The blues sounds easy to play, but Peter Tork knows better.
That's right, Peter Tork. Former Monkee, recovering alcoholic. He knows about the blues, despite coming up as a Greenwich Village folkie in the early '60s.
"Two things stopped me from playing the blues then," Tork says from his Los Angeles home, before leaving for a tour with his band Shoe Suede Blues that stops Saturday at Baltimore's Mojo Room and Lounge. "One was that half the kids playing the blues were simply imitating the blues. They were mouthing the blues. I heard a John Hammond tune recently, and it sounded like he was trying to be Lightnin' Hopkins."
The other reason, Tork says, was a matter of upbringing.
"I knew I was growing up a middle-class white kid, and I was not sure what I had to contribute to the blues," he says. "And now I do believe I know something, do believe I've got something. And I'm still a middle-class white kid, but I believe it's more than that."
The middle-class white kid was born in Washington and lived in Detroit, Germany and New York before his family settled in Mansfield, Conn., where his father taught economics for years at the University of Connecticut. After trying the Greenwich Village scene, Tork moved to L.A., where he auditioned and won a spot as one of the Monkees, a made-for-TV band inspired by the Beatles' A Hard Day's Night. Next came a solo career that eventually led Tork to the blues.
"What I didn't know at the beginning and know now is that the blues is not about the blues," he says. "The reason that you listen to the blues is because when you listen to the blues, you know that you're in this together. The blues is about everybody's [having] had the blues. The blues is about community -- not about how lonely I am, but everybody's been lonely."
Shoe Suede Blues came together a few years ago when Tork and some acquaintances played a benefit for a women's recovery house. A few gigs around L.A. followed, and then trips to the East Coast. Now the band has simple goals.
"World domination," Tork says, deadpan. "World peace through intimidation."
The Hartford Courant is a Tribune Publishing newspaper.
