Micky Dolenz

MONKEE TO MONKEE

Micky Dolenz Sings Choice Cuts from the Michael Nesmith Songbook

BY LEE VALENTINE SMITH

of my own original material, but you never ONE OF THE MOST POPULAR pop bands of the ‘60s was The Monkees. The made-for-television group blurred the lines between high concept and extraordinary creativity, surprising even their fans and corporate know. I’ve been working on short stories and a screenplay and stuff like that. But not songs. I haven’t been inspired to sit down and write any tunes. It’s been prose. It’s been short stories, science-fiction short stories, actually. gatekeepers with a revolutionary catalog of great music, an influential feature film and two seasons of shows that continue to garner new generations of fans. Following the deaths of Davy Jones and Peter Tork, the surviving members of the band continue to tour and record - with a recent live album featuring concert performances from Micky Dolenz and Well, let’s get into this Dolenz Sings Nesmith, because I really love it. Well look, I say, ‘It always starts with the material.’ It’s the songwriter and the song and the material, or a script or a story, a book or whatever. It starts with the material. Nez just wrote so many great tunes. Michael Nesmith. Now that they’re off the road during the pandemic, Micky Dolenz has a brand-new album ready for release. Dolenz Sings Nesmith finds drummerguitarist-director-screenwriter Micky in especially fine form with a set of completely reimagined tunes from Michael’s vast catalog of ‘60s and ‘70s-era compositions. With able production from frequent Monkee-band guitarist Christian Nesmith, the collection - due this month from the retro-minded folks at 7A Records - resonates as one of the best recordings of Dolenz’ career. A deep-dive into the Nesmith canon of tunes, Dolenz and company have selected a set of performances that showcase his range as a vocalist and his openmindedness as arranger and skills as interpreter. Recently INsite was honored to speak with Dolenz from his home in Los Angeles. The concept and the cover are reminiscent of Nilsson Sings Newman. Many years ago in the late 60s, early 70s, one of my dearest friends - probably my best friend at the time - was Harry Nilsson, the singer-songwriter. I was there when he did that album and I guess it just stuck with me. A number of years ago when Mike, Peter and I put together a little tour as a memorial tour for Davy, I just said to Nez one day, this was years ago, ‘I would love to do a Dolenz sings Nesmith album.’ He was like, [shifts into a Texas drawl] ‘Well, that’s a good idea.’ He came up with some tunes, suggestions. But that was it at the time because we went on tour and I did other things, other albums and this and that. Then a couple years ago, I mentioned it to 7A Records who’ve released a lot of reissues of stuff and they loved the idea. Now here we are. I mean, essentially, they made me IF YOU’RE LUCKY AND ALL THE STARS ALIGN AND IT’S THE PERFECT STORM, THEN IT WORKS OUT. WHAT HAPPENS IS THE WHOLE BECOMES Here you come with a great new album. You’ve made records during Vietnam, Watergate and now during a pandemic. Good point. Well, in my case there’s not a lot of pressure or intent. During The Monkees, it was all intent. It was a set schedule. I would film the television show for 10 hours a day and then go into a deal and we engaged Christian Nesmith to produce and [Monkee mastermind] Andrew Sandoval to do the A&R. I basically left it in their hands. I knew I was too close to the material to really be objective about it. I didn’t want to do just a karaoke cover version of these tunes. GREATER THAN THE SUM OF ITS PARTS. the studio and record a couple of lead vocals every night, and it was all on a very tight schedule. It was pretty well-defined for everyone. But after the show went off the air, I stopped recording on a regular basis. Then it was just basically down to There’s not a bad song on it. It’s not one of those records you skip through and go, “Well that one’s okay, but…’ You mean like with Sergeant Pepper, right? somebody making me an offer, saying, ‘Do you want to record an album?’ Lately, I think a lot of people have had nothing Yeah, exactly. I remember skipping through all of those. better to do but get in the studio and write or create things. I think probably we’ll find that a lot of great material - musical and Just filler, it’s all filler. Yeah, all filler. otherwise – I mean, books and movies and scripts and things, will probably all come out of this situation. There’s nothing like being tied to your word processor or your guitar, your piano or something. That’s always been one of my problems, I’ve never been very prolific as a songwriter or any kind of writer but I have written some stuff recently because I just can’t go out. But on yours, it’s all killer. There’s a whole new look at the Nesmith songbook. There’s some really interesting reimagining of some of these tunes, like “Circle Sky.” I mean, it’s just amazing what Christian did with it. I was thrilled, because when I talked to him about it originally, I said, ‘Do you think you’re going to be able to work with that material?’ He said, ‘It’s an So do you think we’re going to see a Dolenz sings Dolenz here pretty soon? I had some wonderful songs that I did on Good Times, produced by the late Adam Schlesinger. But I’m not prolific, I never interesting challenge, but I want to give it a shot,’ and he did an amazing job. He’s the one that re-envisioned the majority of that material. I would throw in my two cents. So I’m glad you like it. have been. Something has to catch my attention. I don’t see myself doing an album Oh, I absolutely love it. And just like with Justus, the very first track I played was “Circle Sky” and man, this time it did not disappoint. We talked about it and I was like, ‘How can we do “Circle Sky” any differently? I mean, it’s what it is.’

