REPRODUCED FROM A 1964 INTERVIEW

PUBLISHED IN SQUIRE AUSTRALIA MAGAZINE

DAVE GUARD

A Squire interview

Dave Guard pulled out of the rat race, jumped off the wheel and retired from show business at the age of 28.

He is now a man-about-beach at glorious Whale Beach on Australia's east coast where he lives the life of the fulfilled man, accepting the occasional job and working wholeheartedly on a private music project.

An on-stage wit and intellectual leader of the wealthy Kingston Trio and inspiration of the Whiskeyhill Singers who helped win an Academy A ward for a movie sound track - that was the past for Dave Guard who sips an occasional beer or Coke at his ocean-front house, indulges occasionally in Kahlua, a coffee-type liqueur he first tasted in Mexico, and drives to a movie or day in nearby Sydney in his Australian made station wagon. He drives slowly.

SQUIRE: You were a successful member of the Kingston Trio which was responsible for 12 per cent of all Capitol Record album sales. Then you walked out. Why?

GUARD: Probably it had reached its outer limits as far as I was concerned. Whatever message that particular group of three boys had to deliver had been delivered long ago as far as I was concerned. I had my mental bags packed for at least a year beforehand. It could have gone on and on of course but it didn’t seem to make sense - for me. Then after I left it was a different group of three boys, another combination, and they went on, they are still going on I guess. Jazz people change groups continually for new experiences.

SQUIRE: Was it merely a change or was it a getting out for you?

GUARD: The art form as it existed had reached its limitations, also there were some business decisions I didn't agree with that we'd gotten into. A lot of the meetings were three to one, and I was consistently the one, so I figured this didn’t make any sense.

SQUIRE: It has been said of you, "he'd rather quit than be an also ran." This was before you did quit. Was it prophetic?

GUARD: I've often pondered that one.

SQUIRE: Who said it?

GUARD: I'm not exactly sure but it's probably a fair description. There are so many things you can succeed at. Part of the experience of maturing is finding out where your particular slot is in life; if you have any confidence in yourself you can find that slot and hit it well. If you can be a street-sweeper and be satisfied with it there's no reason knocking your head against a brick wall trying to be something you can never possibly do. I think a good part of my life has been seeking the things I can make a contribution in and avoiding dead end situations.

SQUIRE: Let's trace your slot. First of all, why folk music?

GUARD: Well, it was music I could do, A1. It's a simple music form essentially. I had no music training at all. There were no musical instruments in my house until I bought a guitar at 15. In Hawaii there are various tunings that they play - folk tunings, which kind of resemble banjo tunings. They call it slack key. In old sailor things, they just tune in to a chord and honk away, kind of Tahitian or Hawaiian music. I really started on Tahitian music. A lot of Hawaiian music is structured for its easy-going appeal to the tourists and so the average Hawaiian resident looks for some outside influence because they hear all the melodious, lovely Hawaiian music. (ETHEL AZAMA BEGAN TO SING AT THE OTHER END OF THE HOTEL ROOM.)

GUARD: That's Ethel Azama singing. She's not singing Hawaiian music. This is the sort of music that appeals to me. I had 250 Dixieland records that I’d gotten on sale, so that was one of my earliest influences. The Weavers came out with Goodnight Irene and things like that. I'd been listening to Burl Ives. The music of Hawaii is folk music. Any other music is imported, just as jazz is the folk music of New York. Hawaiian and Tahitian music and what you would call folk music in general would be music of the streets there. School children are multi-lingual and the use of several expressions taken in various languages to express yourself most adequately is common. There are words which come from each element of the culture - Filipino, Chinese, there's just an intermingling going on - it makes for good folk music. I don't know if its the best jazz music, they say they don't swing out there, they have a slow rolling type of rhythm.

SQUIRE: When did you go to America to stay?

GUARD: After several trips. After the Battle of Midway they shipped several service families back, my father was in the Army at the time. I spent a year in Washington, D.C. We went back to Hawaii when the danger had passed. I moved back to the States on a permanent basis when I was 17 to attend high school before university.

SQUIRE: You have been described in your university days as a bearded pre-beatnik.

GUARD: My beard was an accident if it ever grew. It never went more than a day and a half. The girls wouldn't approve. I don't think there were any beatniks in those days. What's more we didn't have any money.

SQUIRE: When did you earn your first professional dollar from music?

GUARD: When I was in high school, playing at parties and playing on the beach. We had a regular beach gang of people and every once in awhile someone would say, "My daughter's having a birthday party. Here's five dollars, would you like to come along, there's free drinks." Mostly it remained on that basis all through college - whatever you could drink and some food … token remuneration.

