Photo Credit: And The Hits Just Keep On Coming CD Booklet
Happy birthday to longtime musical collaborators and friends Red Rhodes (December 30, 1930) & Michael Nesmith (December 30, 1942)! Rhodes and Nesmith worked on over 10 albums together over the course of their 25 year partnership.
Both are pictured here at Countryside Records in 1973.
"What [Red] was bringing to the music was indescribable except unless you heard it on the records. So it was completely fulfilling for me and I just devoted myself to him. I said, ‘Well, I’m going to work with this guy for the rest of my natural life.’ Which is apparently what I did because he died before me." - Michael Nesmith. Billboard Magazine, May 31, 2018.
"But Red was constantly bringing these swoops and swirls in that made me wanna spin and dance - and him too, although he couldn't get up. That contributed a lot to the synchronization. The way these things went together with me standing beside Red and Red sitting beside me. We were very much dance partners. When we work off and followed the music around - he was playing his stuff and I was playing mine - he was so much more advanced than I was. All I was doing was accompanying him." - Michael Nesmith, liner notes to Cosmic Partners vinyl, 2019.
"I had watched Red play many evenings [at the Palomino] before and would watch him many more. There was something about the construction, tone, and touch of the way he played that surpassed all the other pedal steel players I knew of........Few people can play the instrument well, and Red Rhodes was an undisputed master of it. Red was a string section and a brass section and a Mars section all in one. The lines and fills he played inside the regular country tunes were like smoke and magic, wafting in and out of the soundscape like surreptitious sprites." - Michael Nesmith, Infinite Tuesday, 2018.
"Well I don't know if you're familiar with Red or not, Red Rhodes, the pedal steel guitar player, I would hope that you are because Red's like my cosmic partner. Between he and I we plot on keeping Saturn in orbit." - Michael Nesmith, Live at McCabes, August 18, 1973.