In The Monkees, Michael Nesmith was the still, cool eye of the hurricane, holding a torch for real music amid the wacky fabrications. But as Micky Dolenz and others reveal to MOJO, he died understanding the joy the band gave to millions. “It was fantasy becoming reality, art becoming life,” they tell David Fricke.

Listen to the band: The Monkees (from left) Mike Nesmith, Micky Dolenz, Davy Jones and Peter Tork in 1966.

Photograph: Ken Whitmore.

ON JUNE 1, 1968, MICHAEL NESMITH WALKED into the RCA Victor studios in Nashville with an idea for a tune – no lyrics yet, just some chords – that, as the day progressed, became a mission statement for him as a musician, songwriter and, at that moment, a member of one of the biggest and most divisive groups in pop. Nesmith called the song Listen To The Band.

The year before, Nesmith, Micky Dolenz, Davy Jones and Peter Tork – The Monkees – had wrestled control of their records from the Hollywood producers and label executives who brought them together in 1965 to play a fictional combo in a television series. Gifted singers and players with var ying degrees of studio and gig experience, the four proved themselves with the folk rock spell and psychedelic tinge of the 1967 Number 1s, Headquarters and Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones Ltd. But they often worked apart, on their own tracks with studio musicians, and Nesmith –a lanky Texan who was writing with a country drawl in Papa Gene’s Blues and Sweet Young Thing on the 1966 debut, The Monkees – was in Nashville cutting new material with the local pros.

“One of the things I wanted to do,” Nesmith later explained, “was experiment with pure Nashville players playing a type of rock’n’roll sensibility.” To that end, he reversed the chords from Nine Times Blue, a straight-up countr y stroll he’d recorded that April in Hollywood, and made up words at the mike “just to give me something to sing.” With Salvation Army-style brass overdubbed in Los Angeles and an odd, false ending, like a radio briefly losing reception, Listen To The Band became an anthemic dreaming – “hard-core mountain music,” as Nesmith put it, via the Whisky A Go Go – about the redemptive power of a great rock’n’roll combo: “Listen to the band/Weren’t they good?/They made me happy.”

It was short-lived euphoria. Tork quit the Monkees in late 1968, unhappy with a limited role in the music and his image as a lovable dummy. And when Listen To The Band was issued as a single in April 1969, Nesmith’s first lead vocal on a Monkees A-side stalled at Number 63 in Billboard: a cr ushing fall from the stratosphere – The Monkees’ two-year run on NBC; six Top 5 hits from 1966 to 1968 – that affirmed, for many in the press and music industr y, the stigma of a Prefab Four, built in The Beatles’ image minus the wit and vision.

Before it came out, Nesmith played Listen To The Band for producer Richard Perr y, then on the rise for his work with Captain Beefheart, Fats Domino and Tiny Tim. According to The Monkees’ longtime historian Andrew Sandoval, Perr y told Nesmith, “You did a good job, the production’s good. But I would never buy that record.” When Nesmith asked why, Perr y said, “Because I would never buy a record by The Monkees.”

In March 1970, Nesmith bought out the rest of his contract for $186,000, leaving Jones and Dolenz to carry on for a few more months.

ON NOVEMBER 14, 2021, 53 YEARS AFTER THAT Nashville session and a month before his death on December 10 at the age of 78 from heart failure, Nesmith sang Listen To The Band for the last time at the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles. It was the closing date of The Monkees Present: The Mike And Micky Show, an evening of hits and memories that he and Dolenz first took on the road in 2018 – six years after Jones’s death in 2012 and shortly before Tork died in Februar y 2019.

As they did at most stops last fall, Nesmith and Dolenz opened with Good Clean Fun, a jubilant hoedown the former recorded that same day in Nashville. The duo then raced through two sets of AMradio gold – Last Train To Clarksville, Pleasant Valley Sunday, Daydream Believer – and deeper tracks with a striking focus on Nesmith’s craft and ner ve during his five years in the whirlwind. There was the stinging-jingle march You Just May Be The One from Headquarters; Dylan-esque surrealism in the ’68 B-side Tapioca Tundra; and the acid-countr y hymn St Matthew –a ’68-Nashville number that didn’t come out for another 22 years – before Listen To The Band came up in the encore.

“Nez had been led to believe that he was going to be able to play his music, write his songs. He was very frustrated.”

Micky Dolenz

Ken Whitmore/mptvimages/eyevine

“Nez was misled to some degree,” Dolenz recalls, speaking a few days after his bandmate’s passing. “When he was cast on the show, he had never done TV. He didn’t know the whole process” – something Dolenz knew well as an LA-born child actor. (He played the title character in the late-’50s series, Circus Boy.) “Nez had been led to believe that he was going to be able to play his music, write his songs. But he was ver y fr ustrated when things got rolling.”

Sandoval – who has worked with The Monkees for more than three decades as their biographer, reissue producer and a close advisor on their reunions – points out that Nesmith wrote Listen To The Band as “one verse, repeated as if it’s an incantation. It’s a meditation to himself – that music will heal him, and it might heal us too. He believed in it, and it broke his heart when it wasn’t a hit single.”