Rant #2,318: Goin' Down

As I wrote pretty extensively about the other day, we lost another Baby Boomer icon when Peter Tork died.

Now we know he died of the same tongue/saliva gland cancer he had battled several years ago.

So now, we have as many Monkees alive as we do Beatles.

Kind of strange.

And personally, the two Monkees who are still with us I interviewed in my past life as a celebrity interviewer.

I never got to Peter, or Davy for that matter.

It wasn't for lack of trying.

Peter was playing a solo show on Long Island maybe 35 to 40 years ago, and I thought that maybe I could get an interview with him.

With no leads to go on, I called the theater--I don't remember which one, but it was a dinner theater in  Nassau County--and I tried to get through to his management.

I never got through, and I never interviewed him, although I did see the show--as a regular paying customer. I remember that I was surprised at how spry and good sounding Peter actually was during that show, and how much he looked like he was having fun.

He was never my favorite Monkee--Mike was and still is--but I liked Peter.

He was the real ringer of the group, the only one of the four who really came in from the outside to snare a spot in the band.

Stephen Stills--who was turned down because his teeth were bad--recommended Peter, and the rest is history. But the show was supposed to be built around Davy, Mike was already under contract as a recording artist with Colgems precursor Colpix Records (as Davy was), and Micky was a Hollywood brat from the get go and had plenty of connections, so they were pretty much all in, but Peter wasn't.

He was the East Coast folkie who counted both Pete Seeger and Steve Allen (!) as major influences, and his "dumb" act won over the producers.

Certainly not his musicianship, which was pretty much negated during his entire time with the Monkees until he quit in late 1968.

To me, Peter was the true "everyman" in the group, because he came into it without any gloss at all. Micky and Davy had been kid actors, and Davy had been a huge rising star on Broadway in "Oliver!" Even Mike had that gloss, as he worked his way up the ladder in Hollywood for a few years before there even was a Monkees.

But Peter was the guy without the polish, and he seemed to enjoy what he was doing to an extent, even though he didn't like the fact that he was hired more as an actor than as a musician.

Later on, he was the co-composer of one of their best songs, "For Pete's Sake," and he played on lots of Monkees music. It is his piano that you hear on "Daydream Believer," and he played so many instruments on their recordings that it is really hard to believe that he could be hired simply as an actor.

I found out some things about him just a few years back that I didn't know. One of the things is relatively minor, but it kind of meant a lot to me.

Someone I grew up with and who I knew very barely told me a few years ago that she attended a then-recent bar mitzvah and she saw this man there who she looked at, felt that she knew, and puzzled about who it was, until the light bulb went off that it was Peter.

I then looked up Peter on Wikipedia, and I found out that his mom was part Jewish, so in a sort of way, he was part of the flock, although I never remember Peter ever talking about this, nor that it really mattered anyway.

But it did kind of matter to me ... heck, a Jewish Monkee! Who would've thunk it!

It was like when I found out that Jackie Cooper and Jerry Schatz of the Little Rascals were Jewish--it didn't mean a thing, but it kinda did, to me at least.

Anyway, Peter had his demons, which he battled, and evidently was victorious against. He was not a perfect person. I have also heard some stories that he often could be surly, distant, and nasty. I read an interview with him where he pretty much let it all hang out, and yes, he was pretty vicious.

But I think in his later years, he had come to terms with a lot of things, and at least when on stage performing, he seemed to be in his element, and he seemed to actually be enjoying himself.

In death, we try to make the person we are honoring into some type of god, without a scratch on the person.

Peter evidently had plenty of scratches, but he also seemed like a good healer, and while those scratches I am sure left some scars on him, he didn't seem to let that stop him from doing what he wanted to do, whether playing in front of thousands of Monkees fans or playing in a corner bar with his band Shoe Suede Blues with maybe 50 people in attendance.

He seemed to be a good person, a good guy, and people absolutely adored him.

When we lost him, a huge piece of my childhood went with him, and also a huge piece of my adulthood, too, as I have been a Monkees fan since 1966, going on 53 years solid.

They are my personal soundtrack, and when Davy went, that was another major person to me who was gone.

But with Peter, even though I never met him, I felt his loss even more.