Backstage in Salt Lake City on May 17, 1968. Photo by Henry Diltz.
“Can You Dig It started off as a chart, I mean, the basic signature chord change I wrote in college and didn’t knew what to do with it, and then a couple years later — and I’d always wondered what to do with it — and the a couple of years later, I just… I was daydreaming on the subject of esoteric reading I’d been doing and the lyric just popped out. And I was sitting int he dressing room… I was not in front of the microphone, and suddenly it just all fell out of me on paper, and I said, ‘Oh, here it is!’ and I circled it, and it matches the chords and everything, and that was that.” - Peter Tork, interviewed by Jack Garrett, 2004 “I wrote a set of chords once [in college] and thought, 'Gosh, this is great.’ I couldn’t think of anything to do with them. A couple years later I wrote 'Can You Dig It,’ to those chords. They were… let’s see: D-minor to B-flat major 7th to an E diminished 9th chord. That’s a really interesting way to set it up to the V chord. Or to look at it another way: we’re in A — Arab scale, which is— I don’t want to get too heavy. But it’s an unusual scale in Western music, in pop music. And it worked fine for me. I was just really glad. It just fell out of my hands again. It really felt good.” - Peter Tork, Shanley On Music, 2014 “‘Can You Dig It’ is about the Tao. The hook line I wrote in my dressing room on the set [of the television series in 1967]. The chords for the chorus I’d written in college, and [they] had just stuck with me. I hadn’t been able to do a thing with them until I was sittin’ there, just writin’ on a scrap of paper with ideas, and I wrote, 'Can you dig it?/Do you know/Would you care to let it show?’ Those three as a triplet — as opposed to a couplet. I just looked at them and [went], 'Wow!’ I grabbed a pencil and circled those three. They were part of a quatrain. I said, ‘Wait a minute. No, this works best as a little three-line chorus.’” - Peter Tork, Head box set liner notes “When I recorded ‘Can You Dig It,’ the guitar solo originally ran about three or four minutes all by itself. We cut that back to a minute and a half. Bob Rafelson took a pair of scissors and snipped off the end of it. He didn’t ask me to shorten it, which I would have been glad to do. He just chopped it off. Son of a bitch! I have a lot of gripes about that, but that’s neither here nor there.” - Peter Tork, Blitz!, May/June 1980 ("Can You Dig It" (demo) | You can watch Peter perform the song live during The Monkees' 1987 tour.)
