The Peter Tork "Sex & Music Interview" 2001
Last week I was working double days of Buddy Guy's "Damn Right Farewell" Tour. As I watched the legendary Blues performer, I suddenly thought "I wish Peter was here. He would have loved this."
In 2001 when The Monkees (sans Mike Nesmith, who had not appeared with them since 1997) were offered proper sums of money and succumbed to fan demand to tour again, I had an opportunity to interview Peter Tork, the band’s multi-instrumentalist and generally cheery philosopher of the group. This interview was conducted many years before I represented him as his publicist or started The Peter Tork Hope On Project when he was fighting a rare form of cancer.
It was also long before I asked him, and he kindly agreed, to write an advice column called “Ask Peter Tork” for my online magazine, The Daily Panic. He did a great job and that success prompted other publications, The Washingon Post among them, to ask him to write an op-ed here, an article or blog post there - something he proved very good at.
However, in 2001 the advice column was six years away. We’d met only a few times previous to my interviewing him. This particular interview has appeared in whole and in part in some magazines in Europe/Asia and in various venues on the internet. Reading it now I have to laugh.
I do count this as one of the more interesting interviews I’ve ever done.
It’s not that often you find performers willing or even able to be as blunt as Peter can be on a regular basis. That can be a double-edged sword but it wasn’t one that was a problem this day.
Personally, I find a real conversation much more interesting than a carefully canned or rehearsed one.
Who would have thought the celestial Jimi Hendrix would succumb to the excesses of the times, yet the band he once opened for, The Monkees, would still be making the girls (and grandmothers) scream in the 21st century? In this interview from 2001, Peter Tork explains it all for you.
Peter Tork and Davy Jones, 2001. Photo credit: Therra C Gwyn
I have a memory that many people share. Before MTV and pay-per-view concerts, before Vegas specials and Behind The Music, I was staring at the television for a half-hour one night a week and could not be dragged away for love nor punishment. As a young child ( in my case, I’d been on the planet for almost seven years) I was fully enthralled with what was then the revolutionary freshness of none other than the Monkees.
Yes, those Monkees, as in the ” Hey, hey we are the…” variety. Remember? The 1960s TV show and the catchy hits written by Carole King and Neil Diamond? The mid-1980s MTV darlings doing packed stadium tours?
There’s an undeniable appeal there. Trust me on this if you are a non-believer.
At the very least, give a girl a chance to explain.
It was some thirty years or so after the initial primetime run of the show that I was on a highway somewhere between Jacksonville and Atlanta when all my childhood excitement over the group came to fore. My best friend ( and often partner-in-crime) and I were in a brand new, fire-engine red Camaro convertible, top down, music blaring, speeding in between shows on what was billed as the Monkees’ “Final Tour”.
I had been trying, with no success, to hook up ( in an interview kind of way) with Peter Tork to chronicle this newest chapter of the Monkees’ journey through time. Even with the help of his preternaturally patient manager, Bonnie Verrico, I wasn’t having much luck thus far.
Actually, I was having no luck at all.
The tour had begun several nights before in Clearwater with Natural, Lou Pearlman’s ( N’Sync, Backstreet Boys) latest boy band experiment inserted midway through each evening to give the younger lads some exposure and experience and to allow the older lads a break in a show that often ran three hours.
Despite media criticism that haunted the Monkees early success and sometimes still follows them to this day, this “pre-fab four” as they’ve been called, are really a hardworking, cohesive group onstage.
They are hardly a one-trick pony, although admittedly, the trick they are best collectively known for is a pretty innocuous one. The Monkees are all in their fifties now and are aging fairly well. Peter Tork looks at least 5 years younger. When he smiles the years fall away. Micky Dolenz’s voice is a powerful pop instrument that time hasn’t seemed to change. Their concerts are a lively combination of their popular hits, some of the TV show schtick, and include a solo spot for each member to show off his particular brand of musical talent/interest.
Davy Jones, an energetic performer who knows his audience and courts them, does Broadway, charmingly. Dolenz sings ” Since I Fell For You” like he means it . Tork, dressed nightly in a Sgt. Pepper-by-way-of-Melrose stage outfit, hits the rock standards, tearing it up like a teenager on Little Richard’s “Lucille” and performing a bright version (on banjo, no less) of Jackie Wilson’s “Higher and Higher.” For those who may be sneering ( and have actually read this far), yes, the Monkees play their own instruments ( please, when did this become an actual issue in a business filled with fake body parts and Britney Spear’s non-live concerts?).
They are backed by a full band, including a section of interpretive-dancing horn players. The sound onstage is almost as full as the screaming ( yes, even now) in the audience. It appears that the most enduring legacy of the Monkees may be that they simply make people happy.
I had done my research, talking to the variety of fans who still follow the group, and one thing became apparent very quickly. They worship their favorite Monkee. like any true fan of any boy band.
You have to have a favorite, right? To have, to hold, to hope they are hetero.
These particular fans are proud of their Monkee, whichever one it is that has captured their heart. Tork’s fans proved very protective and vocal.
” If you are going to take pictures of him, don’t use a flash, ” one 40-year-old fan informed me archly, ” He doesn’t like it.”
“He’s really very shy,” offered a teen young enough to be a Monkee granddaughter.
” He can get testy on ya,” a Micky Dolenz fan sniffed, sizing me up, it appeared, as not Monkee-worthy.
“He’s not dumb like he plays on TV!”, a woman and her husband insisted.
“He’s sexy,” a young mother sighed.
“Okay, ” I said, scribbling notes for an interview I didn’t know if I’d ever get, ” No flash, shy, smart, testy, sexy…got it.”
Later, in the lobby of yet another crowded venue, a friend handed me a drink and asked, ” If you speak to this guy, are you going to confess that you had your very first ‘I love this boy’ fantasy about him?” I shook my head. ” No way, ” I swore. I had once worked on a Rolling Stones tour and easily managed not to tell Mick Jagger about my teenage fantasies involving him. I wasn’t going to start revealing any silly stuff from my youth to a Monkee I couldn’t even corner for a 15-minute chat.
As fate and determination would have it, the interview finally took place a few months later. Tork was at his home in California, in between tour dates. This was a tour that would eventually take much of the summer and claim much of the patience of all members of the band.
The Monkees bandwagon crashed and burned in August in a somewhat typical rock band rift and it seemed that the fans who followed the group might indeed have witnessed the “Final Tour,” at least with this line-up.
Or maybe not.
But when I spoke to Tork in very early summer things were still merry and bright, at least on the surface.
Photo credit: Therra Cathryn Gwyn, 2001.
After a flurry of e-mails Monkee and writer connected by phone.
” Hi, it’s Peter,” the polite voice on the other end of the phone sounded familiar, still a touch of East Coast in the accent. We talked for over an hour, yet it was several minutes before I even got to ask my first planned question.
His in-the-moment way of going places verbally can serve to throw a person like me off-balance, at least initially.
I got the idea he might have this particular chat almost with whoever was on the other end of the phone, it just happened to be me at the time. That’s okay, I thought. I’d waited a long time and logged a lot of miles to get to this chat and my interview style tended more towards conversational than central-themed anyway.
“I’m checking to see what the age of consent is in different states” he offered (un-asked) before I could say anything. Peter was evidently sitting in front of his computer while talking to me.
” Look at this. In Maryland, it’s sixteen. That’s considered the South, right? It’s below the Mason-Dixon line? Tennessee, sixteen again…South Carolina, fourteen?…hmmmm… in North Carolina it’s sixteen…no surprise there…” he goes on to rattle off other states and ages. Finally, I had to ask; “Why is this of interest to you?”