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 approaches the camera to speak, poking fun at his "missing hat." An opportunistic lookalike from the U.S. cashed in on his similarity to Nesmith by appearing on talk shows and doing interviews in Australia during the 1980s. The scam was successful, the lookalike being far enough from America to avoid detection as a fraud (which was more likely in the U.S., where the real Nesmith had made many media and show-business acquaintances). An entertaining interviewee, the impersonator's charade was not discovered until after he had vanished from the public eye. The imposter, Barry Faulkner, who had pulled various fraudulent scams