The Kingston Trio Lives!

25 years later, one of the originals carries on
-- but something's not quite the same.

Where have all the young men gone,
Long time passing?
Where have all the young men gone,
Long time ago?

By Eric Zorn

The clean-cut, well-scrubbed boys in the Kingston Trio seemed to step right out of the college classroom onto the covers of the nation’s magazines and to the top of the pop music charts. They blitzed the country in the late 1950s and early 1960s, jamming them in at almost 3OO concert stops a year and virtually monopolizing the airwaves.

For almost five years, they overshadowed all other pop groups in America. Five of their first six albums hit No. 1 on the charts, and they left behind a legacy of hit songs that remain ingrained in the memories of millions of music lovers: "Tom Dooley," "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?" "M.T.A.," "Scotch and Soda," "Greenback Dollar," "Tijuana Jail," and "El Matador." Their enormous commercial success launched the celebrated urban folk music revival of the ‘5Os, inspired an entire generation of folksingers and instrumentalists, and so changed the course of popular music that their impact is widely felt to this day.

They are still here, in body as well as spirit: Tonight, at a suburban Chicago banquet hall on one of the coldest weekends of the year, the Kingston Trio — or, more precisely, a remnant of the Kingston Trio — is playing to an audience of middle-aged business people, mothers and fathers. They have paid $17.50 for a prime rib dinner and a chance to recapture some of the exuberance they felt more than 20 years ago. Up on stage are three well-worn men, two in beards, playing country-rock versions of the songs that made folk music famous. Because the Trio faded so quickly and thoroughly in modern memory, their audience seems unsure: Are these really the same frisky boys, the Pied Pipers of pop, who captured the nation’s imagination a quarter of a century ago?

One member of the band is bald, another’s overweight, and the third’s hair is unmistakably gray. What was once a disarmingly simple singing group is now backed up by a crashing drum combo, electric viola, and the pasteurized throbbing of an electric bass. This slick ensemble of six musicians in mod, casual clothes now travels the country passing as the Kingston Trio — original group member Bob Shane, two singers from Nashville, and three accomplished country/bluegrass session men. They peddle their latest record — "not available in any store" — endure the weary travails of one-night stands, and autograph the cracked dust jackets on albums issued before the days of stereo. They bank on their audience remembering the famous name, their overwhelming popularity, and the ethnic folk tradition that wedged its way into our musical mainstream. They trust that the men and women in the audience will feel like college freshmen again and not remember or recognize what is missing and what they and the Kingston Trio have lost.

The story of Bob Shane and the 25 years of the Kingston Trio is a truly American tale of dramatic successes, dismal failures, and memories and fantasies milked for every last dollar they are prepared to yield. It’s a story of freshness grown stale and shabby; of an idea that one man will not let die.

Hang down your head .Tom Dooley.
Hang down your head and cry.

In November, 1958, a version of the ancient West Virginia murder ballad about Tom Dooley, a Civil War veteran run amok, rose rapidly to the top of the pop music charts. Its ascent launched not just the Kingston Trio, but also the folk revival that turned mainstream music away from teen be-hop and put six-string guitars on millions of laps. The clean-cut collegians who looked and sounded like three fraternity boys entertaining at a party did for traditional and folk music what rock and roll did for rhythm and blues: They brought it out of the cellar and made it fun, cool, young, and middle-class American.

Ultimately, of course, their popularity was eclipsed by the Beatles and the second wave of rock and roll in 1963. As music and the recording industry became increasingly complex, the Trio, with their uncomplicated harmonies, plain instrumentation, and bastardized versions of old favorites, began to seem rather naive and frivolous. While they may have been an easy group to criticize, The Kingston Trio’s dramatic success is nevertheless directly or indirectly responsible for the sound of contemporary entertainers Bob Dylan; James Taylor; Judy Collins; Crosby, Stills and Nash; the Eagles; John Denver; Linda Ronstadt; The Grateful Dead; Fleetwood Mac; and many more.

They were "it" in the late ‘50s — the melding of beauty and simplicity. Some speculate that a similar group might spark a revival in acoustic folk music In. the ‘80s: After all, Simon and Garfunkel drew half a million people to a reunion concert last summer In New York’s Central Park, Peter Paul and Mary are back on the major concert circuit, and the 1982 version of the Kingston Trio shows signs of making a comeback after many years of uphill toil. But these signs of life could also indicate

that the time is right for a wave of 1960s nostalgia to follow in predictable sequence after the ‘50s nostalgia craze in the beginning of the last decade.

