Peter Tork on blues: I'm a believer

Date: 15 Jul 2003 14:47:52 GMT
Newsgroups: rec.music.rock-pop-r+b.1960s
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Peter Tork on blues: I'm a believer
By DAVID HINCKLEY
NY DAILY NEWS FEATURE WRITER
When they were American idols in the 1960s, the pop hits of Peter Tork and the
Monkees stood at the other end of the pop music spectrum from, say, the fierce
blues of bands like Paul Butterfield's. But that will be Peter Tork tomorrow at
the Cutting Room, playing the blues with his own band, Shoe Suede Blues.
Their blues mix, captured on last year's CD "Saved by the Blues," is rich and
eclectic. They play Robert Johnson's hypnotically intense "Come on in My
Kitchen." They play Louis Jordan and Muddy Waters.
And they play bluesy renditions of several Monkees tunes.
"It's all of a piece," says Tork. "It flows together."
Tork met the blues through his mother's jump and swing records, then again as
part of the '60s Village folk crowd.
Then he spent the later '60s as a Monkee - whose key legacy, he argues, is not
their music.
"Yes, we were imitations of the Beatles," he says. "Yes, we were copying 'A
Hard Day's Night.' But we were also, until very recently, the only television
show about young adults that didn't rely on an older adult authority figure.
"The message of 'The Monkees' was that when authority goes off course, you have
to rely on yourselves. We needed that message during Vietnam. We need it again
today. You can argue about the Monkees' music, but that message was their
enduring contribution."
Not that he minded the hits.
"Back then," he says, "having a hit record meant it was a good record."
Today, while Tork still records, he admits, "I wouldn't have any idea how to
get into the commercial market. For me, most of what's there just isn't very
good. It has no meaning to me."
So he plays something that does: the blues.
"You don't have to have been a black sharecropper to play the blues," he says.
"But you do have to have overcome the white man's disease, which is
'otherizing' everyone else - distancing yourself from the humanity of anyone
who isn't you.
"Once you overcome that, the only question about playing the blues is whether
you feel them."
It's a musical question, in most ways, and Tork has a musical answer.
"When you catch a good blues groove," he says, "it's unlike anything else in
this world."
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"I don't mind lying, but I hate inaccuracy." -- Samuel Butler