SQUIRE: Let's work this through to the Tom Dooley stage. When did that occur?

GUARD: Well, there was a nucleus of musicians. There was the gang that gathered, say five or six people out of whom three survived after various changes. For instance I graduated from school and went to a year of business school afterwards. Nick Reynolds the drummer used to play during these sessions and had a little more skill. I guess Bobby Shane had gone home to Honolulu and he tried it in the clothing business for a while and came back and tried as a single. Anyway, the three of us somehow got together again and decided to start out singing the songs we had been singing all the way through with a little more folk music. We had been doing take-offs on Las Vegas club acts as the basis for our popularity but we figured that the public wouldn't stand for that material so we did calypso and some Hawaiian and early hillbilly sounding things.

SQUIRE: When did this become more than a party thing?

GUARD: We formed a quartet with a manager and were supposed to open as the Kingston Quartet but the club closed down before opening night. Then we played dances and things until we auditioned for the manager of a club called the Purple Onion. We auditioned six times consecutively so that we finally wore him down. He finally gave us a job as an audition for a week as under-paid performers. So through a large mail campaign, when we sent out postcards to our friends, and from hooting and stomping, we put out as much noise as we could and earned a permanent place. As soon as that began we went to a vocal coach and rehearsed six hours a day six days a week and in addition played six days a week, had photos taken and that sort of thing, This whole operation had got under way about March or April 1958. It eventually snowballed as the formality of the organisation increased, with more uniforms and the arrangements becoming more professional. The standard of each new tune had to be able to compete with a piece of material that had been on stage for four or five months. No matter what you're doing you’re bound to become pretty slick with five-beat bars and thirteen bar endings and things like that. It becomes rehearsed to a point where it becomes reflexed. I don't think that my attitude to the music was equivalent to that of the others. They had their own picture of the audience they had to reach at a certain level and the amount of practice that should have been done and things like that.

SQUIRE: Was your dissatisfaction with the content of the songs you were singing or with the standard of performance?

GUARD: Yeah.

SQUIRE: Both?

GUARD: I would say so.

SQUIRE: Let's go back to the song Tom Dooley which was the first folk song by a group to get to the top of the hit parade.

GUARD: The Weavers had had great success with Irene Goodnight, On Top Of Old Smokey and I guess for political reasons they were forced out of business.

SQUIRE: McCarthyism?

GUARD: Uh huh. Harry Belafonte scored very heavily with calypso but there was a kind of vacuum there musically. Just beforehand rock 'n' roll had come in to fill it in a way. There was just plain bad popular music for about four years there.

SQUIRE: Where did you get Tom Dooley?

GUARD: This was the result of an audition in a club. An old man came in with a bag of tunes. He wasn't much of a performer but this particular tune touched us so much we thought we'd put it into our repertoire. It just went in as a regular tune on our first album. I think the man who brought it to us was an engineer or doctor. It was a song that had been sung for a hundred years before. The incident occurred in 1866 or '67.

SQUIRE: It seemed to some listeners that later on the Kingston Trio concentrated too much on entertainment. They were unaware of the growth of the folk movement and the desire for more meat in folk songs.

GUARD: I think that entertainment will always be the thing. I think if something comes in, if Bob Dylan is a great entertainer for instance with his material it is because he is an entertainer. If he is just writing these protest songs - I've seen thousands of them written - it takes a personality; a magnetic personality, to put the material across and that is what Dylan has.

SQUIRE: Do some performers, particularly folk performers, fail to realise that they need this magnetic personality in order to succeed.

GUARD: If you're an entertainer, you're an entertainer. I was reading in a magazine about all these Liverpool groups that have come after the Beatles. There are millions of them, they're endless, stretched as far as the eye can see and if they're not as entertaining, that's it. The Beatles are there because they're entertaining.

SQUIRE: When you got out of the Kingston Trio, what was your financial position?

GUARD: We had accumulated some assets, goodwill, what have you and I got out for my fair share of that I would say. The other trio members would probably say, "He got more than his share."

SQUIRE: Do they resent that?

GUARD: They're doing exactly what they want to do.

SQUIRE: What did you actually want to do when you got out? At that moment of getting out, what was it?

GUARD: I wanted to make an honest record, which I did. A record with no over-dubbing, no splices in the tape, no echo, which wasn't done for any publisher. I did my original by Dave Wheat. I went around and looked for the loudest, most soulful girl singer I could get hold of and I got Dave Wheat, who played with the Kingston Trio beforehand, and a guitar player I had known in Honolulu. I looked for a group of four very interesting people who would get out there and screech like owls.

