Web posted Friday, October 5, 2001

Telling it like it is
The Kingston Trio's Bob Shane on the road, life, and how he became a 'folk singer'

By Gene Downs
Savannah Morning News

Factoid of the day: The Kingston Trio is named for the capital of Jamaica, but the band has never performed on the island.

And to hear original member Bob Shane tell it, they never will.

"Why would I want to go there?" he asks in his typically blunt manner. "I'm from Hawaii. We have better coffee and dope."

The Kingston Trio will perform tonight at the Savannah Civic Center. It's part of a two-stop weekend swing up the East Coast; the other stop is in Connecticut.

This conversation took place one weekday last week. It was 7 a.m. in Phoenix, where Shane lives with his wife Bobbie and his collection of Martin guitars. It seemed kind of early in the day to be talking to a musician. But when he's home, Shane usually wakes up around 6; when he's on tour (about 30 weeks a year), he adapts.

"What I've found, from many years of being on road, is that you set your watch to whatever time zone you're in and try not to let it bother you," Shane said. "When you've been on the road for 3-10 days, it's coming home that screws you up. The rest of time, you're traveling and making money."

Shane has been traveling and making money with the Trio since it formed in 1957 as a calypso group (therefore, the name The Kingston Trio). Shane was born and raised in Hawaii and Nick Reynolds and Dave Guard were both native Californians. In less than four months, they began moving toward folk-oriented material.

Shane, however, insists that they never called themselves folk singers.

How the whole folk-music myth got started was when a disc jockey in Salt Lake City started playing a cut from the band's first album. Released in 1958 and basically just their live show on vinyl, the record included some folksy stuff, some calypso stuff and even a show tune or two. It didn't do particularly well, and the Kingston Trio flew off to Hawaii to play some gigs there.

Meanwhile, two DJs at KLUB in Salt Lake City started playing a cut from the record called "Tom Dooley" that Guard had adapted from a 19th-century folk tune.

Other stations started playing the song, and "Tom Dooley" went on to sell 3 million copies in a few weeks, topping the pop, country and R&B charts, and prompting interest from the major labels.

As Shane tell it, "A guy from Capitol (Records) came to us with a big check and said, 'Here! You're folk singers.' And I looked at the check and said, 'You bet your ass we are.'"

The group went on to win the first Grammy Award for best country/western performance, which gave a great boost to the C&W music industry. So much so that in the late '50s, Shane had T-shirts printed for the band members with the slogan, "The Hawaiian calypso folk group that saved country music."

The recording session for the legendary song was less than memorable, and Shane remembers nothing about it. "I don't remember last week," he says. "I'm 67. I don't have to remember s**t like that.

"It was just a very simple song. It had two chords and three verses and two choruses. We got it from a guy who was playing it at the Purple Onion (a San Francisco club). We thought it was a good song, but it's not one we thought would be a big hit."

Famously prolific, the band went on to record 10 hit albums in four years. At one point in the early '60s, The Kingston Trio had five albums simultaneously listed among the top 15 sellers.

By 1961, though, things had turned sour on a personal level and Guard left the band - a development that caused Shane no tears.

"He was an a**hole," he said of Guard. "He quit at the peak of our success. He kept thinking it was his doing entirely ... Dave died in 1995, and we made our peace with him before he died. We were even talking about doing a tour."

Guard's departure, in fact, did little to curb The Kingston Trio's popularity. "Close Up," their first post-Guard album, reached No. 3 on the charts.

In the decades since, others have come and gone. In all, there have been about a dozen men who have performed under the moniker The Kingston Trio - not a big turn-over rate, considering the group's been around for 44 years with only a half-year break from 1967-68.

Finally, Shane bought the rights to the name in 1976 and has held the reins - very firmly - ever since.

"I bought the name so I could have complete control, so it could stay the way it should stay," he said. "Now, we do all the old stuff. Hell, we've got 450 songs we recorded from '57-'67; we've got great material to draw upon."

Shane has no definite plans to quit. He'd like to make it to the 50-year performance mark. But he admits that the recent terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, D.C., have made him question all of the flying time required of a tour. (The band members have always flown commercial airlines.)

When he does quit, he'll lease the name to George Grove (who joined the trio in 1976) and Bobby Haworth (two Trio stints totaling eight years) so the band will continue.

"They can keep it going indefinitely," Shane said. "The Four Freshmen had almost exactly the same arrangement. They played in Las Vegas for years and there were no members from the original group. But if you closed your eyes, you couldn't tell the difference."

The Kingston Trio genealogy
1957-61: Bob Shane, Dave Guard, Nick Reynolds.
1961-67: Bob Shane, Nick Reynolds, John Stewart
1968-1973 (as the New Kingston Trio): Bob Shane, Pat Horine, Jim Conner, Frank Passantino, Frank Sanchez.
1973-1976: Bob Shane, Bill Zorn, Roger Gamble.
1976-1985: Bob Shane, Roger Gamble, George Grove.
1985-1988: Bob Shane, George Grove, Bobby Haworth
1988-1999: Bob Shane, Nick Reynolds, George Grove
1999-2001: Bob Shane, George Grove, Bobby Haworth