My favorite Monkee is Mike.
And you interviewed him? How cool! What was it for? If you published it, I'd really like to read it.
He still gets recognized, nearly 40 years after his primetime gig in a made-for-TV rock band. He was in a Walmart in Bozeman, Mont., when a sharp-eyed clerk identified the now-62-year-old customer as former Monkee Peter Tork.
“By the time it was all over,” he said, speaking by phone from California, “I think I’d signed more than a dozen autographs for women who’d grown up on the thing.”
For those who didn’t, “The Monkees” was an NBC sitcom about a wacky rock band, loosely modeled after the Beatles. Tork played the cheerful mop-headed dimwit. It ran only from 1966 to 1968 (with rerun revivals in later decades) but was hugely popular, winning an Emmy, selling millions of records and turning its stars into teen idols. Overnight, the “folk-singing hippie kid” found his picture on lunchboxes across the country.
Until then, fame had not been among Tork’s goals. “I did not give it any thought one way or another.”
He was still Peter Thorkelson in the early 1960s at Carleton, where he performed in a small folk group, served as Friday morning DJ on KARL, and “chased women -- with zero success.” Exhilarated with college social life after living in a small town in Connecticut, he neglected his classes, with predictable results: “I flunked out.”
He moved to New York and played guitar in Greenwich Village coffee shops. One day his friend Stephen Stills (later of Crosby, Stills and Nash) mentioned that he’d auditioned for a sitcom about a rock band.
“Stills was turned down … he was told his hair and teeth wouldn’t work for television,” Tork said. “They asked if he knew anybody who looked like him whose hair and teeth were in order, and he called me.”
Like some ancient precursor to reality TV, “The Monkees” straddled fiction and life. The band’s first album, with its hit single “Last Train to Clarksville,” topped the charts even before the show aired, though none of the four actors played on it (they did put on live concerts, and eventually recorded together). The fictional pop stars became actual ones, and Tork’s life changed instantly.
“I couldn’t snag a date to save my ass and suddenly they were throwing themselves at me like there was no tomorrow,” he said.
They, unfortunately, were shrieking teeny-boppers – underage and overwhelming. Tork recalls standing on a hotel mezzanine and spotting a few fans below. He beckoned them up for autographs, not realizing a much bigger crowd stood just out of view. Throngs pushed up the stairs, shoving Tork back against a railing for a few terrifying moments – “plucking at my shoes, shoving paper and pencils in my face so fast that I could barely make a checkmark on each one” – before security guards came to his rescue.
Amid the frenzy, Tork had fun. “I loved making television, I loved making records, I loved the business of being on the road and entertaining.”
After the series ended, Tork withdrew to the relative quiet of Marin County, Calif. He played in small clubs, dropped out of show business for a while, struggled with alcoholism (he’s been sober for 23 years), participated ambivalently in Monkees reunions. Nowadays, he tours the country with a blues band called Shoe Suede Blues. Although promoters occasionally tout his Monkees connection, Tork does not emphasize his past.
“My fame has been almost no use to my Shoe Suede Blues life,” he said. “People who like the blues are a little bit snobbish about pop phenomena.”
He’s content now with just enough fame as he needs to get gigs. “I think fame was just one of those chapters in my journey, for better or for worse."
By the way, have you seen "Head"?
Lord I am ashamed to admit this, but I never liked thier music well enough to care about any of them. While the rest of the world was getting down and egtting high, I was dressing up and singing Cunegonde's aria from Candide "Glitter and be Gay".
I think I missed a lot :(
My German stepmother likes to say that the hardest part about living in America is all the choices we have here.
But I learned all them Beatle songs long before I got high, when I was still a child.
I just realized it sounded like I was implying that The Beatles and Candide are American! :laugh:
Update: wait - you meant the Bernstein didn't you? In which case, of course, it was American, and Leonard Bernstein, ain't no one cooler than he was, and he got stoned plenty, according to biographies I've read. :) So you didn't miss nothing. And don't go getting stoned, Mister. Sore throats and raspy voices. And there's a reason they call it "wasted." I haven't smoked dope since way back in the last century, 1987. May 1987. :) Well, I prattled on, din' I? :)
Oh hell I can't get high anymore. I would be asleep before I exhaled. Of course I am aware of the Beatles music and have heard plenty of it, but usually not by choice. Having had the immense pleasure of meeting and working with Mr. Bernstein, I can tell you first hand...the man was incorrigible. Outrageously talented, but incorrigible.