SQUIRE: This group was the Whiskeyhill Singers?

GUARD: Yes. This group got standing applause on the opening number. We yelled and yelled for six months but the pattern was growing there, we were going to be successful again, they were keeping up on the road night after night so I saw the handwriting on the wall and checked out. I had three young kids and I though well they can only be young once. They can write me lots of letters when they're grown up but they're only babies once and if you're not there to pass the information on ...

SQUIRE: This business of wanting to get out is a common problem, but most people don’t get out, do they?

GUARD: That's right. They feel they can't leave a going concern, they don't like getting off a very good thing. I think that's what it is. It's so rare to have any success in show business. Only the tiniest percentage of people ever make it through. Good, competent, even brilliant musicians do not have success.

SQUIRE: You weren't worried about going broke?

GUARD: I put my money away and figured that as long as I had my health I could play, otherwise I had my insurance policy.

SQUIRE: When did you decide to come to Australia?

GUARD: Well, we'd been down here on tour with the trio and after six months straight on the road with the Whiskeyhill Singers in the worst of the winter I decided to get as far away from It as possible and come down here. The first time we were down here was in the middle of the summer and it was beautiful, idyllic, I had never realised that anything like this could exist and the second I time I came down was in the middle of winter but it was the most pleasant winter there was. We had a solid week of sunshine. In America we were having a house built and took the plans to the architect. He was going to charge us 100,000 dollars for the house and I thought this is ridiculous for four bedrooms and a pool for the kids. I looked around at the interest rate in Australia and I found a house for much less and put the money I didn't spend into investments. I retired on the interest. At that point I decided, what am I striving for? What's all this effort for? I figured I would end up a silly old man in a house on a beach somewhere so I thought I'd rather be a silly young man in a house on a beach somewhere. When the opportunity presented itself to get this sort of a surrounding and to grow with my family I decided to jump on it, otherwise I could have been on the wheel for ever.

SQUIRE: Did you have anything else in mind?

GUARD: Well in the last days of the trio I had gotten into George Russell's course on the lydian concept of tonal organisation for improvisation - a forbidding title but it's a very clear-cut view of the way musical tones relate to one another from the very simple things right out to the most ridiculous things you could ever possibly get. He analyses Burke’s concerto for violin and orchestra in a very simple way and I thought well this is fine. Composers or improvisers use a set group of chords. Any chord is a group of three or usually seven notes. Each of these chords has a tonal centre. You can consider the beginning of a scale its tonal centre. Russell takes the view that there are six differently shaped scales which you can have. All you have to do is practice the six scales and then if you know where the chord fits into this scale you're in business.

SQUIRE: From this you developed your own idea?

GUARD: I thought this represented immense musical knowledge but it was written for the practising musician and what I wanted to do was get George together with Pete Seeger because Pete is able to play very complicated things very simply. But Pete was off on trips of his own and he wasn't interested, he wouldn't even look at the book. I talked to George about getting a very simple way of dealing with the theory of music involving twelve tones. People are allergic to reading music as it is written. They fail to see a lot of the interconnections between music because the way they're taught at theory courses is in terms of music and musical notation. You usually have to be pretty fluent on the instrument, fluent at expressing yourself and you have to be pretty good at reading music before you're fluent and the theory seldom gets through. I thought that by putting coloured stickers on a guitar arranged in twelve colours you can explain your way through a 12-tone system. Colours are non-threatening to people. They learn them before they learn words. You don't even have to be good on an instrument to see the relationship between notes when it's laid out this way. The book that I'm doing now is not a way of explaining George's concept specifically but just some things musically. I can't explain how to play certain chords for instance before getting into George Russell's theories - that will be the next book. The colour patterns which appear in the book relate to colour stickers which go on to your guitar. In the book you will see a circle of colours which mean that's where you put your fingers down. It's also worked out so that it phases into reading musical notation. You can get into it at any time.

SQUIRE: Do the colours you have suggested further suggest harmony? Can you give an example?

GUARD: Certainly. In the key of C is a group of colours which relate to one another. In my particular system the key of C will be yellow, yellow-orange, orange, red-orange, red - that area so if you’re improvising in the key of C you're obviously to stay away from the blues and greens. A jazz or folk musician improvises in a certain area which is inaccessible to the beginner but in this way you give the beginner a set of colours and he says oh is that what you are doing and straight away he says that's nothing you put your fingers there.

SQUIRE: How much time do you spend on this?

GUARD: About 199 hours a week. No, I work on it 12 hours a day.

SQUIRE: Then you didn't retire at all when you left the Kingston Trio. What will you call the musical system?

