âPeter and I used to play around the Village more or less every night. He used to warm up the audience for me. I was reasonably well known in the coffee bars, and Iâd pay Peter a few dollars to get things started. He was a real nice guy⊠Easy-going, happy with life, ready to take things as they came. [âŠ]
Peter was as good a friend as anyone could wish to have. We knew each other very well then, and I used to listen to him play banjo before they passed around the basket. That was what we all did in those days, you understand. We werenât paid for playing or singing â it was just the practice to pass round a basket or shoebox and hope the patrons would be generous. Some people would put in a nickel, others a bit more.
Peter always did OK. He was a good musician â donât let anybody try to tell you otherwise â and the people appreciated him.â - Jose Feliciano, NME, June 3, 1967
ââLadies and gentlemen,â [Peter] would say, with a great flourish, âas you know, we poor folk singers donât get paid by the management â so we are forced to pass the basket and place ourselves at your generous mercy. If you like what Iâve done, please make a contribution. This will help keep me off the streets at night, get me a good spaghetti dinner once in a while, and enable me to buy stamps to write home to dear old mom. Now, Iâm going to pass my banjo around and if you put in silver it will go âclink-clink,â but â ah! â if you put in folding money, I will go âswishhh!â Now, if I go âswishhh,â everybody will know that you are not only a music lover, but a great philanthropist.â
At this point, Peter jumped off the stage and began to pass his banjo around. I was amazed at the âclinksâ and âswishhhsâ he got from the audience. He was really different; he was funny. He had more personality than all the rest. I remember thinking even then that Peter wasnât just a musician. He was more of an all âround entertainer.
A few days later I bumped into Tork again, and became aware of another of his outstanding characteristics. He was friendly. In fact, he was the friendliest guy in Greenwich Village! He came right up to me and started talking. Soon, we were having coffee together, and soon we were planning to do sets together. Before I go into that, however, I must tell you about one particularly funny night when I dropped into the Playhouse Cafe while Peter was working alone.
âAnd now, ladies and gentlemen,â I heard him saying, âIâm going to sing you a couple of original tunes. You may not know it, but I have a little brother who is a great songwriter. As a matter of fact, heâs working on a complete musical score for the theatre right now. His name is Nick Tork, and youâll be hearing a lot about him one day.â Then he launched into one of the most ridiculous and funny tunes I have ever heard. All I can remember about it is its title â Under The Undertaker Gah Goo-Gah. When the audience ârevived,â Peter launched into another of his brotherâs ditties â all about an alligator named Albert, who got flushed down the toilet! Well, some of the Village cats may have sneered at that, but the audience ate it up â and Peter got even more âclinksâ and âswishhhsâ in his banjo!
Another thing about Peter was his willingness. Although all of us wanted to work in the âbasket houses,â it was hard to get one person to go on stage and get the show started. Peter would always do this â and in a very cheerful manner. He was that somebody you could count on. He was very dedicated to his music and very ambitious, and even though he had a lot to learn vocally and musically there was an aura about him that made all of us feel that if anybody was ever going to make it big time from the Village, it would be Peter Tork.
Peter was also very much the âimpâ of the Village. He was like a funny genie, with a lock of hair falling across his forehead and a big smile on his face (except when he would grimace, stick his tongue out and perform various rubber-face antics for the audience). He was very popular with the girls who would come to the Village with their parents on a Sunday afternoon, and â believe it or not â many of the parents were straight-out Tork fans! His songs were accompanied by a good deal of light, humorous patter. In fact, he talked a lot. He sometimes tried to intellectualize his tales and often became tongue-tied and confused in doing so â which only made the audience love him all the more. He always âwrapped upâ his act with a classical piece, carefully plucked out on his funky banjo, sans vocal. It usually ended in a race â with Peterâs fingers always losing by a few notes here and there. But with his performance he left a happy house â and, as a result, he was very much in demand.
[âŠ]
At this point, Peter was living in a three-room, cold water flat on Bedford Street. Youâd have to see the place to believe it. It came complete with assorted bugs (you name âem â his pad had âem, from roaches on down). Since neither of us could afford a choice in the matter, I moved in with him and we set about decorating the place in âcontemporary side-streetâ (that is, discarded furniture we found in the various Greenwich Village alleyways) and Salvation Army specials. Believe it or not, we didnât even have a shower â so we used to have to âborrowâ the shower of the two girls who lived upstairs!
Hereâs as good a time as any to talk about girls. Next to his music, girls interested Peter Tork more than anything else in the whole wide world. He loved them all â and most of them loved him. Peter wasnât tall, dark or handsome, but he made up for his liabilities with his great warmth, enthusiasm and sense of humor. He was also basically a very kind and giving person. He just had a way of making people happy even when he was broke, freezing cold and there were no prospects for work in the future. That Pied Piper-ish quality Peter had attracted girls of all shapes and sizes. He had many brief romances and a couple of very serious ones, and even to today Peter is still good friends with almost every girl he knew, dated, or fell in love with during his Greenwich Village days.â - Lance Wakely, 16 Magazine, March 1967
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