Different Drum
#58 / Video feature
The joyous jam session nature of our weekly rehearsals lets us entertain all kinds of songs. Some seem destined to take up residence in Floodlandia; others just wink and wave and keep moving on. We don’t know yet if this great old tune from the radios of the 1960s wants to move in with us, but we sure enjoyed our visit, as you can see and hear here in a video that Pamela shot recently:
At the corner of Folk and Hippy stood Michael Nesmith. Before he became “Mike, the wool-hat guy” in The Monkees in the late 1960s, Nesmith was a scuffling songwriter pitching his tunes in Los Angeles.
He wrote “Different Drum” in 1964 when the 22 year old was looking to start performing as a singer-songwriter in and around “The Troubadour,” the West Hollywood nightclub where he had landed a gig as the “hootmaster” for the Monday night hootenanny.
In 1965, Nesmith shared the song with John Herald of The Greenbriar Boys, the wonderfully eclectic northern string band, which was the first to record the tune on its “Better Late Than Never” album. (In fact, it was that album that introduced the song to The Flood’s founding members in their formative school years.)
When Nesmith because “the quiet Monkee” in 1966, he wanted to bring the song to the show. Initially, though, the NBC producers, who had wide control over the group's musical output early on, turned him down, apparently the lyrics didn’t fit the characters’ happy/goofy plot lines. However, Mike kept plugging and finally “Different Drum” did reach a wider audience when Nesmith rushed through a version of it in a comedy bit in which he was cast to pretend to be hapless folksinger “Billy Roy Hodstetter” in an episode called “Too Many Girls” in December 1966.
Of course, most people eventually heard the song in 1967 when it became a monster hit for The Stone Poneys, which also introduced a young singer named Linda Ronstadt. Her version of "Different Drum" went to No. 12 on the Cash Box Tox 100, No. 13 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, and No. 16 in Record World magazine.
In his post-Monkees years, Nesmith recorded his own version of the song in 1972, and since then it has been covered by other artists. Meanwhile, in later live performances of the song, Mike often sang the closing verse in the same style as the Ronstadt version, which Nesmith admired, saying Linda "infused it with a new level of passion and sensuality.”