Monkees band member Peter Tork dead at 77
Peter Tork, a talented singer-songwriter whose musical skills were often overshadowed by his role as the goofy, lovable bass guitarist in the made-forTV rock band The Monkees, has died aged 77.
Tork’s son Ivan Iannoli said his father died yesterday at the family home in Connecticut, of complications from a rare cancer of the salivary glands. He had battled the disease since 2009. ‘‘Peter’s energy, intelligence, silliness, and curiosity were traits that for decades brought laughter and enjoyment to millions, including those of us closest to him,’’ his son said in a statement.
‘‘Those traits also equipped him well to take on cancer, a condition he met like everything else in his life, with unwavering humour and courage.’’
Tork, who was often hailed by the other Monkees as the band’s best musician, had studied music since childhood.
He was accomplished on guitar, bass guitar, keyboards, banjo and other instruments.
Tork said he played bass because none of the others wanted to.
He had been playing in small clubs in Los Angeles when a friend and fellow musician, Steven Stills, told him television casting directors were looking for ‘‘four insane boys’’ to play members of a struggling rock band.
When the show debuted in September 1966, Tork and fellow band members Mike Nesmith, Micky Dolenz and Davy Jones became overnight teen idols. Nesmith was serious, Jones cute and Dolenz zany.
Tork said he adopted his ‘‘dummy’’ persona from the way he’d get audiences at Greenwich Village folk clubs to engage with him in the early 1960s.
‘‘As I write this my tears are awash, and my heart is broken,’’ Nesmith posted on his Facebook page.
‘‘I have said this before – and now it seems even more apt – the reason we called it a band is because it was where we all went to play.’’
During its two-year run, the show would win an Emmy for outstanding comedy series and the group itself would land seven songs in Billboard’s Top 10.
Initially, the Monkees were a band whose members didn’t play their instruments or write many of their songs, infuriating both Tork and Nesmith.
In later years, Tork would tell of going to an early recording session, only to be told dismissively that he wasn’t needed, that session musicians were laying down the musical tracks and all the Monkees were needed for was the vocals.
‘‘I was a hired hand, and I didn’t quite know that,’’ he said in 2000. ‘‘I had fantasies of being more important than it turns out I was.’’
Eventually he and Nesmith wrested control of the band’s musical fate from Don Kirshner, who had been brought in as the show’s music producer.
By the group’s third album, Headquarters, the Monkees were playing their instruments and had even performed live in Hawaii.
After the show concluded in 1968, the band went on a lengthy concert tour that at one point included Jimi Hendrix as the opening act.
Creative differences led Tork to leave soon after the group’s 1968 movie.
For several years he struggled financially and creatively, working for a time as a waiter and a schoolteacher.
By the mid-1980s, thanks to television re-runs and album reissues, the Monkees gained a new, younger following, and Tork rejoined for reunion tours. All four produced a new album, Justus ,in 1996, featuring them on all of the instrumentals and including songs they had written.
In the 1990s, Tork formed the group Shoe Suede Blues and toured and recorded frequently. – AP