Michael Nesmith inheritance from his mother's Liquid Paper fortune in 1980 eased those concerns. In a 1980 interview with "Playboy", he said of that time: "I had to start telling little tales to the tax man while they were putting tags on the furniture." While Nesmith had continued to produce his compositions with the Monkees, he withheld many of the songs from the final Monkees albums, only to release them on his post-Monkees solo records. Nesmith did not participate in the Monkees' 20th-anniversary reunion. However, he did appear during an encore with the other three members at the Greek Theatre on September
Michael Nesmith was the most publicly vocal Monkee about the band's prefabricated image. The Monkees succeeded in ousting supervisor Don Kirshner (with Nesmith punching a hole in a wall to make a point with Kirshner and attorney Herb Moelis) and took control of their records and song choices, but they worked as a four-man group on only one album, 1967's "Headquarters". The band never overcame the credibility problems they faced when word spread that they had not played on their first records; Nesmith instigated this when he called the band's first non-studio press conference and called "More of The Monkees" "probably the