GUARD: Colour guitar. It's strictly guitar right now because that's the instrument I'm familiar with.

SQUIRE: By living in Australia, at Whale Beach, do you feel you’ve become a recluse?

GUARD: As far as America is concerned, I've died. Capitol Records has said, "You've made yourself unavailable for recording." They're in hysterics about the whole thing. But every time at contract renewal time they renew my contract. Since I've been here I've recorded three albums with Lionel Long, backing him up, and I'm working on this Jazz Meets Folk show three days a week and compering many folk music shows, some at the Uni and the Paddington Town Hall. Every other month I'm involved in something like that.

SQUIRE: What were the albums you did with Lionel?

GUARD: The Bold Bushrangers, a two-album set, one of sea shanties and one of Australiana. Both of them are in the can and not released yet. I just played the banjo and on the sea shanties sang harmony parts.

SQUIRE: You have a style of banjo playing which isn't practised out here, a finger plucking style … blue grass. Have you taught it to anybody in Australia?

GUARD: I've just been playing intuitively, playing what I hear. Maybe after this guitar book I might work out something for tuition, but the Pete Seeger book on banjo playing is a far superior method of teaching people than anything I could dream up. It's a broad view of many types of banjo playing, including the blue grass. You can play just about anything from there. It's accompanied by an instruction record on which he plays things very slowly. He knows much more about the banjo than I will ever know. He's responsible for it being popular nowadays.

SQUIRE: On the album The Bold Bushrangers you played music for a set of modern poems. Don't you think that folk music is something that should come initially from collectors?

GUARD: Folk music is dead in the library, I would say. Folk music has got to reflect the personality of the singer rather than pay homage to any particular form. Then again there's a group of people that says you've got to pay homage to the form. I think the main thing is that the singer should be right out front of the people, entertaining. If it's not entertaining it's dead as it is in the library. By entertaining I don't mean that you have to do any tricks. It's communicating. If it is a song that has moved the performer and he thinks he can use it to move an audience and can communicate it, it's fine.

SQUIRE: Most of Australia's folk singers are concerned with truth, with songs which have some sort of message.

GUARD: I think they feel that's more direct, describing things …

SQUIRE: I'm thinking of Gary Shearston's "Ballad of the Voyager".

GUARD: That reflects Gary's personality I would say. I feel that a lot of the appeal recently has been that people feel that they can participate in present-day events by concentrating on them musically.

SQUIRE: This is a fairly recent development?

GUARD: It's always been, but there hasn't been much of a market for it. Nobody wants to hear anybody complain, except until recently. The rise of LP records has proved that you can put out anything.

SQUIRE: One of the Kingston Trio's most popular records after Tom Dooley was about a man caught in a subway when the fares were increased. It sounded like a protest song.

GUARD: Originally it was a protest song. We did it as a funny song.

SQUIRE: Do you have any favourites amongst the Australian folk singers you have heard?

GUARD: A girl named Judy Durham. She's out of the country right now with a group called the Seekers. She's sensational.

SQUIRE: Do you think your explorations with music will lead to the areas inhabited by the American composer John Cage?

GUARD: I think John is one of the real pioneers, kind of making a bridge of his body. In art you can give a kid a palette of colours and a canvas and he is free to make anything he wants of it. This freedom hasn't existed in music for some reason; maybe because of the rigorous training that musicians receive. People are allergic to noise. They look upon it as nonsense. In jazz you have to be a virtuoso or not attempt anything different. What John is doing is subjective. It's up to the listener to make sense out of it. I think he deliberately tries to make as much nonsense out of it as possible in order to leave as much in the hands of the listener as possible. I think that's just one area of the total picture. My particular taste lies more towards the George Russell thing where you set up a logical format or framework and operate within the rules which you have set up. I've certainly encouraged banging on tin cans by children. If you can make music, that's fine. I like Cage's motto, "Every day is a beautiful day."

SQUIRE: Do you ever hear from other members of the Kingston Trio?

GUARD: Only through the bank. It was a difficult parting. I liked the Whiskeyhill singers very much. We did the soundtrack of How the West Was Won and it got an Oscar. I don't think it was for our singing but we were very proud of the overall contract. Every night it was standing ovations wherever we went. The group dispersed while it was doing pretty well. I just got tired of the road. The others are doing well.

SQUIRE: Will you start a new group one day?

GUARD: Possibly if the right combination gets up but it would have to be right. I wouldn't go back haphazardly.

SQUIRE: Have you set a time limit on your colour music project? A time limit in Australia?

GUARD: I'm feeling my way. I’ll see what happens when the book comes out. I might be spending a tot of time promoting the book.