The clip that keeps resurfacing online lasts only moments: Michael Nesmith, playing a hayseed character named Billy Roy Hodstetter, racing through a country-flavored love song as a comedy bit on The Monkees. The episode, “Too Many Girls,” first aired on December 19, 1966. Within about a year, the same song, “Different Drum,” was climbing the US singles chart in the voice of a 21-year-old Linda Ronstadt.
The story is trending again this week, nearly 60 years after that broadcast, and it holds up because almost every party involved misjudged the song at some point, including the singer who made it famous.
A song the Monkees did not want
Nesmith wrote “Different Drum” in 1964, before he was cast as the wool-hatted guitarist in the TV band. The lyric is a breakup told from the side of the person leaving: one lover wants to settle down, the other wants room to roam. Nesmith later insisted it was not autobiographical, saying the words “had nothing to do with my personal life” because he was newly married at the time.
The first recording came from the bluegrass group the Greenbriar Boys, after Nesmith passed the song to their member John Herald in 1965; it appeared on their 1966 album Better Late Than Never!. Nesmith also pitched it to the people choosing Monkees material, and they passed. In 1971 he recalled the verdict bluntly: “I took them ‘Different Drum’ and they said all it needed was a hook. They asked me to change it and told me it was a stiff.”
Bandmate Micky Dolenz, who recorded the song on his own Dolenz Sings Nesmith album in 2021, has told the story with the punchline intact. When the producers said it was not a Monkees tune, Nesmith pushed back: “Wait a minute. I am one of the Monkees.” The answer was still no. That is how the song ended up as a throwaway gag in a sitcom instead of a Monkees single.
How the Stone Poneys turned it into a hit
Ronstadt was then the singer in the Stone Poneys, a Los Angeles folk trio with Bobby Kimmel and Kenny Edwards. The band planned a gentle acoustic take. Producer Nick Venet had other ideas and hired session players: an arrangement by Jimmy Bond, strings led by Sid Sharp, guitarist Bernie Leadon (later of the Eagles), drummer Jim Gordon, and Don Randi improvising on harpsichord. Ronstadt ended up as the only Stone Poney on the record, which was cut live in the studio, with the second take released and no overdubs added.
She hated the result for years. Ronstadt said she felt “completely confused” walking into a session with musicians she had never rehearsed with, and she later heard “fear and a lack of confidence” in her own vocal. Nesmith disagreed, saying her performance “infused it with a new level of passion and sensuality.” Her bandmates, for their part, said they bore no grudge about being left off the track.
Capitol Records released the single in September 1967. Here is how it charted in the months that followed:
- United States (Hot 100): No. 13
- Canada (RPM): No. 12
- Australia: No. 9
- New Zealand: No. 5, its best showing anywhere
It was Ronstadt’s first hit, and it reportedly went all the way to No. 1 in the Los Angeles market. Ronstadt changed one detail, swapping “girl” for “boy” in a lyric Nesmith had written from a man’s point of view, which made the song’s cool-headed goodbye land very differently.
Why the Monkees’ rejection looks odd now
Put the dates side by side and the irony is plain. The Monkees TV show premiered in September 1966 and the group already had four Top 5 singles by the fall of 1967. Their producers turned down a song by their own member that then reached No. 13 for somebody else a year later. The episode joke and the hit record were separated by roughly 12 months, which is about how long it took the industry to hear in Ronstadt’s version what it had missed in Nesmith’s.
It was not an isolated snub. Dolenz has pointed out that Nesmith was cast as a singer-songwriter, not an actor, and the fight over who picked the Monkees’ songs ran through the group’s whole career. After leaving in 1970, Nesmith became one of the early figures of country rock with the First National Band, whose single “Joanne” reached No. 21 that year.
Nesmith finally recorded a proper version of “Different Drum” on his 1972 album And the Hits Just Keep on Comin’, with four verses to the Stone Poneys’ three. He died at his home in Carmel Valley, California, on December 10, 2021, aged 78, less than a month after the Monkees’ farewell tour closed at the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles.
The 60th anniversary of the broadcast that gave “Different Drum” its first moment on national television falls on December 19, 2026.
Further reading
Image: Docob5, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons
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