MIKE at the Monkees Convention!!!

FINALLY, a dream come true for Conventioneers!!!  I'll see you there!!  At 12 Noon, I got the following in an email.

Then and Now Events Presents

Mike Nesmith will join Micky Dolenz for the 2014 Monkees Convention

For Monkees Fans, this is 49 years in the making! Be a part of history as Mike Nesmith joins Micky Dolenz for his FIRST ever Monkee Convention being held at the Hilton Meadowlands in NJ March 14, 15 and 16th of 2014.

Promoters Phyllis Paganucci and Jodi Blau Ritzen of Then and Now Events have announced that not only will Mike Nesmith be joining Micky Dolenz at the convention, he will also be performing his new show Movies of the MindsSaturday March 15 at 9pm. Tickets are available onwwww.monkeesconvention2014.com

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This magical weekend will include performances from Micky Dolenz, Coco Dolenz, Christian Nesmith and Circe Link, Jonathan Nesmith, Jessica Nesmith.  Actress Ami Dolenz will be signing copies of her new children’s book and answering a Q and A along with her sisters artist and photographer Emily Dolenz and Micky's youngest daughter actress and business partner in Dolenz & Daughters Fine Furniture Georgia Dolenz.  With all of their families in attendance, The Monkees will also be presented with their awards of induction into the American Pop Music Hall of Fame as voted on by the fans late last year. No celebration would be complete without a special tribute to the late and great Davy Jones. Other guests of the convention who will be greeting fans and signing autographs will be Butch Patrick, Donna Loren, Valerie Venet, Henry Diltz, Gary Stroble, Gary DeCarlo, Geri Reischel, May Pang, Larry Storch, Beatles Artist Shannon, David and Jennifer Alexander, The Monkeemobile and more.

Along with incredible performances from Buddy Blanc’s Romeo Delight with special guest Micky Dolenz, Coco Dolenz will perform, Circe Link performing a full show, Jonathan Nesmith with members of The Outerspaces and Mother of Winter,     The Characters, The Frodis Capers, The Monkeephiles, The 1910 Fruit Gum Co, you can look forward to singing late into the night with fan favorites of last year The Blue Meanies.  Sunday we are excited to present Britton Payne's off broad way show Here We Come~A Monkee Parody.  This show has gotten rave reviews from all who have attended its performances.

There are sure to be surprise performances as well with a lineup of legends like this.

There will be meet and greets opportunities with all of our guests.

A Monkees Memorabilia Market Place will be open as well.

For tickets to the convention and for the tickets to the Movies of the Mind Show starring Mike Nesmith (a limited engagement) and hotel information please visit www.monkeesconvention2014.com

 and for updates you can check out the facebook page Monkees Convention.

Note As of now Monkee Peter Tork has a conflicting schedule and is not set to appear.

A very special thanks to our sponsor, John Rose, owner of Cella Bagels, Sky Tan and Jazz Audio located  1198 Middle Country Rd., Selden, New York 11784

(631) 320-1213.

Jodi and Phyllis
Monkees Convention 2014
March 14, 15 and 16th
Sheraton Meadowlands
Be There or Be Square
www.monkeesconvention2014.com

Nez and the Space Between The Group Tour & His Solo One (FB)

Nez is fun to read, eloquent, profound and bizarre all at once.  "The songs sing themselves", like he wrote about Linda Ronstadt's recordings.  He feels them as living things, which is fascinating, and a great way to interpret the "gifts" you were given as a young person.

He's not doing an "Oldies" tour; he's always honoring The Songs.

I think about the Monkees tour that has passed and my solo tour that is to come and I am parsing the differences to see which is which.

The Monkees concert was pop songs played well. It was great fun and I loved it.

My solo tour is yet unknown to me.

Nevertheless, as the show is forming, these are the things I am beginning to understand about it --

We teach what we are.

We are not what we teach.

The songs sing themselves.

We hope they sing us well.

When I stand on a concert stage and look out at the faces I am filled with the same surprise and calm as when I see a beautiful sight of nature or an exquisite design of the heart.

There is a resonance of light from the eyes to the stage and back. In that resonance I hear the phantom chords and hidden tones and know the subtle meanings of words.

In that resonance are the thought values.

A friend asked to borrow a couple of ideas and phrases that had bobbed up during our conversations over the last few days – asking me as if they were mine because I had said them.

I said “Of course – they are yours to keep” and I thought “they have been yours all along”.

These things we share are so subtle and quiet yet we think the noise is what originates the ideas that connect us. We laugh and talk and play our instruments and wave our hands -- all to the good -- but it is the quiet voice that is shared among us that gives me the only voice I have.

I am going on this Fall solo tour -- me and a band – knowing -- with my friends and lovers, my brothers and sisters, my fathers and mothers -- that inside -- in the stillness of a song -- we are all singing the same tune, living the same life, patiently waiting, as we all must, for each revealed step to lead us to the next.

I will play from the end of October, starting on the 27th in Phoenix and ending November 24th, in Milwaukee. Those are the bookends – the schedule is still getting filled in but most of it is now up at videoranch.com

Michael Nesmith Status Update, FB, 9/1/2013

BeatleFest, 2013

Just in case there are Beatle fans out there who imagine that anyone who likes the Monkees is just plain nuts . . . and you know who you are . . . sometimes there is a tremendous amount of crossover.

