One day, while I was living in New Mexico, Douglas Adams called, as he did from time to time, to ask if he and a friend might come stay for the weekend. These calls surprised me at first, but I didn’t mind them. I had come to learn that the British friends I had all shared a certain skill that made them delightful houseguests: they were all possessed of an uncanny ability to disappear a few seconds before I needed privacy and to appear the instant I wanted company.
On this particular occasion, Douglas told me he had Terry Jones, one of the Pythons, in tow. I had been an ardent Python fan ever since Phyllis introduced their show to me, and the idea of a weekend with Douglas and Terry Jones sounded like a good time. I didn’t know whether to expect an evening discourse on a sofa stuck between parallel universes or a parlor game of the Summarize Proust Competition, but either one was fine with me. I told Douglas to come at once.
By this time, 1994, I was with my third wife, Victoria, and we lived on a small ranch halfway between Los Alamos and Santa Fe. It was a textbook adobe building with a set of little structures around it that served nicely as guest rooms.
The guest room I had in mind for Terry had inadvertently turned into something of a storage room for pillows and pictures and other things. Just before he and Douglas arrived, I straightened it up quickly by setting out all the stray pillows—there were a lot of them, at least twelve—in a row on the bed, sort of decorator style. They stacked more than halfway down the bed and it looked a little silly, but so did the designer style of the times, and I couldn’t do much about it since I had nowhere else to put them.
Once they arrived, we had a good dinner and great conversation. It was all I had expected: Terry was a delight, we were all silly and relaxed, none of us talked of our respective professional spheres, and the conversation drifted around stars and physics and Hollywood and London society, mostly rummaging around for a good funny story, a joke, or at least a play on words. It was the model of casual, comfortable dinner conversations I have had over the years, usually with Brits in Britain.
Soon after dinner Douglas and Terry and I were off to our rooms for the night. I showed Terry to his room first, and Douglas was with us. Terry walked in, and I asked if there was anything he needed. He took a few seconds to survey the room. Finally he said, “I might like an extra pillow.”
For a nanosecond I panicked. All the pillows I had were in the room. I said I would go look around, but Terry reached out and touched my arm and I saw the twinkle in his eyes. Douglas laughed, and then I did too.
I learned this was a particularly British skill: to be so believable in the delivery that when the irony dawns it is twice as funny. Over the years, many of my British friends have remarked that England is the only nation that offers a college degree in sarcasm. I knew many Brits over the years who could have had such a degree, and that characteristic was one of the main reasons I became an ardent Anglophile.
I wasn’t always so attuned to the scene in England. It was Phyllis who had first made me aware of the Beatles and their influence in 1963, months before their first Sullivan appearance. She was an avid reader who not only digested classic novels regularly but also kept up with the news. She told me the Beatles were going to be on TV and that we should watch it. She had followed their career for some time at that point through the world’s papers, which were treating the fans’ reaction to the Beatles as big news.
At the time I lived in a little garage apartment in back of a large house within walking distance of San Antonio College, where I was taking classes, and I didn’t have a TV. I had only a bed, a chest of drawers, and a desk next to a bathroom. I made money for college by reading to my landlady’s son, George Paschal, who lived in the large house with his mother. He was blind and working on his PhD in history, and he needed to get through a stack of books for his degree. So I read to him for a dollar an hour and rent on the apartment.
The Paschals did have a television and I had taken to having cocktails with George and his mother while we all watched the evening news. Chet Huntley and David Brinkley would be reporting, and as George listened to their commentary I’d describe for him the pictures that accompanied the sound.
With the Beatles’ Ed Sullivan appearance approaching, I decided to ask George’s mother if Phyllis and I could watch it on their TV, and she said sure, if it wouldn’t bother George. George said he would like to see the Beatles as well, which meant he wanted me to call the play-by-play.
By this time, the Beatles were starting to show up on American magazine covers. The excitement of the Sullivan appearance was building daily.
