Continuing Will Fly's thread drift, regarding "the first music video to be made":

Mike Nesmith's Rio was released in 1977.

The music video that I have most often heard quoted as being the first, is Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody from 1975.

Oddly, The Beatles' 1967 promotional film for Strawberry Fields Forever barely gets a mention in these debates.

It could also be argued that the Beatles (along with Tony Sheridan) made the first folk rock record in 1961, My Bonnie. That question however, is probably a thread drift too far. ;-)

Going back to the subject at hand, punkfolkrocker commments:

"It was only later in the show that ...[their]... musical ability outgrew the format and they started demanding more personal input and control of the band and that's when it all started falling apart."

And although that certainly has more than a ring of truth to it, later work has a good deal of merit too. 1968's film Head is something of a masterpiece, at least in my view.

As Mike Nesmith commented:

"Head was a swan song. We wrote it with Jack and Bob ... and we liked it. It was an authentic representation of a phenomenon we were a part of that was winding down. It was very far from suicide even though it may have looked like that."