Peter Tork

1967:

Dear Mickey, Davy, Peter, and Mike:

Hi! How are you? I'm in study hall right now. It's really boring. I don't really have any homework to do. I'm supposed to be working on math problems, but they don't make any sense. Math is stupid. 

My school is really old. I think it was built when the first settlers came to Mandan. It's kind of dark. Every sound bounces off the walls. You should see this room. It's huge! A teacher I don't know is sitting at a desk on top of the stage. I think this must have been an auditorium in the olden days. Some boy just dropped his textbook and everybody jumped from the racket. 

I hate this school. Sometimes I have nightmares about its big wide staircase. Stupid boys like to make fun of shy girls and pull their hair or make mean comments when I'm just trying to go up to the second floor to my stupid earth science class.

How's Hollywood? I wanted to come out and visit your psychedelic pad, but if I miss school my mom will be mad. Maybe this summer. 

I really like your new song "I'm A Believer". Mickey, you really play groovy drums and I love your singing! Thank you for asking me to sing on your next record!

Davy, your tambourine playing is so cool. Peter, you are so funny! I laugh a lot at all the funny predicaments you get into. Mike, I really like your hat. I watch your show every Monday night.

If you get the time, could you come and visit me? I haven't actually met any friends yet. 

Well, the bell's gonna ring so I'd better finish this up. I just wanted to say hi.


2019:

I learned yesterday that Peter Tork passed away. Unless you were a twelve-year-old girl in 1967, Peter's passing probably doesn't mean a whole lot to you. Especially if you weren't a twelve-year-old girl who'd just moved from the only home she'd ever known to a new town, a new state; had a supremely dysfunctional home life and no friends. The Monkees were my 1967 lifeline.

I don't know why I glommed onto The Monkees, except that they were accessible ~ there they were on NBC television, reliably, every Monday night at seven p.m. We lived in a cramped apartment behind my mom and dad's newly purchased motel. I shared a cupboard-sized bedroom with my three and four-year-old siblings and aside from the spare minutes during which I could drop the stylus down on a 45-rpm record and spin Neil Diamond before my little brother and sister wandered home, my only refuge was the broiling console TV squatting in our living room. 

The Monkees were my lifeline. I did sit in a cavernous room with about a hundred other kids I didn't know, whiling away my time. And instead of completing my homework assignments, I wrote letters to each of The Monkees. I had different colored pens I used for each of the four band members ~ red, green, blue, and purple. Each of The Monkees received personalized letters that I never mailed. 

The me that exists today would say those letters were a means of working out my feelings. That sounds good. I did have a lot of emotions I was not allowed to express, because what did my problems matter, really, when Mom and Dad had so many issues to sort out ~ prime among them that they were both crazy?

I think my first cognizance of The Monkees was "Last Train To Clarksville", which was included on an LP that my big brother gave me as a birthday gift. 

As a marketing concept, it was prescient. Much like with the Beatles, I was primed for what was yet to come. I'd not even yet laid eyes on The Monkees, and already I was a fan.

The Monkees had superb songs. And here's a tip that you can only glean from a twelve-year-old girl: We didn't give a F if Mickey, Davy, Peter and Mike didn't play their own instruments on their records. How would we even have known that?? Music was magic that emanated from our transistor radios. Magic. If I'd learned that someone called The Wrecking Crew had cobbled these songs together, it would have made zero difference to me; and twelve-year-old me wouldn't have bought into it anyway. After all, I saw with my own eyes Mickey beating on the drums and Davy banging his tambourine. And Peter doing something on the piano and Mike Nesmith strumming a guitar and looking bored (Mike was, needless to say, my least favorite Monkee).

I don't think I was even cognizant that the group was pre-fab. Subliminally I knew the four of them didn't actually share an abandoned flophouse. But before their TV show had debuted, they were just another pop group on the radio like The Beau Brummels or The Buckinghams, only more exciting. 

The Monkees came along at about the same time my family was making the move to our new life. The reality of my new existence did not match my initial euphoria. I was too shy to even know how to begin to make new friends, and frankly, I needed to scope these strangers out first to know if I even wanted to be friends with them. When you go to the same school from kindergarten through sixth grade, you don't worry about making friends. Your friends are always just there. Friendship doesn't require any thought or effort. Kids don't react well to a new shy person. They just avoid you ~ you're weird; there's something wrong with you. Maybe you are developmentally disabled.

So, I sat in study hall from 11:00 to noon and wrote letters to The Monkees in my spiral-bound notebook...with different colored pens.

The Monkees TV show only lasted two seasons. By the end of its run I'd found a best friend and the group's significance to me had faded. Mickey, Davy, Peter and Mike had filled my friendship void, though, when I desperately needed someone.

To celebrate Peter's life, here are some of my favorite Monkee songs:

My personal favorite (thanks, Carole King):

Like most memories, I guess you had to be there. "Being there", though, wasn't too much fun. The Monkees, however, made it at least endurable.

Thanks, Peter, for being my pen pal. Say hi to Davy for me.

 

Hey Hey ~ I Guess This Is Goodbye

We're long past the time, thankfully, when people critics looked down on the Monkees as a silly pre-fab pop group.