It’s a million times better than the version on Justus. I was actually disappointed by that one particular track for some reason. Well, that’s probably because it wasn’t that different from the original, it’s so hard when you cover tunes, very few people can do it. I mean, look at how many people have successfully covered a Beatles tune. Very few. I mean, Joe Cocker’s the one that comes to mind that was able to re-envision a couple of Beatles tunes. I mean, how many can you name? How many Beatles tunes can you name that have been reenvisioned, and so successfully. It’s very difficult. I mean, even if you look at Smash Mouth’s version of “I’m a Believer,” which is great. But it’s not a different feel. It isn’t a different version, really. It’s very difficult to do that with iconic songs.

No, because in the ‘60s on TV variety shows, everybody took a stab at those songs and it was always embarrassing. Jim Nabors or somebody, you know? It’s like Steve and Eydie doing “Got to Get You into My Life.” I mean, that’s just wrong. Yeah, I remember when I realized I was really getting old. It was when I was in an elevator, I guess in ... probably at that time it would’ve been in the ‘80s, and I was in an elevator. I heard a Muzak version of Revolution. I thought, ‘Oh boy.’ It was like Mel Tormé or something, [breaks into smarmy Vegas crooner mode] Ya say ya want a rev-o-lution…

Hey, that’s your next record right there. You could swing the hits. (Laughs) Yeah, right. But if you’re lucky and all the stars align and it’s the perfect storm, then it works out. What happens is the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts. And that’s, I think, the secret to our industry, our business, in music or in film or in any medium. You can’t take a Beatles record apart and say, “Oh, well, it was just George Martin,” or, “Oh, well, it was really just John Lennon. It was just Ringo’s drumming. It was just this chord change from G to A.” You just can’t do that. You can’t take it apart. You can’t dissect an album or a movie or a TV show. Anything. It doesn’t work like that. The whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts, and that’s just it. You take it apart, its like the old thing about taking the watch apart to see how it works. Well, then you don’t have a watch and it doesn’t work. When I did King for a Day with Jeffrey Foskett, I said, ‘I’m going to be Frank Sinatra, going into the studio with Quincy Jones and singing.’ That’s what I do. That’s my instrument.

