Concert in review

The sound is still there, but more importantly the fun is still there.

They are no longer the buttoned-down collared crewcut college kids of the 1958 "Tom Dooley" days. Their home is now in Georgia and not the San Francisco Bay Area. And the stripes on their shirts run diagonally instead of vertically.

But that magic that still propelled the Kingston Trio into the most pleasant surprise in popular music in th elate 50s and early 60s is still present in its current reincarnation, The New Kingston Trio, which opened Tuesday night at Granny's Dinner Theater.

Only Bob Shane of the original trio is still with the group, but it was his driving voice that gave the trio it's distinctive sound. Roger Gamble is the Trio's new Nick Reynolds and he handles the role excellently. The third member of the group is Bill Zorn and, although he is not as distinctive solo as either Dave Guard or John Stewart he blends beautifully with the rest of the new group.

AND THE TRIO'S SHOW is all that you would want And more. This is the kind of performance the trio used to put on back in those early cabaret days at the hungry i. It is loose, freewheeling, wildly entertaining and sometimes downright hilarious.

The old songs are still in the Trio repertoire. Tuesday night they sang "Greenback Dollar," "M.T.A.," "Tom Dooley," and "Worried Man." About the only major hits that wern't included this night were "Tijuana Jail" and "Where Have All The Flowers Gone."

They also sang some of the best cuts from those early albums, numbers like "Hard, Ain't It Hard," Shane's now legendary reading of "Scotch and Soda," "Hard Travelin'," "Three Jolly Coachmen," "Shady Grove and Lonesome Traveler," "A Rolling Stone," "Frankie's Man Johnnie," and their beautiful and powerful version of "They Call The Wind Maris."

THE NEW KINGSTON TRIO also sang one outstanding new song, a number called "Nellie," that was just as good as anything the Kingston Trio has ever done.

Some of the Trio's comedy bits are corny, but they always seem spontaneous and timely. The entire show seems loose and free and that's what makes it so special.

The Kingston Trio became too big an act to remain in the hungry i's and Purple Onion's and they were forced to hit the college concert circuit.

Their college concerts were the best thing going during those days but they were delivered at the price of losing some intimacy with the audience.

But now that the Trio is appearing here at Granny's that intimacy is back.

There's probably a whole generation of record buyers alive today who may have never heard of the Kingston Trio and is unaware of the debt owed them. They broke through the pop music barrier at a time when the big acts were people like Connie Francis, Frankie Avalon, Freddy Cannon, Ricky Nelson, Elvis Presley, Lloyd Price, the Elegants and the Teddy Bears.

THEY NOT ONLY DEFIED the tastes of the era and refined them, but they opened a door to a musical form that was virtually unnoticed at the time. The Kingston Trio was called a folk group, although it wasn't in the purest sense of the term. But because The Trio was so good , people began exploring folk music and they discovered the Pete Seeger's, the Woody Guthrie's, the Leadbelly's and the Ramblin' Jack Elliott's. It also made it easier for the Joan Baez's and the Bob Dylan's to take their places in music history.

This is a debt that can't be repaid even with a trip out to Granny's to see the New Kingston Trio. But the trip is still more than worth it.