have officially Done My Banjo Research (i.e. consulting with my musician friend & testing out a few models irl) & have settled on the one I'm going with. It's a super light beginner/travel model that I'll actually be able to hold without exhausting myself & I'm sooo excited, I have so many songs I want to learn 🐻🪕
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Performing in Houston on October 27, 1979; photo via RockinHouston dot com.
“The Great American Food and Beverage Company is an institution in [Santa Monica, Calif.]. […] A waiter in his ‘30s, older than the others, made his way to the podium, banjo in hand.
He seemed strangely familiar in an unusual outfit whose suspenders gave him a whimsical air. He was very thin, with an angular, almost bony face and straight, mid-ear length dirty blond hair that was parted in the middle. That was all fine. But he also had a mustache and bags under his eyes that somehow didn’t seem quite right.
[…] Then came the memory of who he was. His name was Peter Tork, and more than a decade ago he was one of the four Monkees […].
And now Tork was a singing waiter. I assumed that few would recognize him — and that he’d probably rather not be recognized. So I decided to respect his privacy.
But then, on the way out, he overheard me mention to someone that I was a writer visiting California to do some celebrity interviews, and he said to me, just a trace of bitterness in his voice, ‘Hey, how’d you like to do a story on a former great?’
Peter Tork now lives with his wife and two small children in Venice, Calif., […]. His home is a ramshackle duplex with badly chipped white paint on the outside and a gate that’s locked by a clothes hanger.
Inside, the apartment has second-hand furniture with wobbly legs and sports bare wood floors of the kind it’s not fashionable to leave uncovered. An old sheepdog with a very doggy smell lies under an even older piano.
In 1965, Peter Tork was washing dishes in Huntingon Beach, Calif., for $50 a week when he was recommend for the Monkees by a musician friend named Stephen Stills […|. ‘In those days we were both folksingers, and we were known as the two cats who looked alike,’ Tork said. ‘He turned me on to the situation.’
[…] Today Peter Tork is 36. In his three years as a Monkee, he guesses he made a million dollars. Except for a trust he can’t touch until 1985, it’s all gone.
‘It just poured through,’ he recalled, without being at all maudlin. ‘It was like a tidal wave after a drought. The amount was so grotesque that I didn’t know what to do with it. I spent hundred-dollar bills like quarters.’
He calls himself a socialist now and says he’d be ‘philosophically and religiously prone to give that kind of money away anyway. But I dribbled it away.’ And that bothers him.
‘
I lived in Studio City in a big house that cost too much. I didn’t know how good I had it. I had no basis of comparison. I never got competent professional advice (from his producers, on how to invest his money). I’m bitter about that. They didn’t know how to handle a flash rather than someone who’d clawed his way to the top. Now I’ve been on the fringes. Now I know what it’s like to claw.’
Among other things, the fringes found him busted for alleged dope dealing. ‘It was ‘72. I was caught coming across the border from Mexico with some hash in my pocket,’ he said. ‘For a while, they thought they’d get me for a big smuggling rap. I ended up spending just three-and-a-half months in custody. I recommend it to all my good friends.’
After that experience, he worked for three years as a teacher. Then the school closed in the midst of a strange embezzlement scandal. So Tork decided to take another stab at show business.
He has reactivated some old contacts and recently tried out at Paramount for comedy spots on ‘Happy Days,’ ‘Laverne and Shirley’ and ‘Mork and Mindy.’
‘
I’m trying comedy because I know I’m glib, and I know I’m good at it,’ he said.
‘And I’m taking acting lessons. I’ll be glib one day in drama too.
‘Maybe first I can get a walk-on, then some solid comedic roles, then maybe in time a feature role in another series, then films, then maybe I can make enough to finance my music, which is really what I want to do,’ he said, the bounds of his quite sincere fantasy mushrooming in a minute.
[…] In the meantime, while he waits for a casting call, his show-business career still consists of The Great American Food and Beverage Company, where he has worked since last summer.
‘It’s something to do with my hands while I’m waiting,’ he said. ‘It’s a place where you’re allowed to sing, and everybody uses it to keep their chin up while waiting for their big break — like “The Gong Show” or something.’ A touch of bitterness there, again.
‘It’s just that the people don’t shut up (at the restaurant). I wish they would. You basically have to drown them out. But… it is a chance.’
With that, Peter Tork picked himself up to go to work. It was his turn to wash dishes.” - article by Steve Sonsky, The Miami Herald, February 18, 1979
“Well, what I thought was great was that [Peter] always seemed to be humble and very, very gracious in his actions and his attitude. He always treated everybody with respect. He stayed low-key until we would kick up with a group number and then he would join in. […] Everybody else has been joking about how he wasn’t Pete, he was Peter. You can tell a lot about a person when they do whatever they need to do for their family. And the only thing else that I would add is that the fact that he stayed so humble and so gracious after a lot of us had grown up with him as an icon means a lot.” - D J Barker, Tales of the Road Warriors, 2019 (x)
“I worked with Peter in the mid seventies. A kinder, gentler, gracious and giving human being you could never find. His sense of humor and positivity was a gift to all of those lucky enough to be around him. He loved his life, (in spite of it sometimes!)[.]” - D J Barker, Facebook, February 13, 2023 (x)
“There was a period where I was broke. And I called home, I said, ‘Send money.’ ‘No, sorry, kiddo, you’re on your own.’ So there was a restaurant, a two-restaurant chain, there were two restaurants — a short chain, a very small chain, two links — in L.A. called The Great American Food and Beverage Company. And the trick to this establishment was that you had to be a musician, you had to audition to work at this restaurant. And I really, really, really, really, really didn’t want to work there, but I really, really, really needed the money. Anyway, so I’m standing in the kitchen, it’s my first day, and I’m dressed in this ridiculous outfit, and a bunch of us are lined up. And the coked up manager was marching up and down in front of us like a drill sergeant. And as we’re standing there listening to this madman, the kitchen door swings open, and who should walk in but none other than Peter Tork from The Monkees. And I watch Peter Tork walk by me, take a time card and punch in the time clock and get in line right next to me. And my mouth dropped open. And it became evident at that point that he was working as a waiter at the restaurant. And this is Peter Tork from the fucking Monkees. This man was, you know, as big, if not bigger, than The Beatles in the U.S. at one point in his career. And I watched my whole life pass before my eyes.” - Matthew Wilder, Speaking of Music with Jason Faber
More about Peter's time at the Great American Food and Beverage Company in a second post.
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