Album Reviews

REVIEWS BY JOHN B. MOORE

Rev. Peyton’s Big Damn Band

Dance Songs For Hard Times

(Thirty Tigers) The good Reverend and his crew are known for churning out a remarkably satisfying blend of Blues and Americana, often played and recorded on vintage instruments and using antiquated technology. What they aren’t really known for are current takes on modern problems. But even Rev. Peyton’s Big Damn Band couldn’t avoid singing about the global pandemic that locked down the world for the 12 months. On “No Tellin’ When,” Peyton sings about not knowing when he’ll be able to get back to work or hug his mom again. And that’s not the only time the COVID 19 virus, and the financial and the emotional havoc it brought. serves as fodder for the band’s songs . The themes pop up on “Dirty Hustlin’” and “Ways And Means”. But listening to this album, it turns out the Blues is the perfect genre to tackle the past year. Dance Songs For Hard Times, their 10th full length, manages to be their most accessible album yet and also once of their strongest. The album closes with “Come Down Angels,” a plea for a little help from above, and while not exactly a slow tempo jam, it’s probably the closest the band has come yet to writing a ballad or a hymn. Appropriately it evolves into a full-on raucous stomp, an appropriate end to any Reverend Peyton album and a great way to cap off (hopefully) the end of the pandemic. Travis Good Feeling [Vinyl Reissue] (Craft Recordings) Long before the music of Travis became the go to soundtrack for dramatic rainy scenes in TV shows like Grey’s Anatomy and One Tree Hill, they put out a fantastic and oddly overlooked Britpop album, 1997’s Good Feeling. Craft Recordings just reissued this debut with the classic sleeve and packaging (the lacquers were all cut at Metropolis Studios, London). Produced by Steve Lillywhite, the album opens with the guitar-heavy track “All I Wanna Do Is Rock,” a song that is decidedly 90s with Fran Healy’s sing to howl chorus, but one that also holds up brilliantly well two decades-plus later. With Good Feeling, Travis took what Blur and Oasis had started, but came at it with a very guitar-heavy sound. Songs like the opening track, “The Line Is Fine,” (oddly enough this one was not one of the five singles released from this record, but easily one of the band’s best) and the upbeat “Tied To the 90’s” all sound remarkably fresh even now. Even on their slower tracks, like “I Love You Always” the band manages to impress. In the decades that followed the Scottish band have continued to release albums, some that are pretty remarkable, but none match the energy or the rock-heavy sound of Good Feeling. And yes, this one sounds even better on vinyl. Prism Bitch Perla (Self-Released) On their stellar debut, New Mexico’s Prism Bitch manage to channel some of the best late’80s - early ‘90s college rock, from the Breeders to The Pixies, all while slamming their own stamp on the genre. On the 11 track Perla, the four-piece careen through a dizzying collection of songs that take turns highlighting their airtight rhythm section and the brilliant guitar/keyboard combo, adding remarkable color to bassist Lauren Poole’s confidently strong vocals. The album starts off with a seemingly incongruous synth, on “In N Out” before kicking into, and blending perfectly with military precision drumming and straight-ahead rock guitar riffs. Perla ends with the slow burn “One Shoot,” with sluggish guitars bookending the album nicely. In between is a whiplash of boisterous punk rock and slower indie rock on tracks like “Lonely Nights,” an addictively catchy song that manages to standout on an album full of standout tracks. Even just four months into 2021, it’s hard to imagine many more records coming out this year that are as satisfyingly diverse as Perla. And kudos for coming up with the last great band name.

Streetwalkin’ Cheetahs One More Drink (Dead Beat Records) It takes a lot of balls to name your band after one of the most famous lyrics from a Stooges song, but as the Streetwalkin’ Cheetahs have been proving since the mid’90s, they actually have the talent to back up that bravado. On One More Drink, the LA band tears through nearly a dozen gritty, yet addictive pop punk tracks for another deeply satisfying 30 minutes. The band started out playing clubs around LA doing covers of the Dead Boys, New York Dolls, Stooges and The Runaways and it’s clear they never really shook those core influences but have added to them over the years. It’s been two decades since their last album, but the band has clearly not been sitting idle letting rust settle in, as One More Drink proves to be one of their best yet. That’s not to say it’s flawless – there are a couple tracks here that sound a bit paint by numbers, (like the goofy “Switchblade Knights”) but those moments are fleeting. There are also plenty of surprises here showing the band expanding their template, like on the opening track, “Ain’t It Summer” sounding remarkably like Cheap Trick or the sax slathered all over “Bad Vacation.” Elsewhere, on a song like the ferocious “Rumblin’ Train,” the band bolster their hard rock cred once again, proving they just may be the missing link between power pop and punk rock, managing to bridge the genres perfectly.

