MICHAEL NESMITH

November 1963

San Antonio College
1819 N Main Avenue
San Antonio, Texas 78212
USA


FLAC master, 12 December 2021, by elegymart:
Analog audience recording (mono) {recorded by Michael Nesmith}: unknown tape recorder > analog audio cassette master > unknown analog generations > analog audio cassette > mini-disc master > Memorex 80-minute music CDR (trade, c. 2000) > EAC (secure mode) {ripped 2015} > WAV > SHNtool (joined all WAVs) > Cool Edit Pro 2.0 (audio cleanup) > SHNtool (fixed SBE) > CD Wave (track splits) > TLH (WAV > FLAC8).
Created this text file.


Total running time [70:48]
--------------------------------------------
01 my generation [4:28]
02 cars [6:36]
03 perspective [7:13]
04 no leadership [11:30]
05 leave us alone [8:45]
06 drinking [6:02]
07 good homes and group mentality [3:50]
08 girls [8:34]
09 the want [6:16]
10 I Called Her Arrabee [7:28]


Notes:

THE ELEGYMART ARCHIVES, VOL. 2

This was really meant for Volume 1, but it took some time to clean up and review. It is yet another non-musical volume, all spoken word here.

Here's Michael Nesmith, almost all of 21, possibly in his dorm room at community college, doling out some wisdom extensively on teenage society. It's tough to discern 58 years later what brought about this recording, but it seems to be triggered by a ton of hysterical articles at the time about teenagers and how they've gone out of control (shudder at the thought of that).

"This is what I think, Mike Nesmith, standing here in this stupid little room" -- Nez feels rather compelled to put his thoughts down on tape. It doesn't seem to be a recorder he's used much, as he has to test whether the unit is on. He also doesn't set the recorder close enough to himself, so the sound is average and sometimes hard to hear. He records for a bit, then stops the tape, sometimes to flip it, but sometimes to review what he's said. You can hear an airplane flying over around the 14:00 mark and this goes on for about 45 seconds. San Antonio International Airport was less than ten miles away from the college. He's either on the ground floor of a dorm or at a place offsite wherever he was housed facing the street, as a car rolls up next door at one point and manages to make him lose his train of thought.

This used to circulate around as audio diaries, and is still listed that way on a Monkees fansite. This is no diary however. Perhaps it was for a class project? In any case, after Nez expounds about his generation, cars, and leadership, he then pulls out the latest Reader's Digest. He provides some further thoughts on "The Tense Generation" by Samuel Grafton. It is a reprint of an article that originally appeared in Look magazine (August 27, 1963). The Reader's Digest is November 1963; Vol 83, No 499, so that easily narrows down the time of this recording, which used to circulate as just "1964."

He mentions President Kennedy when he discusses leaders, so this has to be prior to November 22nd (maybe even late October if the Reader's Digest for November were available that quickly back then). He would've been married to Phyllis Ann Barbour at this point and she would have been two months away from giving birth to their first son while at college. By 1964, Mike along with his wife and their friend John London, all ditched Texas and college for Los Angeles, so if it were not a turbulent time personally for him, there was certainly a lot going on.

The last track here is a short story that Nez reads, probably of his own.

This is far from the best lineage, but given that it doesn't seem to circulate much, and on the aforementioned fansite is shorter than what's here, it seems to be a timely share at the end of this man's productive life.

Enjoy,
elegymart