T.A.M.I. Show (1964) dir. by Steve Binder.

“And [Davy] wants to talk to me about it because… I’m pretty much his best bud among the four of us. We sort of lined up that way: Davy and I on the one hand and Micky and Mike on the other.”

“When we meet in a cafe near his home in Connecticut, he checks that the cake he’s ordered is alcohol-free, explaining, ‘I’m an alcoholic, and that means once I pick up the first drink, something gets triggered and I have no resistance, so the answer is to not drink at all. I’m 34 years clean and dry now. I was awful when I was drinking, snarling at people.’ Indeed when Peter, Micky and Davy toured the US in 2001, Peter quit early, unable, he said, to put up with ‘the drinking and difficult behavior offstage.’ ‘The truth,’ says Peter now, ‘is that I’m still confused about my own behavior then and I’m not sure that I had all my own faculties at the time, sober or not. The drinking itself was not an issue and if it were, I would not have rejoined them.’ And he’d always found the fame hard to handle. ‘I gave a lot of my money away when I was younger – just left it in bowls around the house and people would help themselves to handfuls of it,’ he says. ‘I wasn’t thinking too clearly at the time and it might have been my low self-esteem, thinking that I didn’t deserve to keep the money, but it wasn’t really that bright, was it?’ he laughs. ‘I mean, there’s nothing wrong with giving money away to people, but give it where you can do some good.’” - Daily Mail, article by Lina Das, August 14, 2015

“‘We were getting along pretty well until I had a meltdown,’ [Tork] says. ‘I ticked the other guys off good and proper and it was a serious mistake on my part. I was not in charge of myself to the best of my ability – the way I hope I have become since. I really just behaved inappropriately, honestly. I apologized to them.’ He now says alcohol played only a small role in the group’s problems. ‘I’m sure it played a part, but I cannot honestly say it was anything more than a very slight part,’ he says. ‘It could have been very, very minor. But the main thing was that I had a meltdown and I messed up.’” - Rolling Stone, March 7, 2011

Q: “Your thoughts on being a pop culture icon.” Peter Tork: “I have nothing to compare it with. I didn’t have a life other than that life.  I did the best I could. I ran as hard as I could with what I had going. It was a wonderful trip and [I] enjoyed it hugely, and it was a pain in the ass, and I quit. I rejoined and I quit again. If that doesn’t tell you the size of my confusion then nothing will.” - Enigma Online, April 23, 2006