“We are endlessly announcing that Michael Nesmith died in his home on Friday morning, surrounded by family, peacefully and naturally,” the family said in a statement.
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Nesmith was a guitarist, singer and occasional songwriter in The Monkees, an American band of The Beatles for the NBC comedy show.
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However, the band surpassed their British role models in selling US albums. Their first two albums, The Monkees and More of the Monkees, were at the top of the music charts for decades.
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The second of these records, for example, contains the hit I´ma Believer, who re-popularized the animated film Shrek years ago.
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Despite their immense fame, the band members rebelled against their record company, which in their opinion did not give them enough creative space.
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The musicians subsequently gained more freedom, but the show on NBC soon ended and the band’s fame waned after the release of two unsuccessful albums.
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Nesmith then went to country rock with the First National Band. He recorded three albums with it, which were not so successful commercially, but are now considered classic examples of Los Angeles country rock.
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The musician founded his multimedia company Pacific Arts in the mid-1970s, where over time he began to focus on the growing influence of television on the music industry.
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For example, he produced the show PopClips, which later served as a model for the creation of the music television MTV.
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After the death of his mother, he inherited substantial assets, which he, as an executive producer, invested in the films Repo Man from 1984 and Tapeheads from 1988.
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In the 1990s, he joined other former members of The Monkees to record another album, Justus, and toured with them.
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In 2017, Nesmith published a memory book called Infinite Tuesday. He divorced three times in his life, leaving three sons and a daughter.
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