Just as with all music groups that hit it really, really big, the Trio in the late ‘5Os happened to be the right group in the right place at exactly the right time: Elvis Presley was In the Army, Buddy Holly was dead, Chuck Berry was linked to scandal, and it looked like rock music was going to die a-bornin’. "Leave It to Beaver" and "Father Knows Best" were TV hits, and the popular alternatives to teen music were monochromatic, honey-throated soloists such as Pat Boone and Perry Como.

By no means did the trio of Bob Shone, Nick Reynolds, and Dave Guard invent a new kind of folk music, nor were they the first to have a hit record with a traditional song. The Weavers with Pete Seeger sold 2.5 million copies of "Goodnight, Irene’, in 1952, prompting a mini-revival that aborted when Seeger was linked to far-Left politics and refused to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee. In fact, most of folk music before 1958 —as sung by the likes of Seeger, Woody Guthrie, Harry Belafonte, and Burl lves.— was seen as foreign, boring, intellectual, or somehow subversive.

Into the funky San Francisco folk music milieu of 1956-57 came Dave Guard and the Calypsonians, an informal contingent of musicians from nearby Stanford University and the Menlo College of Business Administration.

They performed a mixed bag of ethnic folk songs at student hangouts for pretzels, beer, and attention. One man who paid especially close attention to the sassy, spirited Calypsonians was Frank Werber, a public relations agent who, storybook-style, saw in the group the promise of success and a boost to his faltering career.

He convinced Guard, a lanky, 22-year-old Stanford intellectual who wore Japanese sandals, horn-rimmed glasses, and T-shirts, to shrink the group to three men and change its image and name. The first incarnation of the Kingston Trio — so named to sound vaguely Ivy League cum Caribbean — included Guard, his high school acquaintance Bob Shane, who had returned to Hawaii after college to try his hand at Elvis impersonations, and Shane’s Menlo buddy Nick Reynolds.

Guard and Shane had attended Punahou High School together in Honolulu where they performed in talent shows, worked up a popular comedy diving routine, and sang on the beaches for tourists. Though the press dutifully reported that the two were "school chums" it was really more an alliance of convenience: Shane was the dashing, sexy, naturally talented singer who found in music a sure way to attract attention, and Guard was the brains and personality of the operation. Underneath, each man resented and competed with the other. Those who know the two say it was this dynamic interaction that made the Trio great at the same time that it destined them to break apart after a short time.

Little Nick Reynolds, half a foot shorter and a year older than Guard and Shane, was the loud, witty catalyst whose on-stage antics thrashing the tenor guitar or conga drums made the Trio exciting to watch: When he performed, he looked as though he was having the time of his life.

Shaping this raw material, their new manager Frank Werber worked Pygmalion-style to make professionals out of amateurs. Before they ever made their debut as the Kingston Trio, Werber assembled his charges in a cramped Bay-area loft and drilled them like a football team in every aspect of their stage show, sent them off to a prominent vocal coach for intensive instruction, and dressed them in their trademark striped shirts with button-down collars, khaki pants, and penny loafers.

Despite their clean image, the boys were not entirely wholesome. On stage they were goofy, rakish, and relaxed, cheerfully telling corny jokes about drinking and making it with girls. Guard, as the between-numbers interlocutor, added a touch of class with his deadpan insertion of long words, foreign phrases, and droll puns. The act was polished to give it an exuberant, spontaneous, yet very sincere air.

Their one-week tryout in 1957 at San Francisco’s Purple Onion, a "discovery club," became a seven-month command performance when young, hip crowds jammed the small club night after night. Werber subsequently took his charges on the road, testing them in diverse markets such as Las Vegas casinos and Mr. Kelly’s nightclub in Chicago, each time with uniform success. Capitol Records released "The Kingston Trio" in the summer of 1958, an album that drew national attention after two disk jockeys at station KLUB in Salt Lake City took a fancy to "Tom Dooley" and hooked their listeners on the tune. Its popularity spread like a fire and rose to the top of the Billboard singles chart in November.

The Trio caught on fast with the young, white middle-class primarily because they were so easy to identify with. Their songs were easy folk melodies requiring only a few guitar chords, and their vocal harmonies were smooth parallel thirds. Their entire routine didn’t seem to require any mysterious talents to reproduce: Look, up on the stage, It’s your brother …it’s your boyfriend … it’s you!

