By JEM ASWAD and CHRIS WILLMAN
CREDIT: BARRY PEAKE/SHUTTERSTOCK
Peter Tork, the bassist and wise-cracking character in the 1960s teen-pop sensation the Monkees, died today at the age of 77, a rep for the group confirmed to Variety. Speaking with the Washington Post, Tork's sister Anne Thorkelson did not specify a cause of death, although the guitarist had been diagnosed with a rare form of cancer a decade ago.
Tork wrote a blog piece for the Post about his diagnosis with adenoid cystic carcinoma after beginning treatment in 2009. Through most of the 10 years since, he had been able to resume an active musical life, participating in Monkees reunion shows as recently as 2016, and recording his own solo blues albums, the last of which, "Relax Your Mind," a Lead Belly tribute, came out in early 2018.
"There are no words right now… heartbroken over the loss of my Monkee brother, Peter Tork," Mickey Dolenz tweeted.
Michael Nesmith posted a lengthier appreciation. "Pardon me if I am being dogmatic - but I think it is harder to put together a band than a TV show - not to take anything away from TV shows," he wrote. "These days I watch MSNBC - mostly aghast at what I see - and what I am missing is 'madcap.' … Peter Tork died this a.m. I am told he slipped away peacefully. Yet, as I write this my tears are awash, and my heart is broken. Even though I am clinging to the idea that we all continue, the pain that attends these passings has no cure. It's going to be a rough day. I share with all Monkees fans this change, this 'loss,' even so. PT will be a part of me forever.
"I have said this before - and now it seems even more apt: the reason we called it a band is because it was where we all went to play," Nesmith continued. "A band no more, and yet the music plays on, an anthem to all who made the Monkees and the TV show our private - dare I say 'secret' - playground. As for Pete, I can only pray his songs reach the heights that can lift us and that our childhood lives forever - that special sparkle that was the Monkees. I will miss him - a brother in arms. Take flight my Brother."
The Monkees' legacy is a complicated one that even today polarizes serious rock fans, many of whom argue, as Nesmith did in his statement, that their transformation from a "manufactured" group to a "real" one deserves at least as much credit as anything with more organic beginnings. "Sometimes the question of the [Rock and Roll] Hall of Fame comes up, and I've been thinking lately that I don't know whether the Monkees belong in the Hall of Fame," Tork said, modestly, to the Baltimore Sun in 2016. "I mean, I would vote for us if I had a vote. But what I can say is if there was a hall of fame for television casts who became pop groups in their own right, we would be the only candidate."
While the Monkees were a television-centric, American version of the Beatles as depicted in "A Hard Day's Night," Tork and fellow guitarist Mike Nesmith were serious musicians who paid their dues on the folk and rock scenes of the early 1960s; vocalist Davy Jones and singer/drummer Micky Dolenz were former child actors. Tork played the "Ringo" role in the group, as a charming and goofy comic foil.