As Beatlemania broke out across the US over that weekend, the Beatles were on more than just Sullivan. We got to watch the band’s arrival at the TWA terminal in New York, hear Chet Huntley say sardonically, “Someone asked what the fuss was about and we found we had no answer,” and see the Beatles’ line of limos snaking through the crowds out in front of the Plaza Hotel and the Ed Sullivan Theater.
Finally the Beatles appeared onstage. During their performance, I tried to describe to George what was happening, but I was dumbfounded. I kept saying the same thing over and over: “This is amazing.”
George didn’t think much of the Beatles’ music, as far as I remember, but he couldn’t see them. Seeing them was a large part of understanding what they were about, but even that wasn’t it. There was more than music there, more than four guys playing and singing, and more than new haircuts. When I rewatch that performance now, much of what inspired and thrilled me that first time has faded. The recordings of the show don’t do it justice, because the recordings don’t convey the tenor of the times.
The performance pointed the needle of the world’s design compass toward London. I knew that these guys and their music, and this new direction of the arts, would rearrange the social order and be in my life for a long time.
After the Monkees TV show was on the air, the first thing I did when I got enough money was get on a plane with Phyllis and head to London. London was to the 1960s what Paris was to the 1920s, except with a much farther reach, driven by TV. I wanted to try to understand what was stimulating the arts coming from the city, from Not New York and from Not LA. I wanted to get a look at the force at work there, if there was one; I wanted to see who was steering it, if anyone was, and what it meant, if it meant anything at all.
When I got to London I expected a dazzling scene with the sizzle and flash of artistic exploration and advanced ideas, but that didn’t happen. The center of a hurricane is calm, and London was right in the eye.
No one in the center seemed to know much about what was going on in the outlying reaches—the spirals of flying furniture or the twisting of cultural latticework. I made the club rounds, met the Beatles and many of their friends, examined the galleries and architecture, the studios and the theaters, the boutiques and department stores, and I noticed it all was marked with what I have come to call “easy speed.” Easy speed is when massive motion, like the motion of a planet, is somehow summoned and big ideas manifest in spectacular yet elegant displays of alacrity, ingenuity, and beauty without the slightest visible effort from anyone involved.
Before I arrived in London I had not met John Lennon—I didn’t even know how to contact him—but I thought if I could meet him and spend some time talking, it would be a great addition to the trip. Alf Weaver, a Londoner, was helping me out as a guide and driver and providing me with some security. I asked him if he knew how to contact John, and he said he might be able to get an address. He also suggested it would not be a good idea to show up unannounced at the door. I decided to send John a letter, but I made it a telegram, so it would arrive separate from the other fan mail. I wasn’t sure what to say, so I just wrote something like, “Hi, I would like to meet you if you have time. I am at the Grosvenor House in London.” But I needed to feel sure that he would know it was really from me—I needed to come up with some kind of structured signal like semaphore, except without me waving any flags. I signed the letter “God is Love. Mike Nesmith.”
I don’t know what part of the message worked, but he called a few hours after I sent it and invited me and Phyllis to stay with him and his wife, Cynthia, at his house. He sent his big black Rolls-Royce to pick us up. This was the first I learned of the grand English tradition of having houseguests.
Up until my visit with John, my main window into England and its culture had been listening repeatedly to the LP of Beyond the Fringe, a London stage presentation of the comedy troupe that included Peter Cook and Dudley Moore. I thought they were off-the-wall hilarious, with routines comparing the heat death of the universe to four hundred cerulean trousers left at the London transport lost and found, and that sort of thing. But that did not adequately prepare me for John’s subtle humor or his appreciation of sly irony.