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CELEBRATING 29 YEARS!

COMBO CORNER, SLIGHT RETURN

On Yesterday’s Tomorrow, Vets of the Winston-Salem Music Scene Look Back

BY LEE VALENTINE SMITH

INDIVIDUALLY AND COLLECTIVELY, North Carolina-based Mitch Easter and Don Dixon were an integral part of some of the finest records of the ‘80s. As musicians and/or producers, individually and collectively the old friends were behind guitars, microphones and mixing boards on many projects from R.E.M., Pylon, The Smithereens, Guadalcanal Diary, Oh OK, Let’s Active and Marti Jones. When their friend and fellow Carolinian Chris Stamey published his 2018 memoir A Spy In The House Of Loud: New York Songs and Stories (University Of Texas Press), he enlisted Easter, Dixon and a number of likeminded pals for a commemorative concert to promote the book. In May of ’18, the gathering occurred at The Ramkat in Winston-Salem. During the pandemic, Stamey listened to the tapes of the show and decided to issue the recordings as Yesterday’s Tomorrow: Celebrating the Winston-Salem Sound. Released by Omnivore Records, the set revisits the rock scene of the area’s so-called “Combo Corner” in honor of a Guitar Player magazine feature on bands centered around RJ Reynolds High School. The result is an energetic and decidedly psychedelic history lesson with the various participants briefly looking back on their formative roots. INsite spoke with Easter and Dixon about the new album and their shared disdain for musical nostalgia.

How did the record happen? Easter: Well Chris Stamey really has a knack about making a product out of something. He knows how to make the package make sense to somebody. The show had actually happened a couple of years before, but a while back, he started talking to Omnivore and other people about making this into an actual product. Dixon: I don’t think it was planned to be a record when we all played the show. You just record because you can. I think Chris just wanted to have a fun night that celebrated these bands.

Was the show filmed as well? Easter: Yeah there were actual visual recordings, some of which, in a prelegendary way, were immediately lost. I guess he had the idea of making a sort of a documentary out of it. And now it’s happened. It was kind of a remarkable show. I don’t know how enjoyable it was if you didn’t know the story of the people involved but it was a pretty good overview of a certain slice of a really strong music scene, back when all of us were kids in this town. It’s not comprehensive at all but it’s still a good bunch of people. It was the kind of thing where a lot of them were people I hadn’t seen for so long. It was just weird that so many of us still played.

As we all know, there are always some people in a scene that you just don’t want to run into, much less be creative with, but it doesn’t seem that way within the WinstonSalem scene. Easter: In our case, I don’t think it was ever that way, maybe because it just didn’t seem ‘real’ or something. People that I know who have had more of a showbiz-type upbringing around places, like Los Angeles for example,

I’M SUPER-WARY ABOUT THE ‘NOSTALGIA BUSINESS.’ IT JUST MAKES MY SKIN CRAWL. WE JUST GOT UP THERE AND DID IT – WITHOUT ANY SORT OF HOKEY FANFARE.

