Musician known as comic goofball of the Monkees
Peter Tork, a struggling musician who became an overnight teenage idol in the 1960s with the Monkees, died Thursday at a family home in eastern Connecticut. He was 77.
His son, Ivan Iannoli, said the cause was complications of a rare form of cancer that was first diagnosed in 2009.
The Monkees were an unabashedly manufactured band, created by Hollywood producers in the 1960s to capitalize on the astounding popularity of the Beatles. The members — Tork (the oldest, at 24), Davy Jones, Micky Dolenz and Mike Nesmith — were cast as the stars of an NBC sitcom, “The Monkees” (1966-68), in which they performed and dealt with comic situations with a childlike irreverence, much as the Beatles had in their hit films “A Hard Day’s Night” and “Help!”
Tork was positioned as the goofy one, the court jester.
Because they were created for television, did not write their own songs (that was left to professionals like Gerry Goffin, Carole King and others) and did not play their own instruments (they mimed playing on camera), the Monkees were disdained by many; if the Beatles were the Fab Four, the Monkees quickly earned the derisive nickname the Prefab Four.
But they surprised many in the music industry, and perhaps themselves as well, when they became popular both on television and on the charts.
Their show won the Emmy Award for outstanding comedy series in 1967, and the band’s many hit records, including “Last Train to Clarksville,” “Daydream Believer” and “Pleasant Valley Sunday,” for a while earned them sales on the same stratospheric level as the Beatles’.
The Monkees recorded for only three years before disbanding; their popularity faded after their TV show was canceled, and Tork left the band in 1969.
Tork reunited with his fellow Monkees for a world tour in 2011 and with Dolenz and Nesmith in 2012 for a tour that included a tribute to Jones, who died that year.