When we arrived, John was in a kind of breakfast den next to the kitchen, examining the cover of the Safe as Milk LP from Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band. I was surprised and happy to see the album because I had been at those sessions in LA and made a friend of Beefheart, an artist of extraordinary scope who wore a smock and a perfect diamond soul patch, and whose real name was Don Van Vliet. One of the producers of the album, Bob Krasnow, had been a close friend as well, as well as my manager and record producer before I got the job on the Monkees TV show. So for a moment at John and Cynthia’s house, it was as if John, Beef, Kras, and I were all friends in the same room. I was sure Bob and Don would be very happy to know John was aware of the record—and was maybe even a fan of it. Maybe he could even be part of our band of avant-garde LA artists. Don had played an electric flour sifter on the record: possibly the next big rock-and-roll instrument.
I asked John if he liked the album, and he said he hadn’t heard it. He had just received it unsolicited in the mail, was wondering what it was, and curious about why it was there. I was a little deflated. It was the fastest breakup of any band I had been in.
John then asked if I wanted a drink, and without thinking I said I would love a glass of milk. There was the breath of a pause as he looked at Cynthia and said, “Well, we’re in for a good time, aren’t we?”
At first I was embarrassed, because I thought he thought I had refused to drink with him. Then I made the connection between the offer and the Safe as Milk LP he was holding and it dawned on me that he thought I had been cleverly ironic. I laughed and said, “I’d love a drink of something in a moment. I really would like a glass of milk now to settle my stomach from the ride out.” John smiled, and Cynthia got me a glass of milk.
I had missed John’s first cue, but we each knew that at least we had the same sense of humor.
My times with John and Cynthia were pleasant nights out at clubs to watch someone perform, a good meal to talk things over, after-dinner drinks, and lying on the floor of cabs to get back into my hotel through the paparazzi.
After a few visits, John and I found a shared sandbox of wordplay where we could waltz among the verbs and nouns, puns abounding and riffs a-popping. Convivial as it was, it became apparent that he and I had only momentarily and superficially connected, caught for several delightful extra whirls circling the roundabout intersection of two orthogonal streets.
I was happy to meet John and ready to dive into conversation. I imagined talking about creativity, arts, and pop culture—maybe even the minutiae of instruments and favorite songs and singers. But this was not to be. In fact it was off-limits, more or less. The manic scene of producing a TV show and the ambition-choked streets of LA had not prepared me for a laid-back “have dinner, socialize, make wisecracks” atmosphere. That was the way it was in Lennon’s home.
Life in London then was life lived in service to the arts and to the simplicity of doing, an almost impossible-to-grasp feeling of being in harmony with harmony itself—or as John put it in “Tomorrow Never Knows,” floating downstream. It was easy going—sort of. In the center, there was no one in charge, no visible agenda. Everyone seemed to be under the control of a force of nature. So, “nothing to get hung about.”
I was nonpolitical mostly because of my naïveté. I embraced a social order that I had cobbled together in the Dallas public schools and among kids in my neighborhood—a kind of civics lesson of the streets. It was a shallow knowledge that engendered the belief that anyone could be president of the United States if they just worked hard enough and were well behaved. I loved ideas of fairness and justice for all, the comic-book-hero motivations. But I was clueless as to real politics, even though I lived in the United States, under the long shadow of a war machine, in a conservative bastion of a city, a city where a president had been assassinated.
John and I never discussed politics explicitly, but as far as I could tell his politics were focused on his concept of peace and love as political acts. I did not think of love as a political engine. I thought of peace and love as self-sustaining and providential, healing and comforting in a world of apparent heartbreak and suffering. It was a subtle yet distinct difference to me.
John was playful and funny, a true artist of the highest type, but over time I lost touch with him. Among the existential realities that governed my life I could not find what I needed to fully understand his rules of behavior, so I could not share them. We ended up talking past each other some of the time. This made for no conflict between us. We were good playmates for the little time we spent together. The communication was collegial and smart, but for me it was incomplete. I loved the music, the arts, the spiritual awakenings of love and politics, but I was outside of the social system, outside the culture and even apart from the crowd.
