine 
that being anything but good.

Jaimie Vernon,
President, Bullseye Records
"Not Infecting Our Customers' Computers Since 1985!!"
http://www.bullseyecanada.com
http://www.bullseyerecords.com
Author, Canadian Pop Music Encyclopedia
http://jam.canoe.ca/Music/Pop_Encyclopedia/

http://www.myspace.com/jaimievernonsmovingtargetz