It’s no The Kentucky Fried Movie, but Mike Nesmith’s hour-long patchwork of comedy sketches and music videos (Nesmith calls it a “video record”) is so goofy that it feels like you just exhaled your third monster bong hit of the night. It’s not great, but it stands out because few musicians have ever done anything like it. It’s post-Devo and pre-MTV. Like Devo, Nesmith uses music videos here to be weird and conceptual rather than just show off his face and sell some singles. It’s a loose and strange affair. It’s a new wave relic made by a Monkee. It was produced specifically for the early days of home video and cable television and it plays best when you’re zoned-out on the couch at 3 AM.
What you get: Five songs from Nesmith’s last couple of albums, including his soft-rock hit “Rio”, but the best is “Cruisin'”, a weird new wave tune accompanied by a video of two rollerskating girls who wheel around Los Angeles with wrestler Steve Strong. Dominating the film though are comedy bits in the Saturday Night Live vein. They’re mostly lightweight, PG-rated parodies of TV commercials, game shows, and movies. Not many of the jokes have held up over the years, but most of the sketches fly by in only a minute or so.