The same organizer, Charles Rosenay, who brought the 2013 Monkee Convention to fruition, brought 10 tribute acts together to perform a day of Beatles-Covers. The proceeds all went to victims of Sandy Hook, which was close to where the festival took place.  It was held in Danbury, at the Charles Ives Concert Park, named for an incredible American Composer (my personal favorite of his is the Concord Sonata)

Here's a review by Fred Velez, all around Monkee-guy and blogger for Monkees.net.  Pictures of Ringer Star here, there's a reason there is only one "R", Fred.  It's a pun!

PS Here's Fred's description about the notoriously difficult Meet&Greets on Mike's solo(ish) 2013 tour:

In mid-March, there was a message on Nez’s Facebook page regarding the meet & greets. You had to log on to his Video Ranch website store, purchase a free Nesmith song download, and you were put on a list of folks who would get a special email of when to purchase the meet & greet passes, which was at the time limited to 25 people. The day the email message went out, it was at 4 in the morning. The first people to see it and purchase the m&g’s were insomniacs, and I didn’t look at my emails till 8am, by that time they were mostly gone. The week of the show at Rahway, I ran into a friend at Beatlefest in NJ who put me wise that he contacted someone at the Video Ranch store to see if there were any m&g passes left, and was told there was a limited number and he was able to purchase one for Rahway. I started calling and emailing Video Ranch and got with touch with someone at the store about the m&g, and finally was able to purchase a pair for myself and my Lovely Linda for the Town Hall concert in NYC. It took a little persistence, but I made it, Folks!

Nez Radio Interview on World Cafe

I LOVE this show!  It's a nightly NPR music review, offering a good mix of folk, acoustic, etc.  This interview in particular is excellent, allowing him a good chance to discuss the Monkee years, FNB stuff, his songwriting and what else went on.  It also includes a rare cover and a discussion of the storytelling format of his recent solo tour.

I find that it is really rare to get a *somewhat* mainstream interview which doesn't try to focus exclusively on sound bytes or Monkee history.  The conversation is intelligent and it's a pleasure to hear how eloquent Nez is about everything.

It's also a show that Tork should get Shoe Suede Blues on.  But hasn't yet. (??) Maybe Nez has broken the "M" curse, perhaps?

Listen to the half hour here.

Mike Nesmith on Timerider and Crowdsourcing

His post today (again posting because he tends to delete):

Looks like Christian and Circe (My son and his S.O.) did well on their Kickstarter campaign.

I am really happy for them. They are gong to make an Album, do a Video and maybe go on tour. 

I like the whole idea of crowdsourcing. 

At the end of June I will be in NYC for a fundraiser for The New Inquiry magazine. Rachel Rosenfelt (Publisher) has some ideas about funding for the magazine that goes around the accepted routes. She wants the magazine to raise enough money to operate without having to compromise any of its editorial freedom -- which boils down to "no advertising"

I think its a great idea and we are backing her and hers. I'm not sure how they will do. RR is smart and so is her team so I think she will come up with the right plan. I'm going to go to the fundraiser and see what I can learn and how I can help.

I use to race off-road during the eighties. It was an expensive and a very steep learning curve. I got beat a lot. I got depressed about it.

Off-roading became a lesson in workarounds for me.

I began to wonder if I might do better and go quicker even if I had to take a harder and more difficult unexplored track. There were plenty of options -- race rules required only that we get from point A to point B as fast as possible -- staying on the ground.

My team found all sorts of available tracks but usually they were harder and seemed slower. The problems they raised looked too hard to solve and they weren't much fun while you were racing on them.

Race days were all dust plumes from the trails of the cars and trucks racing along the desert. Usually the higher the plume the faster the car.

From time to time we would see a distant plume of dust starting to rise somewhere along a track so far away in territory so rough that no one had bothered to take it even though it was perfectly legal. After a while the plume would vanish -- a car broken or lost in the desert.

We started to focus on those tracks -- taking those same distant and awful trails -- content to go slow and work hard finding our own way -- spending hours preparing for races by building pit stops in the middle of nowhere and plotting our course by dead reckoning instead of following the wandering or pre-graded trails other cars were taking.

That's when we started to win. We won a lot. Other cars started following us.

The name of the race team was Timerider. Same as a movie I made.

Crowd sourcing is one of those rules based workarounds. It enables artists especially. We spend a lot of time begging at the door of wealthy Americans -- Corporate and otherwise -- and we end up having to sell out most of the time in order to produce at least some part of an creative idea.

Its a drag and its one of the awful things about innovation and living in the margins -- outside the commercial think of big business.

Crowd sourcing is a real alternative to that. I think Alex Cox (writer director Repo Man)may be raising some cash for his next movie -- and I see some other film makers going down the same road. Wealthy film makers -- not just poor ones.

The web has all these great new unexplored alternatives for economy and politics and the arts -- legal side roads around the traffic choked avenues of traditional commerce.

Expect to see me out there from time to time. Come join me if you see me. Have a cup of coffee by a campfire in the middle of nowhere. Like Marfa.

And keep your eyes on Christian and Circe. They make good records and good videos and they have just started creating a nice plume of dust way off the usual roads.

And just to put in my two cents, Circe's link is http://www.circelink.com/
The Kickstarter bit is http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1163708654/support-circe-links-new-record-dumb-luck

As of today, they have met & exceeded their $3500 goal (you need to meet it, otherwise you don't get any of the money).
They have 137 Backers (you can donate as little as $1).
$8,398 is pledged, only 3 days in, the link will be active for the next 27 days.

Her site is well established and updated regularly, she's active on Social Media and cuts a striking figure in person.  And her stuff seems kinda good too . . . (maybe that helps)