Tork (far right) and Shoe Suede Blues.

The 37 years following Peter Tork's departure from the Monkees have included a string of obscure '70s California bands, a stint as a grade-school teacher and assorted Monkees reunions. For the past decade, Tork's musical passion has been his current group, Shoe Suede Blues. The four-piece combo is currently on tour in conjunction with the release of its second album. In a recent phone interview, Tork was quick to interject a disclaimer about "blues" as an accurate description of the Shoe Suede Blues style.

"I have to say in all honesty that we're not a pure blues band," he says. "We're basically a blues-based rock/pop/R&B band. But we do play some get-down, low-down, straight-ahead blues and some wonderful classics from the Chicago blues era — I mean, how can you not? — and we also do some original songs along the lines of classic Chicago blues.

"The name of the band has to do with that particular era of music where music all came together: blues and pop and rock and country and soul and R&B were all the same music," he continues. "There was incredible overlap among all the [genres]. Everybody was listening to all of it, and no one was trying to distinguish between it. I mean, there was Little Richard right next to Johnny Cash, and who would have ever thought those two would be on the same radio station at the same time? We're very much all about that: the overlap of music and the union of music."

With intermingling musical styles as the Shoe Suede Blues manifesto, the idea of mixing Monkees hits with blues standards in the same performance starts to make some logical sense. And Tork is also enjoying adding new twists to Monkees classics.

"One interesting thing we do, for instance, is a version of "Last Train to Clarksville' that is very bluesy, very newÅ very slinky," he says. "I mean, when you think about the tag line of that song, "And I don't think that I'm ever coming home,' it can be pretty bluesy and have a lot of blues thought to it."

Frustrated with circumstances in Monkeedom, Tork was the first to leave the group shortly after the 1968 release of Head, the Monkees' psychedelic experimental film. In addition to addressing the group's stigma as pre-fab musicians, Head explored themes of mass media's distortion of reality and identity, and individuals' strange interaction with celebrity.

"As far as being confused with the character I played on TV, that didn't happen too much. People who came up to me sort of all got that I was [just] playing a part, so that wasn't a big thing. But something interesting came up not too long ago. I was at a seminar and I was enjoying it pretty much, and the leader at one point said to me, "Hey, are you who they're telling me you used to be?' Suddenly the relationship totally changed. I was no longer a member of the public taking the seminar and he was the seminar leader. Suddenly, he was a fan and I was the former Monkee. It was so strange and so dislocating to have that shift in relationship so suddenly smack me in the face. In that way, it was strange, and remains strange."

But Tork doesn't see his celebrity past as too significant of a factor in his relationships with others.

"Almost no matter where people come from or what they know about me beforehand, once somebody gets to know me, that disappears," Tork says. "It's like, if you don't know too many persons of another race or nationality, you first meet them, and their race or nationality is a very big part of what's going on with them. But after you've hung out with them for a while, that recedes into the past, and they become the person, not the race or nationality, you see? And it's like that with being famous. After people get to know me, it never disappears, but it recedes into the background. And then who I really am comes into play much more deeply." n