Mike Nesmith

Robert Michael Nesmith (December 30, 1942 – December 10, 2021) was an American musician, songwriter, author, screenwriter, and actor, known as a member of The Monkees and for his solo work. His songwriting credits with The Monkees include "Mary, Mary", "The Girl I Knew Somewhere", "Tapioca Tundra", "Circle Sky" and "Listen to the Band". Additionally, his song "Different Drum" became a hit for the Stone Poneys featuring Linda Ronstadt.

After leaving the Monkees in 1970, Nesmith continued his successful songwriting and performing career, first with the seminal country rock group the First National Band, with which he had a top-40 hit, "Joanne" (1970). As a solo artist, he scored an international hit with the song "Rio" (1977). He often played a custom-built Gretsch 12-string electric guitar both with the Monkees and afterward.

In 1974, Nesmith founded Pacific Arts, a multimedia production and distribution company, through which he helped pioneer the music video format, winning the first Grammy Award for Video of the Year for his hour-long comedy/variety program, Elephant Parts (1981). He created one of the first American television programs dedicated to music videos, PopClips, which aired on Nickelodeon in 1980, and was soon afterward approached to help develop the MTV network, though he declined. Nesmith was also an executive producer of the film Repo Man (1984).

Nesmith was born in Houston on December 30, 1942. He was an only child; his parents, Warren Nesmith and Bette Nesmith (née McMurry), divorced when Nesmith was only four. Following the divorce, Bette raised Nesmith as a single mother. Bette McMurry took jobs involving clerical work to design work, eventually attaining the position of executive secretary at Texas Bank and Trust. She went on to invent the typewriter correction fluid known as Liquid Paper. Over the next 25 years, Bette Graham (she had remarried in 1962) built the Liquid Paper Corporation into an international company, which she sold to Gillette in 1979. She died in 1980 at the age of 56.

Nesmith attended Thomas Jefferson High School in Dallas, where he participated in choral and drama activities; he left high school without graduating and enlisted in the U.S. Air Force in 1960. He completed basic training at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, was trained as an aircraft mechanic at Sheppard Air Force Base in Wichita Falls, Texas, and was permanently stationed at Clinton-Sherman Air Force Base near Burns Flat, Oklahoma. He obtained a General Educational Development certificate and was honorably discharged in 1962.

Biography summary from English Wikipedia, photograph via Wikimedia Commons.