…or blame, depending on your point of view. But Gram Parsons is the one generally cited as “inventing” the form of country-rock that became popular in the early 70s, and Nesmith did it earlier. I understand The Monkees weren’t hip, but Nesmith was a solid musician and songwriter, and all you have to do is look at the timeline to figure out he was there first. I personally enjoy the work of both artists, but the critics who write the official history always seem to overlook Nesmith.
Ever heard of rockabilly?
Is there one recording you’d point to as the seminal one? What musical characteristics made it so?
He also “invented” music video television before MTV - his concept show Elephant Parts, IIRC.
Nesmith was/is a thoughtful guy, but for some reason has not been thought of as a great, moving force behind stuff he was involved in.
Kinda like The Social Network - the Winklevi had a decent idea, but Zuckerberg ran with it and fulfilled its potential. Gram Parsons was central to the seminal album Sweethearts of the Rodeo and hung out with both the Lowell Canyon crowd and the Stones - so his influence became far more…influential.
Nesmith tends to get treated less seriously because he was in the Monkees, IMO. A lot of Very Serious People look at the Monkees as a manufactured band (which they were…“the Prefab Four” wasn’t inaccurate), but they made good music, and just because someone was in a manufactured band doesn’t make them lousy musicians.
Mike Nesmith is one of those unattached tinkerers…kind of riding the front of and influencing the various waves that flow through the culture without really managing to put his name on anything. I always considered him a really intelligent and talented guy who either didn’t want to or didn’t know how to market himself, once Kirschner (RIP) and Columbia-Screen Gems stopped doing it for him (and their own bottom line).
Rockabilly has nothing to do with the 70s country-rock I’m talking about.
Although more on the pop than rock side, stuff like “You Just May Be The One”, “Sunny Girlfriend” and “What Am I Doing Hangin’ 'Rond?” were early examples; “Nine Times Blue”, “If I Ever Get to Saginaw Again” and “Listen to the Band” are more in line with the Gram Parsons stuff.
Richie Furay (Poco – Picking up the Pieces – 1969) and Gram Parsons (Byrds – Sweetheart of the Rodes – 1968) have a stronger claim (and were far more influential), though Nesmith does deserve credit (First National Band – 1970).
Similarly, there are many better claimants than Nesmith to the first video – Rick Nelson’s “Traveling Man,” various Beatles music videos, even many of the videos on the Monkees before Elephant Parts. It all depends on definition, but the Beatles were clearly doing videos like “All You Need Is Love” solely as videos.
Nesmith’s most important contribution to music may have been making Linda Ronstadt a star – her first hit single was his song “Different Drum.”
I respect him a lot (and by the end of their run, most musicians respected the Monkees for trying very hard to be more than just the hype), but let’s not get carried away.
First National Band was Nesmith solo, but he was doing that brand of country rock with the Monkees before '68.
Micheal Nesmith is unquestionably an influential - and often underrated - musician, but I’m not sure that you can credit him, or any other single player, with actually inventing the genre. Part of the difficulty lies in trying to define “country rock”. How do you differentiate between that and, say, folk-rock. Or country-folk. Or alt-country, Americana, roots music, or even the Contemporary Folk genre?
Bob Dylan deserves a lot of credit for the folk-rock-country fusion - Gram Parsons is often credited but if you listen closely his music is quite similar to early Dylan. Even Willie Nelson could probably claim some credit for pioneering country/rock music. As could Gordon Lightfoot. And then of course there’s Johnny Cash, who predated all of them.
If in fact country-rock music was invented as opposed to having “just kinda growed”, and if it is possible to point to one artist as the “inventor” of the genre, I’d nominate Ian Tyson. In a fifty-plus year career, he started out with the 60’s folk revival performing traditional folk music in Greenwich Village, moved to contemporary folk in the Ian & Sylvia days, then to country-rock with Great Speckled Bird, and finally came full-circle to a solo career as a country & Western stylist. He’s nearly 80 now, still tours and is writing some of the best songs of his long & illustrious career.
SS
Laurel Canyon. And agreed about the Stones, that’s what really cemented Parson’s legacy, imho.
:smack: Oy. Don’t know what happened there.
The fact is that Nesmith is NOT considered the starting point of country-rock. He’s a sidebar note as far as how the music is looked at today.
History is littered with examples like that - sometimes an artist’s fortunes and rep get rehabilitated down the road by strong-voiced scholars. William Faulkner was considered an idiosyncratic Southern curiosity and F. Scott Fitzgerald a jazz-age failure until Malcolm Cowley edited and re-packaged their works and re-introduced them to the public…
Been waiting forever to share this video of Mike Nesmith (as) and Frank Zappa.
Nesmith isn’t usually credited as inventing the music video, but he was the one who gave Warner Bros. the idea to start a music video channel, which became MTV.
Ever since reading the topic title, “What am I doin hangin round” has been hangin round my head. 
I’ve been including Nesmith in my history of rock class in three different lectures since I started out – I have a bit where I talk briefly about the bubblegum craze and manufactured made-for-tv pop of the 60s, and so he’s included with the Monkees; he shows up in the country-rock class; he’s also noted for his innovations with music video when I get to the '80s (and I own Television Parts, Elephant Parts, and Dr Duck on VHS 
)
So I’ve done my part for the cause (and favorite performers!)
One of my regrets about gigs I didn’t bother going to was that I missed one of the Monkees revival tours when they played Glasgow (maybe the first one; all 4 of them were on it).
Not because I was that big a fan of theirs, but because I discovered afterwards that Nesmith and his band were the support!
And I missed them, dammit.
Heh – your story, Meurglys, reminds me of when I was first studying guitar, when I was around 15 or 16 – the shop where I took lessons frequently had in guitars from famous musicians. I was a bit stuck up (in typical teenaged fashion) about current popular music because I played classical guitar – there was, for example, the day I snubbed Eddie van Halen* with a shrug. Gah, horrid little creep that I was!
But one day they had in Mike Nesmith’s big old white Gretsch that he played on the Monkees, and I was all over that thing – he was my fave from days of yore when the show first aired, and four-year-old me used to stack wallpaper catalogues up in front of the TV so I could play along ‘on stage’ with the group.
*PS, sorry, Eddie, if you’re reading…I have long since developed better manners. 
Nesmith should also get some love for executive-producing Repo Man. I don’t know how much input he had into the story/script, but it certainly fits his sensibilities.
I think one of the first albums considered to be country-rock was Rick Nelson’s Bright Lights and Country Music in '66. He followed this with Country Fever and then began touring with the Stone Canyon Band.