Covers: Different Drum

Okay: who had a favorite Monkee? Come on, it's okay, I won't tell anyone... okay, if you don't pick someone soon, I'm going to pick for you, and then - okay, that's better. No, I'm not going to wait for your answer, you had your chance. Besides, this is my blog, and I can do whatever I damn well please. And it pleases me to share that my favorite Monkee was Mike Nesmith. He wasn't the goofball, he wasn't the ladies' man, he wasn't even the one who danced like Axl Rose. Maybe it was the toque, foreshadowing my soon-to-be move to Canada. Maybe it was his height. Maybe it was the fact that you could tell that he really just wanted to be writing and playing songs, and especially in later episodes didn't seem as keen on the cheeseball "acting" sequences.

Nesmith always was a songwriter. The other guys all chipped in, and later on even wrote some of their own original material. But Nesmith had more of a gift - my favorite Monkees song, period, has always been You Just May Be The One. Here it is on YouTube, and notice that the audio is slightly different from the version that usually surfaces on Monkees recordings:





Anyway, that's where my appreciation for Michael Nesmith started. Now we move on.

Like everybody else in the history of the world, my musical interests were molded somewhat by what my parents were listening to when I was a child. This explains Meat Loaf, ELO, and the soundtrack to Jesus Christ Superstar, as well as The Beatles, Billy Joel and the Rolling Stones. It also is my explanation (excuse?) for Linda Ronstadt. (As an aside: yes, I promised both here and in a comment on Armagideon Time that I'd be posting about her soon, and am only now getting to it. Better late than never.) So, here goes.

My parents had Linda Ronstadt's Greatest Hits album, which played a lot in that house on Long Island. There's a bunch of covers in there to begin with, like Desperado and That'll Be The Day, but my favorite was Different Drum, which it turned out was written by, you guessed it, Michael Nesmith. I didn't learn this until I was much older, but maybe this too had something to do with the choosing of my favorite Monkee.

And look at her back then: such a cutie. Damn. I know that for the Living In the USA album, they did a photo shoot with her in short shorts and roller skates, which seemed a natural fit as I keep going on about roller derby lately, but I can't for the life of me find the image I recall. Not that this isn't a marvelous picture to begin with. Taken around 1970, I think, which would be around the time she recorded Different Drum with the Stone Poneys. I've dug up a couple of other reverential covers of the song by appropriate people, who get it.

Michael Nesmith - Different Drum



Linda Ronstadt (Stone Poneys) - Different Drum



Matthew Sweet with Susannah Hoffs - Different Drum



Evan Dando - Different Drum (Live)



You can get Linda Ronstadt's Greatest Hits here.
You can get Michael Nesmith's early hits "The Older Stuff" here.
Matthew Sweet and Susannah Hoffs' track comes from Under the Covers, available here:
The Evan Dando track was apparently on the Lemonheads' Favorite Spanish Dishes EP, which appears to be out of print. Not sure if this was a separate recording or the original.
As usual, enjoy them while they're here, and if you really enjoy them, go out and buy them.