When he wasn't getting screamed at by nine-year olds, Peter Tork was walking around naked in his hippie flop-house mansion, indulging in drugs and orgies, and putting his hippie money where his hippie mouth was and handing out cash, food, and beer to seemingly everyone he encountered from the biggest pop stars of his day (especially the future members of Crosby, Stills, and Nash) to the lowliest aspiring local musicians. What he got in return from his so-called friends was bankruptcy, but he apparently greeted it all with a zen attitude whether he was going to jail for a bullshit drug charge or being reduced to busking on the street to pull in a few coins to support himself and his family.
Peter's innate kindness and sunny disposition, and the empathy of his biographer, Sergio Faras, make Love Is Understanding: The Life and Times of Peter Tork and The Monkees a consistently pleasurable read. Peter never wanted anyone to write his biography, but I like to think that he might have been content with Faras's fair, respectful, and thorough treatment of the actor/musician's life. While Faras does not shy away from aspects of Peter's life that might have seemed seamy on the pages of another writer's book, he does so without judgement or an exploitative tone. I learned much about that life in this book, such as how Peter's parents allowed him to drink at a very young age (which may have set him up for alcoholism later in life), that he was briefly in Buffalo Springfield, that Mike lobbied to allow Peter to be the lead singer of "Saturday's Child", that The Monkees vetoed a pre-fame Steven Spielberg from directing an episode of their show, and that the FBI was keeping a dossier on those subversive "Monkeys" you can read it online here!).
However, Faras also has a tendency to take certain well disseminated myths at face value. He repeats debunked lines about how the Daughters of the American Revolution lobbied to get Jimi Hendrix kicked off a tour with The Monkees and how The Monkees outsold The Beatles and Stones combined in 1967, a stat Nesmith admits he made up on the spot during an interview. The author sometimes misinterprets (his analysis of the lyrics of "Love Is Only Sleeping" is really far off, and more scandalously, he states that Mike was dating 15-year old Winona Ryder in 1986 when Mike, who'd been producing a film starring the actor at the time, merely escorted her to a Monkees concert). He also keeps insisting that the Head soundtrack was a precursor to all of those bloated all-star charity records of the eighties for some reason. So you might want to take some of this stuff with a grain of salt or at least do a little of your own fact checking.
Because Faras is Brazilian and Love Is Understanding was originally published in Portuguese, the new English translation from BearManor Media also has some minor wording issues (using "wedding" as a synonym for "marriage" or using the term "jokester" instead of "fool" to describe a well-known Shakespearean archetype, for example) that aren't too distracting. The abundant proofing errors (missing spaces between words is a regular issue throughout the book) are a bit much, though. Nevertheless, navigating typos and the occasional odd statement is a small price to pay for what is mostly an engrossing and intimate look at a talented, complex, thoroughly original artist who was anything but faceless.