Way out here. they’ve got a name
For wind and rain and fire.
The rain is Tess, the fire’s Joe
And they call the wind Maria.

Musically, Shane, Reynolds, and Guard together were nothing special. Though they sang passably well — often crowded barroom-style around one microphone — The bedrock of their act was their eclectic repertoire that Included not just buried American treasures and banjo bangers but sea shanties. Calypso songs, European ballads, and a heavy dose of sprightly Latin melodies augmented by a good deal of gratuitous shrieking and pounding of drums.

While the Trio was turning the masses on to a broad variety of folk music by making it palatable, they were turning off true folk musicians. Their act was too smooth and polished for those who believed in the visceral integrity of tradition. Wicked parodies of

"Tom Dooley" surfaced, including one by the Country Gentlemen, a hard-core bluegrass ensemble, that ridiculed the Trio’s Yankee accents, chorale harmonies, and mild banjo licks.

By far the Trio’s worst transgression against folk decency was the way they stole obscure songs from obscure sources, secured a copyright and then raked in publishing royalties. When songs were already in the public domain and couldn’t be appropriated, they compromised the lyrics in order to get a piece of the action. The legendary "M.T.A.," for instance, used to be "The Wreck of the Old 97," an old death-on-the-railroad ballad, until it was rewritten as the humorous ditty about a man named Charlie trapped in the Boston subway system during a rate hike, unable to exit for want of an extra nickel. "All My Trials" became "All My Sorrows" and Guard rewrote the Carter Family classic, "Worried Man Blues," into a song about adultery.

Bobby’s in the Living room, holding hands With Sue.
Nickie’s at that big front door ‘bout to come on through.
Well I’m here in the closet, Oh, Lord, what Shall I do?
We’re worried now, but we won’t be Worried Long.

Has the nation forgotten? The Kingston Trio pioneered the lucrative campus-concert circuit, pushed 7-Up on TV, played the White House, collected Grammy. awards, hit the charts with 23 albums, inspired imitators Peter Paul and Mary, the Highwaymen, the Tokens, the Limelighters, the Tarriers, the Brothers Four, and others, and started a national demand for guitars that put the major manufacturers 2½ years behind In their orders.

Teenagers polled in the late ‘50s named the Trio their favorite group, though all three men were married to glamorous young women; Look magazine postulated that these straight-arrow folksingers were ringing the death knell of the Devil’s rock and roll. They succeeded where Pete Seeger and others had, in a measure, failed, by fusing the American popular and folk traditions.

"The Weavers gathered a lasting following on the campuses, but not elsewhere," says Joe Hickerson, head of the Archive of Folk Culture at the Library of Congress. "They inspired groups like the Trio, who were able to deliver traditions to the mainstream. It

went from that into rock, and even acid rock. In that way (the urban folk revival] didn’t really fizzle out, it just dispersed."

I don’t give a damn about a greenback dollar.
Spend it fast as I can.

Though each man involved gives a slightly different account of what happened next, the basic facts are these:

As with so many other musical groups, success strained relationships within the Kingston Trio. They became a huge, diversified corporation with investments in real estate, publishing, land development, and restaurants. To keep the operation rolling, the boys signed a demanding three-albums-a-year contract with Capitol, a pace that quickly drained their reserve of songs. Guard, who did all the musical arrangements and was the creative impulse of the group, recognized they were headed down an artistic cul-de-sac

As talented imitators in the "gee-maybe-I-could-do that" music field started cropping up, Guard saw that the Trio, not blessed with huge raw talent, needed to be innovative to stay in the vanguard of popular tastes. Reynolds and Shane, both more happy-go-lucky than their Intense, determined leader, saw no reason to tamper with success.

During this period of interpersonal alienation, an executive in the Trio Corporation was nabbed embezzling $127,000. Werber, Reynolds, and Shane didn’t want to prosecute, and Guard, who was asking himself, "Is there an honest man in the whole business?" resigned in disgust. "It was entirely a matter of principle," he says today. "There are some things one just does not put up with."

Shane’s version of why Guard left: "He’s an ass."

Either way, Guard took a $300,000 cut of the Trio operation and formed the Whiskeyhill Singers, a harsher, more experimental folk quartet that folded quickly. He then moved his two children and pregnant wife to Australia, where he starred in a folkie television show, developed his own method of teaching guitar by using a color wheel transposed upon a 12-tone scale, and worked as a studio musician and sheep rancher. Stateside, Shane, Reynolds, and Werber hardly missed a beat. After a series of auditions, they picked singer-songwriter John Stewart, a fan who had just turned 21, to fill Guard’s shoes and join the hottest group in the country. "He looked and sounded like

Dave," remembers Werber. "Alter a while, the public didn’t even know the difference."