This incompleteness came to mark my disconnect from the entire eye of the London hurricane. The artists there had the approbation of the world; they heard the roar of the swirling winds of the era’s cultural storms as cheers of encouragement. But such validation was no part of my life. By the time I was in London I was nearly a pariah in the US, pummeled by opprobrium and ridicule and reviled among my peers.
My natural bent was toward peace and love; my natural life was harmony and tolerance; my proclivities were kindness and loyalty, mercy and forgiveness. But in the eyes of the rock cognoscenti and the arbiters of hip, the Monkees were a fraud, created to an evil purpose of greed, and I was assumed to be a perpetrator. As near as I could tell, John did not hold that opinion of the Monkees TV show, but we never talked about it. Indeed, John was one of the few points of connection to the London arts scene for me and had brought me far inside his world and among his friends.
When I was in LA society, I was politically repugnant to the people I most respected and with whom I mostly agreed. London was familiar and friendly, and revealed how far from the center I was and how little I understood of the process by which that center had been created.
What did become apparent and finally undeniable was the fact that the Beatles and the whole British Invasion were not the Visitation.
The Visitation had not yet come, although it was about to. In all my travels through London-at-altitude it was categorically the most astounding and important thing that happened to me.
One night, in the spring of 1967, John and Cynthia and Phyllis and I were to meet at a restaurant for dinner, and John was late. He came in breathless with apologies and explained he had gotten caught up in a club where he was listening to a band. He produced a portable cassette player the size of a small loaf of bread, laid it in the center of the table, and played what he had recorded.
It was Jimi Hendrix playing “Hey Joe.”
Everyone at the table was silent, and it dawned on me that we were all speechless. We all stared at the recorder as if it were some type of alien egg, something from far outside the limits of our normal waking state.
When the song was over, someone said, “How can anybody be that good?” Whatever Hendrix had plugged into—whatever Visitation he brought upon us—was, first of all, good. It came with the instant recognition of a real thing, a true thing, an innovation.
When I got back to the hotel after that dinner, I ran into Micky Dolenz. He told me he had seen Hendrix and asked him if he would be the opening act for the next leg of the Monkees tour, and Jimi had agreed. I was thrilled and confused.
This conjunction of Hendrix and the Monkees was staggeringly weird in my eyes, but the idea that I would get to see him playing live night after night was electrifying. It would prove the most lasting and substantial aspect of all my trips to London.
If London was the still center of a storm that was changing the artistic, social, and political landscape of the world, Jimi was a maelstrom, both the center and the circumference, with his own gravitational force. He was music as mass, and all that revolved around that music changed the landscape of the mind. Hendrix moved through aural boundaries the way Duchamp moved through retinal ones. From the Purple Haze came Nude Descending a Staircase as “Little Wing.”
The British bands’ rearrangements of the US rock-and-roll legacy had generated a storm, but Hendrix opened a world where a whole new type of music was born. The world that he discovered, the sonic possibilities of instruments in a rock-and-roll band, shaped the bands that came in his wake. From the way he used the amp—turning the volume all the way up and using his guitar volume as overdrive, sending the sound into a sweet and mellifluous distortion—to the wah-wah pedal that shifted the tonality, what he unveiled changed even the Beatles and the Stones. The range of nuance—especially the extremely loud—and his melodic structure and lyric content all had some history, some foreshadowing, but Hendrix revealed a performative aspect of music that was life, that brought the best of all the musical worlds together. When Hendrix played, something came into existence as a fact that had not been there before he played.
That being an opening act on a Monkees tour would bring Hendrix into a world of popular awareness was curious and oddly poetic. That it would galvanize the Monkees’ assassins for their final push was no surprise.
Jimi came onto the Monkees US tour that started up in Jacksonville, Florida, in July 1967, and that was the first time I met him. He had hair out to here and was wearing exotically lavish psychedelic clothing. I found him to be a gentle and kind soul, soft-spoken and a bit shy. There were times watching Jimi play that I felt the company of Wagner or Beethoven, other times Bo Diddley or Buddy Holly, and other times Gershwin or Max Steiner. We became friends of a sort during that tour and stayed in touch in the years that followed.