they’ll talk about a more unpleasant sort of competition. Around here, everyone was sort of starving. Not literally, but when I was in high school, nobody had any idea of what to do to make a step forward - beyond just playing. It’s like, ‘Ok here we are, we have a band, we’re writing songs and we’re playing. Now what do we do?’ Nobody had the slightest idea. It’s funny that anybody from around here that did anything and got some kinda traditional attention. The model for that, I think, the pioneers would’ve had to have been the B-52’s and Pylon going to New York to play. They went and sort of proved that New York audiences might want to hear bands from down here. Then the sort of pipeline opened for us. It was a great thing for all of us. Chris and I had sent tapes to record companies when we were in high school, that was our bold thing to do. I don’t think anyone else we knew did that. Of course, they were all rejected. Beyond that it was like, what do you do? So around here, I don’t think people felt competitive because there was really nothing to fight over. You just sort of played at the teen dance or something. There was a kind of fantastic indifference to it all. Dixon: But I must say, I don’t think there were a lot of scenes that were happening quite like this, anywhere else in the country. It was driven by the church coffeehouses and the city fathers putting money into it all to try and keep the kids off the street and give them something to do. It created these venues that were pretty unique. Most towns didn’t have all these opportunities. It was a real circuit. You could play every week. Bands had places to play, in front of hundreds of people. It was very different than anything I’d known as a kid growing up in South Carolina. I guess we were a little older than Mitch. Being in college as opposed to being in the ninth grade is a big difference. So the level of experience was different. I’d already played a lot of super professional gigs. The WinstonSalem scene was very different for me because I saw that it gave people the chance to be creative and to be heard. That’s so important. It’s definitely worth celebrating and looking back on. Easter: I played my first show at a place called Floretta Baylin’s Academy of the Dance Arts, which was this thing where they taught all these wild teenagers how to do the foxtrot and stuff so they could be civilized adults, you know? It was like the last little gasp of a certain kind of genteel era of social skills. It’s very charming to think back on now. At the end of the term or whatever, the kids were allowed to have a crazy party and listen to that awful loud music that they liked. My first band played at one of those parties and that was my big entrance into show business.

There is a certain sense of optimism in these tracks as well as the performances. I haven’t felt that sort of focused energy since the early ‘80s days in Athens. Dixon: Well as we get older I think it’s harder to feel that optimism, but there was something pretty special in the air in that time. In Winston-Salem, in Athens and Atlanta, too. Though the scenes were very different. It’s hard to really pinpoint but I remember [my wife, singer-songwriter] Marti Jones commenting on this, too. The first time she started coming down to North Carolina, she noticed how supportive and non-competitive the scene seemed to be. As opposed to what was going on around Akron and other places where she’d been, because it was kinda cut-throat there. People were trying to outdo each other or outsmart somebody - just to get ahead. It was amazing to see the support of people. Like with the B-52’s success, I think it kind of created this sense in Athens of, ‘Oh gee, maybe doing our dumb little shit, we can actually have some fun with it.’ That same kina thing was part of this whole Winston-Salem world that Stamey’s trying to celebrate with this record. It’s about the supportiveness of the scene, not of the divisiveness. That’s what you were feeling when you had those positive feelings about what was going on in Athens. I think you were feeling the positive energy from the bands and the scene that created that music. You have to have a certain amount of chutzpa to think that anybody would even want to hear you do anything at all. It takes a lot! I remember being in high school and trying to get up the courage to sing. You didn’t want people to laugh at you, you know? So having a scene that was so supportive, as opposed to being all ‘everyman-for-himself’ is a very important thing.

The record sounds vital and doesn’t wheeze with forced nostalgia at all. It’s old music - but played with a great deal of modern enthusiasm. Dixon: I agree. It doesn’t come off as a nostalgic at all. This isn’t an oldies act, it’s who we were and still are. I think there’s a terrific energy to it. Easter: It’s really great that everybody in their ‘twilight years’ could even do it again at this point. But I don’t think it came across as tragic. Like, ‘Oh there’s the old codgers up there singin’ their old songs, isn’t that great?’ I’m super-wary about the ‘nostalgia business.’ It just makes my skin crawl. We just got up there and did it - without any sort of hokey fanfare.