Though the second-generation Kingston Trio never had a gold album or a No. 1 single, there was plenty of energy left in them: Since Shane’s wet, mossy voice was "the rock upon which the church was built," as Stewart says, the change in personnel didn’t hurt the sound of the group at all, and their stage-routines were so pat by then that Guard was hardly missed.

With Stewart, the Trio relied more for material on contemporary American songwriters than on the exotic, foreign sources that supplied them in Guard’s day.

The consequence of this watering-down of their act was that they became increasingly indistinguishable from the myriad of less-imaginative groups, such as the Brothers Four, that had followed their lead Into folk-pop. Worse still for the Trio was that the world began to change: President Kennedy was assassinated, and American youth became Increasingly concerned with civil rights and air deepening Involvement in the Vietnam war. Successful musicians sang to the discontent and increased social consciousness of college students. The Trio couldn’t and didn’t want to answer the call to activism, and so became a lifeless anachronism, a self-parody. They played to smaller and smaller crowds, and were happy in 1965 to get an album to number 126 on the charts.

"It was over long before we decided to break up," remembers John Stewart. "Like the wife whose husband is cheating on her, we were the last to know."

So in June, 1967, after 10 years, 26 albums, 280 songs, and 24 million in group profits, the Kingston Trio finally recognized that it was all over. They played a farewell engagement at San Francisco’s Hungry I. After the very last concert the Trio, still in short hair and striped shirts, drove out to watch the opening night of the Monterey Pop Festival. There they saw Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Simon and Garfunkel, and the Who.

They’re rioting in Africa.
They’re starving in Spain.
There’s hurricanes in Florida.
And Texas needs rain.

While Nick Reynolds retired to Port Orford, Ore., to start a ranch and a new life, John Stewart and Bob Shane embarked on solo careers. Stewart has since been a very mild success. He has produced a dozen albums in the last 15 years, not one of which mentions his past association with the Trio on the liner notes. A few of Stewart’s songs — notably "Gold" and "Daydream Believer"— have been hits for other artists, and he recently completed a tour as the opening act for rock singer Stevie Nicks.

Shane was quite sure he’d do better than that. In 1987, at age 33, he’d been star material ever since high school, and his was the raw talent that kept the Trio going for 10 years even though he was never a well-known personality. But a combination of bad luck and poor promotion doomed him [he recorded "Honey" Just months before Bobby Goldsborough made a No. 1 hit of an amazingly similar version], and he was forced to give up the idea of making it on his own.

By 1969 he had five children and plenty of silver in his hair but not enough in his pocket. He knew that while crowds might not come to hear Bob Shane, there would always be at least a few old fans who would turn out to see the world-famous Kingston Trio. Accordingly he "reactivated" the group by leasing the name from a corporation that still included Werber and Reynolds and adding unknown musicians, new instruments, and a new sound.

"The New Kingston Trio" used a pedal steel guitar, piano, drums, fiddle, electric bass, and almost anything sacrilegious a folk buff could think of; their overwrought vocals sounded like the Association and other pop groups. The effort was a disaster that Shane is loath to discuss even today. "It was wrong," is all he wants to say.

Werber complains it was a constant effort In those days to keep on top of the New Kingston Trio about good taste, quality, and the dignity of the name as they shifted personnel [at least nine men have called themselves Trio members through the years] in search of a winning combination. Eventually Share recognized that the public didn’t really want anything "new" out of the trio, so five years ago he bought the old name outright for half a million dollars, settled on ex-session men George Grove and Roger Gambill, and tried again.

So here we are
In the Tijuana jail.
Ain’t got no friends
To go our bail.

For a long time the pathos continued. Even with the old name and the old songs, the Trio played to minuscule crowds. They recorded an album in 1978 — "Aspen Gold" — that was nearly impossible to find in stores. All in all, they seemed destined to end up where another group of men calling themselves the Kingston Trio had started out 25 years ago: nowhere.

In the past year Shane’s group has enjoyed a modest growth in popularity, playing larger venues such as Poplar Creek in suburban Chicago and earning standing ovations for the golden oldies that comprise 80 percent of each show.

They are currently pushing an album of reconstituted hits called "25 Years Non-Stop" and preparing to tape their own cable television special for Showtime.