The first night he played I went incognito to the sound check at the stadium and stood at the foot of the stage a few feet away from him and Mitch and Noel, the other two members of his band. When Jimi started playing, I stopped breathing for a second and found myself standing about three feet farther back from the stage than I had been, but with no idea how I got there. It was the first time I ever saw a Marshall stack, a five-foot-tall amplifier with enormous power. Jimi played through two of them, as did Noel, the bass player.
The music was unlike anything I had ever heard, but it was almost beside the point. The Beatles’ TV appearance and their subsequent records were the best played, the most artfully written and harmoniously sung, but they didn’t come close to what Hendrix was doing performatively.
I listen to Jimi’s records now, even his live recordings, and they have very little of what I heard that night at sound check. No kind of recording could contain it. I watched him every night after that for about ten days, until Jimi gave the finger to everybody in the Monkees’ audience at Forest Hills Stadium in New York and walked offstage. He moved out of the miasma of the Monkees tour into his own hundred-thousand-seat stadiums and played for reverential crowds that did not shout “We want Davy!” while he played and sang “Foxy Lady.”
I was not close friends with Jimi, and our subsequent contacts were infrequent and usually hurried. But I saw him one last time, and he did a good deed that defined him for me as a person.
I was back in London to kick off a tour of the First National Band, a group I had put together and written new music for. This was my first time to play and sing songs I had stored up during the Monkees TV show. I was at the height of pariah-hood with the press and the pop critics, and the reviews of my new album, Magnetic South, were excoriating. Even other contemporary bands were suspicious, and we were mocked by bands on the same concert bill with us.
RCA had called a press conference for me, and I knew I was in trouble by the way the promotion man who set it up was acting. He kept reassuring me that everything would be fine in a way that only made me sure he knew that no one was coming.
However, when we got to the conference center at the hotel, the place was jammed with reporters. The promo man was clearly relieved—and surprised. A few minutes after the press reception started, I looked up and saw Jimi coming in the door. He walked straight to me and gave me a hug, and we exchanged glad hellos. I asked why he was there, and he told me he had gotten a call saying that the responses to the invitation for my press conference were not going well and asking if he would come and lend his support. He said yes, he would be there, and had allowed that to be announced to the trades.
His presence at the conference made a huge difference to me that day. It was one of the most generous acts of support I had experienced from a fellow artist, and was especially welcome given my state of mind, which was mightily confused, artistically and personally. Hendrix was curious about the music I was making, and we talked. I gave him a record but felt shy the moment I handed it to him.
That wasn’t all of it. A few minutes after Hendrix arrived, Ringo Starr came in with the same story. He was just as warm and supportive as Jimi had been. We were talking when a reporter came up to Ringo and me, interrupted, and started talking to him, asking questions about the Beatles. Ringo would have none of it. “Oh, no,” he said, “this is his press conference,” and shooed the guy away.
I suppose there are pictures of Jimi and Ringo and me somewhere in the archives of some music-press paper, but I have never seen them. What I have from that time is my memory of it, and the forever gratitude I feel for what they did for me.
Two days later Jimi was dead.
It is hard to overstate Jimi’s importance in music, just as hard as it is to explain it. Hendrix rose to a level that was available only to those who were there in real time. What’s left in his recordings is like remnant light, like echoes of the big bang. Nothing one can hear now fully captures what he did in conjunction with the spirit of the times. It’s the same with symphonies and big bands, where the music was designed to be played live and recording was confined to paper, allowing other players to only approximate the sound.
The music of the 1960s, born as it was from the American blues legacy, has a staying power, but its impact lessens over time. Nude Descending a Staircase still exists, but its effect is softened now, as it occupies the space it created for itself. The thrust of some new idea that opens a new door is always most exciting when first encountered. Then it slowly turns. We begin to live with art’s legacy almost immediately after it is created.
