Peter had a spell of a few months with the Phoenix Singers, which at least paid regular money, even if there wasn’t much of it, and he even formed his own trio, along with Steve and with one John Hopkins, another guitarist and another regular on the Village scene.
“Trouble was,” says Peter, “that we just got bored. Not with our own company, cos we were all great mates, but just bored at the hard graft in the clubs for money that came only if the customers felt in a generous mood. So we split. Later on, though, I met Steve again—he was later with the Buffalo Springfield—and he told me about a certain audition which was for some crazy new group they’d fixed up. Group called the Monkees!”
Point to make here is that the Monkees, by this sort of 17 age group, had packed in a great deal of experience between them. They weren’t maybe stars, but they’d been working. Micky had travelled widely, too—remember hearing about his trip to New Zealand and the like on a hunting tour? And Peter, mid-way through his Greenwich Village stint, got the chance to go from North America to South America. To Venezuela, in fact.
He flew down to see his dad, working there on a short-time commission, and his mum—and he made the journey with his grandmother, Mrs. Catherine McG. Strauss. She recalls: “He was so very excited about our going to Caracas. It was for the Christmas holidays and Peter went out each day looking over the Southern Andes mountains. He was there for about six weeks and the change of scenery and the relaxation really did him good. He was much more excited about Venezuela than he had been as a mere child in Germany.”
All good things come to an end, though, and eventually Peter had to go back to Greenwich Village. Only this time he wasn’t quite so enchanted with the scene. He felt that there was more money to be made in California, so he hitched his way cross-country and announced his arrival with a flurry of notes on his banjo.
Dishwasher Permalink
Oh, he got work, all right! And money. But as a dishwasher in the Golden Bear Hotel in Huntington Beach. Even so, you can’t keep a good man down. And Peter WAS good.
Even working as a dishwasher in California, Peter Tork had a special way with him. Though basically he was a very shy guy, he also had a knack of suddenly erupting into an impromptu performance which meant that he didn’t really have to work as hard as the others who were slaving over the soap-suds backstage in hotel kitchens.
Peter talks about this period of his life with a wry grin. “You can say I’m lazy but that isn’t entirely the truth. What I felt was that I simply had to make the grade in show business or I’d just kinda explode inside. Where I’d got a few cents singing round the clubs in Greenwich Village, down in California the competition was that much greater. To eat, I had to work, so I worked at something that didn’t take up too much time.
Hill-billy Permalink
“They’d bring in great piles of greasy old dishes and stick ’em in front of me. One day, I felt I just had to sing to keep my spirits up, so I got into a couple of hilly-billy folk songs. What happened was that the other guys there liked it, so they said for me to keep on singing—and they’d take care of the great piles of steak-stained plates. There was me, stuck in one corner and dressed in my overalls and that, and just singing away like I was entertaining an audience. I didn’t do the work, but I got paid—and it seemed like I was keeping the other guys’ spirits up as much as my own.
“Sometimes I get in a fretful mood about the way the Monkees get to visit some interesting place but we never get to see much of it. It’s straight in, then into a hotel, and straight off again once the performance is over. But with the Phoenix group, there weren’t any troubles about folk recognising us. We could wander round the streets as long as we liked and it would be a minor miracle if anyone so much as asked for our autograph.
“I sang with them, played banjo and guitar—and we earned what we could. I developed this way of kinda begging audiences for money, once we’d finished… that’s if we were in one of those clubs like I used to play in the Village. I’d get the back off my banjo and pass it round. But first, a little speech, which I’d carefully rehearsed.
“I’d tell ’em that they were virtually on trial as music-lovers. They were going to contribute to me, and the rest of the group, according to how well they’d understand the high-class musical performance we’d laid on for them. I’d say that ordinary coins would go in like a kind of clunking noise. But paper money, indicating that the donor had been really able to appreciate our work, would go in with a mere swish. A swish was the thing to aim for! It was all tongue-in-cheek, but you know something? I betcha I got more swishes than clunks.”
After a few more months in California, Peter’s pal Steve Stills pointed out the advertisement for a crazy group to be known as the Monkees. But that’s still a long way off as we unfold the Monkee story… and we can leave him there, serenading among the sinks in hotels.
And we can rejoin Micky Dolenz, who had just come back from his big-game hunting expedition to the other side of the world. When Micky was only seventeen, he was a veteran of the Hollywood acting scene, but he was still a very young and insecure lad. So when his father died, quite suddenly, he felt very much alone—and he also felt the responsibility of looking after the rest of the family weighing heavily upon him. So he took a job, quite well-paid as it happens, as a mechanic in a garage which specialised in Mercedes Benz cars.
Let Micky talk about this time of his life…. in his own words. “I’d graduated from high school and really I wanted to go on to college. But we had to have some money coming in, and anyway I was going through a spell when I thought the most important thing in my life was standing on my own two feet. What happened was that through this garage I became completely dominated by cars. I love ’em.
“Getting all covered in oil and working long hours didn’t worry me at all. I’d start in on repairing some groovy set of wheels and I’d even forget about breaking off for my lunch. Sometimes I looked at a special sort of car and thought it was much more attractive even than a beautiful girl. Mind you, that went out of my head just as soon as I went home, because we had some fabulous chicks in the neighbourhood.”
Another instalment next month!
