Papa Mike Nesmith gets the covers treatment

The cult of Mike Nesmith is pretty substantial, considering that he’s probably best known for wearing a hat. In reality, the former Monkee’s songwriting and solo efforts would have achieved even greater renown if the world were a little more just. Nesmith’s talents were in plain view with the pre-Fab Four, with titles like “Papa Gene’s Blues”, “Don’t Call on Me”, and the almighty “Listen to the Band” revealing his feel for a yearning melody and an unusually thoughtful lyric.

Those are three of the songs that turn up on Some of Nesmith’s Blues, a tribute album that you can listen to for a whole lotta nothin’ here at Bandcamp. Of the three, only the latter really disappoints, but that’s probably because the original is so unique as to be uncoverable.

Elsewhere on this fine record of artists that I’ve never ever heard of, I doff my wool hat to So L’il for taking the weirdo-moog “Daily Nightly” even further into space, while Casella gives us a fair approximation of what Alex Chilton might have done with “Sunny Girlfriend” if he was alone with a four track. Or alive.

Somebody called Ringo Dolenz takes a whack at “Crippled Lion”, one of the few tracks taken from the golden era of Papa Nez, when his music was maturing into something half way between cosmic American gumbo and country prog. On the other hand, Nesmith’s earlier work yields some of the best stuff here, like ”Different Drum”,  given a cute ukele treatment by Blake Ian, or the Monkees era “Sweet Young Thing”, a co-write with Carole King and Gerry Goffin that Jake Incao aces with no more than his acoustic guitar and a soulful vocal.