Shane likes to argue that the present group is "better" than the original Kingston Trio. With drums added the rhythm is stronger, after all, and it’s hard to dispute that Gambill and Grove are the slickest, smoothest Trio musicians yet.

Both sidemen are cheerful, outgoing, down-to-earth types in their 30s who know a good thing when they see it. They’re on the gravy train, and all they have to do is re-create easy harmonies and Instrumental breaks on the 40 songs [all in English] that this group knows. It’s like infield practice. Today’s between numbers stage patter is a bit more coarse and a bit less inspired than when Shane, Reynolds, and Guard bounced around the country in 1960. Jokes focus on how many strings the band members break when they play, how old they are, and what drugs they use. The innocence is gone. The freshness is gone. Sexual humor and mutual cajolery that were cute on crew-cut young men all dressed alike are unbecoming when delivered by middle-aged men who are so obviously pretending.

John Stewart and Nick Reynolds tactfully decline any lengthy comment on Shane’s group. "When you add drums, an electric guitar, and a fiddler, you make it something that it wasn’t before," Stewart says simply. Ex-manager Frank Werber calls It "a sham" and "a rip-off"; and Dave Guard, while expressing his fondness for Gambill and Grove, says that the sound of today’s poseurs makes him "physically ill."

The contrast between Shane and Guard today, the boys who once were clones with no more than an inch of hair on their heeds, is striking. Shane leads a scrappy life on the road, is the original good-time Charlie always ready for an impromptu party, and smiles from behind tinted spectacles. His face shows lines of age beyond his 48 years. Guard, now a vegetarian follower of Swami Muktananda, the "guru’s guru" In India, lives quietly In Los Altos, outside San Francisco, and hardly looks a day over 35.

He returned from Australia in 1968 and worked with Stewart Brand to put out the "Whole Earth Catalog." He has subsequently taught his guitar theory to hundreds of students in the Bay Area, Survived a 1979 operation for skin cancer and a divorce, written several books on traditional mythology, produced recordings of a Hawaiian guitarist, and even performed a few folk tunes with groups here and there

Back to back
belly to belly.
Well I don’t give a damn
Cause I done that already.

Guard is obviously itching to get back into the music scene. He was a key force in the recent reunion concert of original Trio members that will air on public television March 13 at 10 p.m. on WTTW-Channel 11. Those who tried to convince the original trio to sing together for the first time in 2l years had to overcome the following obstacles:

• The inertia of Nick Reynolds, who is comfortable and happy with his new family on the ranch in Oregon and has "nothing to prove."
• The reluctance of John Stewart to compromise his status as a solo performer after a 14-year effort to shed his identity as a former member of the Trio.
• Bob Shane’s bitterness toward Guard and Reynolds, and his fear that a lot of attention on the reunion would confuse the public as to the identity of today’s newest Kingston Trio.

Nevertheless, the November concert at Six Flags Magic Mountain amusement park in Valencia, Calif., came off without a hitch. At rehearsals the boys, who are no longer boys, agreed to set their differences aside for the week and concentrate on putting on a good show which, by all accounts, they did.

One result of the landmark concert is renewed Interest by Stewart, Reynolds, and Guard in forming a trio of their own and maybe cutting a few records. They’d actually be the Kingston Trio without the name, and, they insist, without those old songs. "It would have the old fun spirit; the life," muses. Guard.

"We would try to make it what the Kingston Trio was in the glory days: a progressive group, not a nostalgia act."

This is only talk of course, and it may never be more than that. "Stewart, Reynolds and Guard," as they would call themselves, would never get Bob Shane to join them. He’s making plenty of money and having fun on the road 35 weeks a year. Furthermore, he’s fiercely loyal to Gambill and Grove, without whom he would not have a Trio at all.

Scotch and soda
Mud in your eye.
Oh baby
Do I feel high.

At the suburban banquet hall outside Chicago, — on one of the coldest nights of the winter, three singers stroll onstage without a single warm-up note in the dressing room. Their backup band cranks out an eerie version of the theme from "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly." People In the audience, many of whom have grown old along with the Kingston Trio, seem to applaud as much for themselves as for the group as they recognize the songs of the early days and the charm of the ‘60s behind the distinctly 1980s lounge-rock accompaniment.

Some in the crowd seem to believe this band performs a public service by keeping the candle flickering. Some think this is a good way to recapture a youth that seems so bright in memory. Some ask themselves, If they were In Bobby Shane’s position, with a name and some old songs that still make people cry, would they do what he is doing?