John Cleese, one of the Pythons, said to me once as we were riding on a bus together that all comedy gets less and less funny over time. I think he is right. Although the Pythons have endured for me, they were never again as funny as when I first saw them. It may be that comedy is particularly susceptible because it is best when absurd and irreverent, and time covers comedy routines with a patina that’s toxic to that spirit.
When I got home from London the second time I went, in 1967, after the “Day in the Life” sessions and another weekend at John’s house, I wrote a song about him and the Beatles and Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers that I titled “I’ll Remember You.” John and I had sat at the upright piano he was painting in his garden room, and I started playing the chords to “I Remember You,” a Johnny Mercer–Victor Schertzinger song that had been a big-band hit and was more recently a hit for Frank Ifield. John remarked on the first chord change, from C major to B-flat minor, and he played along a bit. The original circus poster for Mr. Kite was on the wall in back of us. I made a mental note of the moment and set it aside until I wrote “I’ll Remember You.” I didn’t use that chord change in my song, but John did in his.
I was going to record the new song and send him a home cassette of it as homage and a thank-you. Harry Nilsson had made a close friend of John and told me he would send John cassettes regularly, which he said John loved to get. I kept meaning to get the song recorded for him, but time passed and I didn’t get around to it.
The Beatles broke up; John moved to New York with Yoko Ono and became a peace activist and performer on his own; and almost before I knew it the 1970s had come and gone as well.
My memories of London served me well as a touchstone for art’s potential. During that time I was exploring new avenues of thought, trying to find a safe and sheltered landing spot after The Monkees had gone off the air in 1969. I kept writing and making albums, kept hanging on to the music I loved and trying to explore more possibilities. In the 1970s, I had set my sails for video and television, and the music took on a visual component. Finally, in the late 1970s, I got around to recording the song I had written for John. I was working with a good band during a session for a record, and I took time out to record and even do some polishing of “I’ll Remember You.” I packaged it up in a cassette but left it in a desk drawer, always meaning to send it, but I kept forgetting.
Then one night I heard that John had been shot to death on the streets of New York by a crazy man. It was horrible.
Years later I made a video of “I’ll Remember You” for an NBC show I had called Television Parts. I put it in one of the episodes as a farewell.
I have returned to London many times since the 1960s on many different errands and enterprises. The heritage of that time is still a large part of the identity of the town and is forever imprinted on my mind, but it is dimmed a bit, atrophied, and in some degree lost, by the veneration of the ages that followed. In a city that is mostly swallowed by its own history, I found it curious that the thing that defined London to me, and what defined the sixties, never came to know itself.
The day Jimi came to my press conference, he came up to my room afterward and we had a drink and a smoke and got to talk quietly a bit. Jimi said that he was thinking of branching out into R&B and putting together an R&B band. I was surprised and I suppose it showed. His early work was still resonating down the halls, and I could not imagine how an R&B band would work in comparison. He said he had also been taking singing lessons.
I blurted out, “Why? You have one of the greatest voices in rock and roll, if not the greatest. You sing the way all rock singers want to sing.” He said he felt like he sang flat. It occurred to me that he had no idea how good he was. He was too close to it. He had no idea of the magnitude of his work or that he had made history with his songs and his playing. It also occurred to me that Jimi had never seen Hendrix live, like I had.
I had the same sort of exchange with John one weekend. He brought home some acetates from the Sgt. Pepper sessions and played them. We listened together, and I was thrilled to get to hear them. After one song, I can’t remember which one, he said he thought the bass was a bit loud and might need to play a different part. He then asked me what I thought. What I thought, of course, was that my musical realities were slowly being altered. All I could think was how amazing it all was. I told John that, and I think it may have embarrassed him a little as well. I realized that he had no clue about who he was in the context of the Beatles. He had never seen the Beatles play. I had. Jimi had never seen the Jimi Hendrix Experience; John Lennon had never seen the Beatles. They were forever barred from knowing them.