The credit for inventing country rock usually goes to the Byrds, the Eagles, or Gram Parsons. But since Michael Nesmith died Friday at 78, critics are pointing out that his name belongs in that debate. If not the creator, Nesmith at the least laid the foundation, for which he's belatedly received credit. "Since the rise of Americana as a genre," Alexis Petridis writes in the Guardian, "he had come to be hailed as a genuinely innovative figure in the history of country rock." That wasn't necessarily his plan when he formed the First National Band, a group that Billy Dukes in Taste of Country calls pioneering, in the early 1970s, shortly after the Monkees ended for the first time.
"I had no notion of country-rock as a possible genre, although we used the phrase among ourselves as First National Band members," Nesmith told Goldmine in 2013. "We weren't conscious of this being innovative. It was fun to play like that." The group had an impact despite having only one hit, "Joanne." Parsons invited the band to tour with his Flying Burrito Brothers. A short time later, the Byrds and Eagles hit. It's clear who was the influencer, Petridis says. Listening to Nesmith's '70s albums—"masterpieces of the genre"—he writes, "you don’t hear someone following in the wake of the Flying Burrito Brothers or the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, but a supremely gifted songwriter intent on forging his own eccentric path through a musical fusion."
No other artist combined country and rock the way Nesmith did, Geoff Edgers writes in the Washington Post. The First National Band records "were flawless," he says, "ranging from achy ballads to swaggering jams and all of it soaked in echo, pedal steel and the singer's dry wit." The Texan had his native twang, and Edgers writes that "he was not afraid to blend it with the kind of quirky wordplay and sarcasm you might hear from Frank Zappa or Captain Beefheart." On top of that, Edgers says, nobody "yodeled and yee-hawed" quite like Mike Nesmith. (More music stories.)
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