Lin Brehmer Remembers Peter Tork
We all have our teenybopper bands. These are the groups we loved as we gazed over the precipice of adolescence. These are the bands that we were forced to deny before the cool kids sent us away.
My teenybopper band was The Monkees. We watched the TV show. They weren’t The Beatles, a popular sensation that existed on a much different level. The Monkees were that struggling fictional band that seemed all too real to us. They lived together like The Beatles pretended in the movie “Help.” The gigs they played on their television series were modest affairs and madcap plot extensions that gave us a chance to hear their hit singles. And what singles they were. Confections written and produced by ringers like Boyce and Hart including one of the all-time great television theme songs. It started all soft and breezy and then erupted.
“Here we come
Walkin' down the street
We get the funniest looks from
Everyone we meet,
HEY HEY, we’re The Monkees.”
The music, the video montage of the wacky band members, it all was the kind of stuff that fired up every 11 year old in the country.
We were sold the idea of this band and felt betrayed when we found out they weren’t playing their instruments on their album. Many of us went through a period where we repudiated our love of this video quartet. It was only when we reached that musical maturity where we can put aside what other people think of our musical choices that we could rejoice at the sounds of “Daydream Believer” or “Last Train to Clarksville.”
That all brings us to Peter Tork. Back in the 80’s I remember a PR firm reaching out to a radio station to interview Peter Tork, but only if the subject of The Monkees would not be mentioned.
You can’t interview Peter Tork without talking about The Monkees. Stung by an association with a band that was widely enjoyed but not taken with the seriousness of their contemporaries, Peter Tork lived with the knowledge that he was originally a singer and a guitarist who was playing nightclubs with the likes of Stephen Stills long before he was a Monkee. Tork was the daffiest member of a daffy band. He was the funniest of a funny group. He was the guy that a goofball like me identified with. No question. He was cagey enough to ‘play dumb’ and playing dumb was definitely in my wheelhouse. Just ask Miss Jacobs, my fifth grade teacher.
And when Peter Tork stepped up to sing lead on The Monkees “Your Auntie Griselda,” I knew I was in my element.
“She knows her mind all right, your auntie Grizelda,
She says she knows my kind, she might, maybe so.”
We all knew your kind. We were your kind. R.I.P. Peter Tork.
-Lin Brehmer
