Bill Seward
Well-Known Member
Seems like 1966 was just yesterday... Then I read that Peter Tork was 77 when he passed yesterday. Time flew!
RIP.
RIP.
Peter Tork.
- Thread starter Bill Seward
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A pop band, built from marketing and designed to appeal to pre-pubescent girls. Then-again, what isn't marketed, and who among us in their youth didn't want-to appeal to girls who had become young women? Anyway,
Something I posted elsewhere:
The most-mismatched tour 'partners' in the long history of rock & roll: the Monkees and the Jimi Hendrix Experience. Jimi was age 24, and was starting to get some notice on the USA side of the pond.
How in-hell do you take the stage after Jimi Hendrix?
One of my older brothers took my sister who was much-younger to see the Monkees, of-course he was there for Jimi. He also saw the Beatles in Toronto.
What Peter Tork said about the tour:
Nobody thought, “This is screaming, scaring-the-balls-off-your-daddy music compared with the Monkees,” you know? It didn’t cross anybody’s mind that it wasn’t gonna fly. And there’s poor Jimi, and the kids go, “We want the Monkees, we want the Monkees.” We went early to the show and listened to what this man could do because he really was a world class musician.
More info:
To make a bad situation even worse, Hendrix joined the tour in progress in Jacksonville, Florida on 8 July 1967, just before the Monkees were scheduled to play a couple of shows in North Carolina. One would have been hard pressed to have found a part of America less likely to appreciate what Micky Dolenz described as “this Black guy in a psychedelic Day-Glo blouse, playing music from hell, holding his guitar like he was f**king it, then lighting it on fire” and what Eric Lefcowitz termed “the cacophonic strains of Hendrix’s feedback orgies mixed with his lascivious sexuality.”
Matters came to head a few days later as the Monkees played a trio of dates in New York:
After a handful of gigs, Hendrix grew sick of the “We want the Monkees” chant that met his every performance. Finally, he flipped the bird at the less-than-enthusiastic crowd at Forest Hills Stadium in New York and stormed offstage.
Hendrix had had enough: “Purple Haze” was starting to dent the American record charts, and it was time for him to head out on his own and play for audiences who wanted to see him. He asked to be let out of his contract, and he and the Monkees amicably parted ways.
But one last bit of Monkee business turned an unforgettable experience into a legendary one.
Music critic Lillian Roxon, who was tagging along on the tour with her friend Lynne Randell, crafted a mischievous press release to explain Hendrix’s abrupt departure. She wrote, with tongue firmly planted in cheek, that the right wing group Daughters of the American Revolution had complained that Hendrix’s stage act was “too erotic” and he was “corrupting the morals of America’s youth,” and the DAR had pressured the promoters to dismiss him from the tour. The put-on went over the heads of most of “the establishment” and was duly printed as a straight news story, creating a “fact” that would continue to be cited for years to come. Hendrix, of course, went on to achieve superstardom before dying only three years later, leaving behind a legacy of classic rock music and one quirky little legend.
Read the whole story:
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/eroticked-off/
Something I posted elsewhere:
The most-mismatched tour 'partners' in the long history of rock & roll: the Monkees and the Jimi Hendrix Experience. Jimi was age 24, and was starting to get some notice on the USA side of the pond.
How in-hell do you take the stage after Jimi Hendrix?
One of my older brothers took my sister who was much-younger to see the Monkees, of-course he was there for Jimi. He also saw the Beatles in Toronto.
What Peter Tork said about the tour:
Nobody thought, “This is screaming, scaring-the-balls-off-your-daddy music compared with the Monkees,” you know? It didn’t cross anybody’s mind that it wasn’t gonna fly. And there’s poor Jimi, and the kids go, “We want the Monkees, we want the Monkees.” We went early to the show and listened to what this man could do because he really was a world class musician.
More info:
To make a bad situation even worse, Hendrix joined the tour in progress in Jacksonville, Florida on 8 July 1967, just before the Monkees were scheduled to play a couple of shows in North Carolina. One would have been hard pressed to have found a part of America less likely to appreciate what Micky Dolenz described as “this Black guy in a psychedelic Day-Glo blouse, playing music from hell, holding his guitar like he was f**king it, then lighting it on fire” and what Eric Lefcowitz termed “the cacophonic strains of Hendrix’s feedback orgies mixed with his lascivious sexuality.”
Matters came to head a few days later as the Monkees played a trio of dates in New York:
After a handful of gigs, Hendrix grew sick of the “We want the Monkees” chant that met his every performance. Finally, he flipped the bird at the less-than-enthusiastic crowd at Forest Hills Stadium in New York and stormed offstage.
Hendrix had had enough: “Purple Haze” was starting to dent the American record charts, and it was time for him to head out on his own and play for audiences who wanted to see him. He asked to be let out of his contract, and he and the Monkees amicably parted ways.
But one last bit of Monkee business turned an unforgettable experience into a legendary one.
Music critic Lillian Roxon, who was tagging along on the tour with her friend Lynne Randell, crafted a mischievous press release to explain Hendrix’s abrupt departure. She wrote, with tongue firmly planted in cheek, that the right wing group Daughters of the American Revolution had complained that Hendrix’s stage act was “too erotic” and he was “corrupting the morals of America’s youth,” and the DAR had pressured the promoters to dismiss him from the tour. The put-on went over the heads of most of “the establishment” and was duly printed as a straight news story, creating a “fact” that would continue to be cited for years to come. Hendrix, of course, went on to achieve superstardom before dying only three years later, leaving behind a legacy of classic rock music and one quirky little legend.
Read the whole story:
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/eroticked-off/
