Paras Griffin/Getty Images. Photo courtesy of The Monkees via Twitter.

Michael Nesmith, who is best known as a member of the rock band The Monkees, has died; he was 78.

Nesmith, who attended Thomas Jefferson High School and grew up in Dallas, died at home Friday of heart failure, The New York Times reported. He had undergone quadruple bypass surgery in 2018.

Television producers inspired by the Beatles’ movies wanted to create a show about a rock band, casting actors with musical backgrounds.

“It would always seem wildly ironic to me that I was the one given credit in the press for being the ‘only musician’ in the Monkees,” Nesmith wrote in his 2017 memoir, Infinite Tuesday. “Nothing was further from the truth.”

Nesmith and Dolenz, another member of the band, gave a concert in Grand Prairie in September 2021.

The TJ alumnus spoke in a podcast about growing up without a father and how he was introduced to music.

Here are a few facts about Nesmith:

He was friends was Jack Nicholson, whom he met through a mutual friend, as well as John Lennon, Jimi Hendrix and Johnny Cash.

His mother, Bette Nesmith Graham, invented Liquid Paper.

And Nesmith can be cited as part of the reason MTV exists. In the 1970s, he pitched a show called Pop Clips to Warner Bros., and it’s considered the precursor to MTV.