What Peter Tork Believed Monkees Fans Would Regret “To Their Dying Day” About These 1967 Concerts

“Hindsight is 20/20” and “entertainment culture is fleeting” are two of life’s certainties. They’re also the reasons why Peter Tork believes some Monkees fans felt as if they had egg on their face in the final years of the 1960s.

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That is, of course, if these Monkees fans happened to be at a show between July 8 and July 17, 1967. Attendees of this small batch of concerts had the pleasure of seeing both The Monkees and rising star Jimi Hendrix.

The only problem was that the crowds didn’t seem to be aware of just how brightly that rising star was burning.

The Monkees’ Fans Didn’t Take Kindly to Jimi Hendrix

Jimi Hendrix had a stellar reputation amongst fellow musicians around 1967. But he wasn’t quite a household name. Music lovers of the more, shall we say, square variety might not have been hip to a heavy rocker like Hendrix. Monkees and Hendrix fans weren’t necessarily crossing paths yet. So, when Hendrix joined The Monkees as their opening act for a string of shows in early July, the teenybopper fans made their qualms known. Loudly.

Fans screamed for The Monkees throughout Hendrix’s opening sets. But even as a made-for-TV band, The Monkees knew talent when they saw it. The crowd’s reactions didn’t boost their ego. They mortified the band, who were fully aware of what their fans were disregarding in real time.

“Jimi would amble out onto the stage, fire up the amps, and break out into ‘Purple Haze’. The kids in the audience would instantly drown him out with ‘We want Daaavy!’ God, was it embarrassing,” Micky Dolenz later recalled.

Peter Tork Believed His Fans Likely Regretted Their Behavior 

During a 1982 appearance on Late Night with David Letterman, Monkees bassist and keyboardist Peter Tork shared similar sentiments to his bandmate, Micky Dolenz. Tork recalled how he and his bandmates would show up to their concerts with enough time to catch Jimi Hendrix’s set because they knew just how good he was. In fact, it was Hendrix’s show-stopping performance at the Monterey Pop Festival that landed the guitarist on The Monkees’ tour in the first place. Still, Monkees fans weren’t having it.

Smiling, Tork recalled Hendrix making an “obscene gesture” at the crowd. “I know that there are many out there now who will regret to their dying day that they didn’t stand still and listen to this giant. It was a tragic mistake from Jimi’s point of view. While I got an awful lot of enjoyment. We’d go early and listen to this great music blazing, and then we’d go out and dance for the kids.”

Hendrix left The Monkees tour on July 17, 1967, a decision that likely disappointed the headliners but was well-received by the fans—and Hendrix himself, who referred to The Monkees’ music as “embarrassing.” And ultimately, Tork joked that it was “probably very prestigious” for Hendrix to have gotten kicked off a Monkees tour. For someone spearheading the counterculture rock ‘n’ roll movement, you couldn’t ask for a better middle finger to the mainstream.

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