Monkees: In the end a real band
EARLY on in his life as onefourth of The Monkees, Peter Tork learned a cruel truth about the huge gulf between image and reality in Hollywood.
He dutifully arrived at a recording studio one day, guitar in hand, after being told some new Monkees songs would be coming together that day.
Upon arrival, he was greeted by The Monkees television show’s songwriters and producers, Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart, who asked why he was there.
Confused, he told them what seemed obvious: He was there to play, he recalled years later.
‘‘They told me, ‘No, Peter, you don’t understand. You can put the guitar down.’’’
They had already finished the session, without so much as a note played by an actual Monkee.
Anyone who has ever spent hours trying to improve their musical skills had to empathise with the seismic shock Tork, who died last month aged 77, surely felt.
At that point in The Monkees’ embryonic development, the music used each week on the show was being handled by behindthescenes professionals — the ace studio musicians later to be called the Wrecking Crew.
Tork, even though he was a seasoned folk musician when he was cast in 1965 to be part of The Monkees TV show, had not been hired for his musicianship, but simply as an actor who would pretend to be a musician for a national TV audience.
It was the same dilemma that faced lead guitarist and sometimes lead singer Michael Nesmith, an accomplished folkrock musician and songwriter from Texas who also passed the auditions, along with former child actor Micky Dolenz and English musical theatre veteran Davy Jones.
Dolenz and Jones took little issue with the show’s central deceit because of their histories handling various acting roles.
But Tork and Nesmith struggled to assert their musical impulses during their tenure as Monkees.
But the reality outside Hollywood quickly intruded as those songs became bona fide hit records, and, suddenly, real people in real cities wanted to see and hear The Monkees live.
Dolenz took lessons on the drums he sat behind in so many TV episodes, and Jones essentially relegated himself to mastering singing while shaking a tambourine or maracas.
Soon, they became the kind of aspiring garage band they played on the show — competent enough to headline concerts before thousands of screaming fans who couldn’t hear much of what they played, or didn’t play, anyway.
By the time of recording a third album, Headquarters, the group members demonstrated they could handle their instruments, and it became the first and only album to feature only Tork, Nesmith, Dolenz and Jones.
‘‘When we did Headquarters, suddenly, this issue was moot, end of story: We’re a band,’’ Tork said in 2012.
‘‘Among other things, we actually were a band. We were also an acting troupe and a performing troupe.
‘‘It was like Leonard Nimoy becoming a real Vulcan. But it was more like Glee, where real singers and dancers are playing the part of singers and dancers.
‘‘It would be like having actors who are also medical students playing the part of doctors and then they got to work in hospitals. It’s unlikely, but it’s real.’’ Indeed, after quitting the Monkees at the end of 1968, and trying to separate himself from that role as he pursued a solo career in the 1970s, Tork — like Nesmith — eventually came to accept and even appreciate what The Monkees had been.
‘‘I did say it was unfair,’’ Tork said of the way the four were often pilloried, not only by some of the show’s executives, but also by critics (the quartet was quickly dismissed as ‘‘the Prefab Four’’) and even other musicians.
‘‘I wasn’t at all happy about not being the musicians on our records, and I was absolutely triumphant when we did get to be.’’
To that end, he expressed sadness that The Monkees have not been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, despite a string of some of the catchiest hit singles in the second half of the 1960s, and some remarkably experimental tracks.
MTV brought The Monkees back in front of a whole new generation through reruns shown on the thennew music cable channel, leading to a 30thanniversary reunion album, 1996’s Justus.
Tork, Dolenz and Jones periodically toured as a trio, while Nesmith had various music and business ventures.
After Jones died in 2012, the three surviving Monkees pulled together for a reunion tour that celebrated their recently departed band mate, and focused on Headquarters, the album that allowed each to shine musically.
After The Monkees, Tork — the show’s resident goofball — spent some years teaching maths, music, social studies, French, history, and was even a baseball coach. —
❛ I wasn’t at all happy about not being the musicians
on our records, and I was absolutely triumphant when
we did get to be