TOKION ARTICLE

(photo: Filthy Rich Pictures)

As if being part of the '60s phenomenon The Monkees wasn't enough, Michael Nesmith went on to shake the pop landscape. "Nez" has recorded a dozen or so reputable folk and country-rock records as a solo artist, masterminded cult film staple Repo Man, won the first-ever Video Grammy, and written a fantastical novel (with another on the way). Yet he still comes off like a humble and highly cerebral version of your best friend's dad. Oh yeah, somewhere in the middle of all of this he had the foresight to conceive MTV.

What was your first personal contact with a music video?

Michael Nesmith: Well, I had been asked to do a music video--it wasn't called a music video--it was called a 'clip,' for promotion of a record I had made called 'Rio.' It was to be played on European and UK television. This was one of the ways popular music was disseminated in the late '60s and early '70s. So I went out and made this video with no real understanding of what these people were asking for, only with a general understanding of how films were put together. I put this film with this music, and suddenly this sort of extraordinary new event happened. It boils down to, when you put music and images together they tended to make each other more powerful, and you could do things when they were together that you couldn't do alone. Thus was created the music video.

Do you feel like you were out there alone, figuring this thing out?

MN: Well, I had a basic sense of film grammar, just from being in different places where film and television was made. One of the most important things, and this probably goes to the biggest shift that created the music video, was the sense of continuity. Continuity had been imposed on the film form from novels and plays. You know, when someone was outside, and you watch them walk through a door, and you cut to the inside, you watch them come through the door. That continuity was maintained. It was all basically to push a narrative forward If for some reason you juxtapose the images so it blows up the continuity, it's jarring.

What happened was, I was working with a guy named Bill Dear, who was a commercial director who wanted to get into film. When I wrote the images down for 'Rio,' they were essentially disparate, discontinuous images. What I was doing was, on an aesthetic and spiritual basis, saying (that) this follows the intent of the song, and of course the song in non-narrative, non-linear...It's about whimsy and so forth. He didn't quite understand it in terms of how I was structuring it in my mind, but he certainly understood what it meant to put small pieces of film together in a commercial. So when we started laying these pieces of film together, they were odd images: a guy sitting on a horse, a guy in front of a microphone, a guy flying through the air with a woman with fruit on her head. It didn't make any sense at all. But when you put the music underneath it, this sort of magic thing happened. What it did was to establish a new narrative base. It completely obviated the problem of discontinuity. We were just amazed by what we were seeing, so we were wondering if this would work again. We went out and did 'Cruisin',' and we learned a lot that time, too. You can depend on these principles. The music will smooth over the discontinuities and provide a new narrative for the images. But you had to be careful--if you try to literally interpret a lyric of a song, it gets corny.

So that's what basically forms the underpinning of the music video. It wasn't anything I invented, but it was something we discovered. You go back to early cinema, early montage, and you see that it's always been there, but nobody would really practice it. Disney did it to some degree with his animated experiments, especially with Fantasia, and there was some feeling for it in musical comedy. (But) the wholesale abandonment of the film narrative was that spontaneous happening, where 50 or 60 people are working at the same time without ever talking to each other.

So how did those early music videos expand into what would become Popclips?

MN: I looked at ('Rio') and thought, 'What have I got here? This is a new art form...I wonder if there are other kinds of htese things?' So I went to these people who had me make this first (video) clip and said, 'Are there other people making these things?' They said, 'Yeah.' Most of them were just promotional clips in record company vaults with someone just standing there singing, but buried among them were other people experimenting along the same ways I was, adding images and so forth. I thought, 'Well, I could string these together, and I think people would watch them. I thought this would make very interesting (television) programming.' Cable television had just come about and there were a lot of cable services that didn't have a lot of product to distribute. One of them was Warner Brothers and American Express, in a joint ventrue. I went to them and said, 'Here's this program I have. We could string them together and play them all day long. There's not a lot of them now, but I think if we did it there would become a lot of them.' So I made them half an hour long, and I made about ten or twelve of them. We started testing them on cable channels and one of them was Nickelodeon. The next thing you know the response was overwhelming, and Popclips was born.

How did Popclips become MTV?

MN: Well, once we had the package built, they made the decision, and said, 'Let's take a satellite we have and commit one of the transponders to a 24-hour program, and we'll call it MTV. You can run it, and Bob (Pitman) can help program it, and Les (Garland) can help program it.' I said, 'You know what, I don't want to do this, I don't want to be in the television cable business. You should just buy me out for the idea, and you guys can take the idea and run with it.'

Do you catch MTV now?

MN: No, but that has more to do with not watching too much television than it does with just not watching MTV. I watch television now kind of like I go to the movies. In fact, my television set is put away, so we have to pull it out of the closet.

Do you ever feel like Dr. Frankenstein? Like you played this role...

MN: (Laughing)...In creating a monster? You know...while MTV was my brainchild, what MTV is now, it's not very close to that original vision. What I thought was going to happen with the video was that it was going to be an art form, and that people would have videos in their lives the same way that they have records or movies. That artists would begin working in the form and creating videos. What happened was the video became a commercial for the record. This is a qualitatively different animal than the stand-alone piece of pop media that I thought (videos) might be. The model was radio and records and this would be television ad records. There wasn't any way to sell (music videos). The VCR had just come of age--you couldn't really (shop) the way you can today and buy a DVD and take it home. It was arduous and difficult to get a video into your life. There was no real economy to it as a business. The best economic model I could find was to put these videos out through a video distribution system that was married to a motion picture distribution system, so I started Pacific Arts and made Elephant Parts. Sure enough, it didn't make any money. (Laughs.)

What was the concept of Elephant Parts. What were you trying to do?

MN: I guess it was an attempt to combine music and comedy in a sort of single, long-form format. It was very warmly received by the creative community and by the few people in the public that saw it. We won a Grammy for it. They didn't have Grammys for videos then, so they didn't quite know what to do. The general sense was, you know, 'Videos are coming along and we have to get in the game.' So there was me and three or four other videos. Frankly, I can't remember what they were...Then, when we won, it was a year before they gave me the award.

Let's jump subjects--How did you become involved with Repo Man?

MN: Repo Man was a nice piece, as far as I'm concerned. I think it was a bull's eye for '80s culture. Alex Cox and Jonathan Wacks and Peter McCarthy were at UCLA together, and I saw a short film that Alex had made called Sleep is for Sissies. I read the script for Repo Man, and I thought this really captures something of this time, aesthetically. So I jumped on and did it. It was a hard film to make, because it was Alex's first feature film. But I thought he did a spectacular job. And I'm pleased with where it fits within the landscape of film.

Central to Repo Man is a Chevrolet Malibu. Alex wanted to buy the Malibu for the movie and drive it to work everyday. I said, 'Alex you can't drive the picture car to work and drive it home everyday. It's the picture car.' Alex was constantly trying to make the film for $1.50, and I was constantly saying, 'Alex, you've got to spend a little money to make this thing work.' But Alex still insisted on driving (the car) back and forth to work, and on the second day it got stolen. Without the car, everyone was standing around looking with nothing to do. After that we had two cars and the picture went off fairly smoothly.

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