When the news broke on Wednesday that Davy Jones had died, everybody I know, including my husband, felt sad, and wistful.

Someone at work told me.  Her mom had texted her the news, because her mom knew what a crush my co-worker had had on Davy when she was a child.  And everybody I talked to said the same thing!  "I was going to marry him!"

I, for one, was not going to marry Davy Jones.  I was going to marry Micky Dolenz.

But all the girls had "their Monkee".  I'm sure some girls were even going to marry Peter, or Mike.

Once I'd heard, of course, I immediately went online, even though it wasn't my lunch break, and that's actually frowned upon, but I'm sure exceptions can be made in the event of world-shattering news.

What intrigued, and gratified me, was that the comments on the stories I read about Davy were 100% positive.  You know how you always get the trolls, who feel all important by posting some nasty, misspelled comment?  I didn't find any trolls.  I checked a few different sites, and no trolls.

People, even the no-life losers, could find nothing but love to express for Davy, and for the Monkees.

Why is that?

You know, a few famous people have died recently (more than a few, sadly).  And when you read the story comments, there's always a bunch of hate-filled remarks, right there, alongside the glowing.

But none about Davy.

People of a certain generation, who are wont to comment, because their hearts are broken, hold the Monkees close to their hearts, and there is good reason for that.

Remember the most awkward, embarrassing time of your life.  How old were you?  Twelve or thirteen?

I was actually eleven when the show debuted in 1966.  Here's my story:

We moved to a new town, a new state, when I was eleven years old.  It was in the middle of my sixth-grade year.  The middle of the school year!  As if it wasn't bad enough that we had to move, and I had to leave all my friends behind, and I had to maneuver through the halls of a completely unfamiliar environment, I had to show up in the middle of the year!  And make that torturous walk into a strange classroom, and the teacher made me stand there, right upfront, like a complete freak, while she introduced me to a group of strangers.  And they all just sat there and stared at me.  All I wanted to do was go home, albeit a home that was also unfamiliar, but at least my family was there, so there was someone who knew me.

I dreaded, dreaded recess.  My MO was to go out onto the playground, and find a nice, safe corner to stand in, for the eight hours fifteen minutes that recess lasted, until, mercifully, the bell rang, and I could go back inside.

Most of the kids just kindly ignored me.  One or two brave ones would approach me and try to make conversation.  Ever notice who those kids are, the ones who do that?  They're usually the ones who are considered the "outcasts".  How cruel.  Pre-teens and teenagers mock people like that; mercilessly taunt them; when these are actually the good people; the ones who don't mind showing a bit of kindness to the new geek.

In the days before there was such a thing as "middle school", the school that I moved to was somewhat unique, I guess.  The elementary and junior high school were both housed in one big building.  So, as I moved from the sixth grade, and my one home-base classroom, I stayed in the same place for seventh grade; I just had to move around a lot between classes, and try to get to my next period before the bell rang.

So, as a new seventh-grader, I got my schedule (and a locker!), and I had the usual stuff:  English, Life Science, Math, Phy Ed (another excruciating experience), Reading (Was there actually a class called, "reading"?  I think so.)  And another "class" on my schedule was Study Hall.  How can that be a class?  There's nobody teaching it.

I think Study Hall (for me) was right after lunch.  There was this cavernous room; I think maybe in the 1920's, it was a lecture hall for college agricultural college students, or something.  Bear in mind, this building had been around since approximately the time that the town was founded.

So, this "room", if you can even call it a room; more like an alien planet, held hundreds of desks.  And there was a platform way at the front; a raised platform, with a desk, for the Study Hall "teacher" to sit at.  If I'd had binoculars, I could have possibly almost seen him or her.  And the platform itself, and the steps leading up to it, were built from sleek marble.  Now that I think about it, it was just weird; a weird other-worldly experience.

And I don't know how school is now; I'm guessing there's a lot more homework, but back then, we really didn't need study hall.  It was just a filler.  A schedule filler.

The boys would throw spitballs at each other (the teacher couldn't see them, obviously, unless she had binoculars).

Nobody around me, that I could tell, was actually doing any actual schoolwork. 

I had a notebook, and I had four pens:  a blue one, a red one, a green one, and a black one.  And I would take my notebook and write letters to each of the Monkees; Micky, Davy, Peter, and Mike; each letter in a different colored ink.

I would write letters to them as if we were friends.  As if we were just shooting the breeze.

This is how I spent my time in study hall.  Every day.  Five days a week.  Because I had no friends.  So, the Monkees were my friends.

So, what does the passing of Davy Jones mean to me?

Davy was one of the few (four) friends I had when I was twelve and thirteen.

Because everybody else was a stranger. No, I wasn't a total loser.  I met the best friend I ever had in my life in the sixth grade, although we hadn't yet become best friends at that point.  I was still feeling pretty much alone, in a new town, a new school, a new swarm of faces.

I needed the familiar, and Davy, Micky, Peter, and Mike were familiar.  And they liked me, and didn't judge me.

So, hats off to you, Davy.  Thanks for being my friend.  Even though you didn't even know it.