. Monday, September 19, 1983

THE KINGSTON TRIO
CELEBRATES 25 YEARS

By MARY CAMPBELL

Associated Press

THE KINGSTON TRIO, which recently played Carnegie Hall, was formed in the spring of 1957 and has been celebrating its 25th anniversary for the past year. But there hasn't exactly been a Kingston Trio for most of those years. Only one of the original members, Bob Shane, silver- haired at 49, is left. The others are Roger Gambill, 41, who has been singing with Shane for 11 years, and George Grove, 35, who as a boy listened to Kingston Trio records so much that his father admonished him, "After all, you can never grow up and be in the Kingston Trio."

In 1957, the Kingston Trio was Shane, Nick Reynolds and Dave Guard, Menlo College students who sang in coffee houses around San Francisco.

They were discovered by a publicist at the Cracked Pot in Palo MTA and signed to a contract written on a table napkin.

Their biggest' hit came the following year with Tom Dooley, only their second release. Other songs they made famous were The Tijuana~ Jail, MTA, A Worried Man and Scotch and Soda.

The trio tours 35 weeks a year. "The economy dictates where we play," Grove said. When they first regrouped, they spent three months in the Ohio Valley and the rest in the West. Now, they're expanding the territory. Their Carnegie Hall appearance was the trio's first in 21 years.

What about the inevitable comparisons? "A lot of people play our old records before coming to hear us," Shane said. "Basically, all we've done with the old material is up tempo it. Everybody has learned to live faster lives. We moved up the pace.

"George has a whisky baritone that people remember," he said. "Roger has a high tenor voice. I fill in on lead; harmony's too hard. Whatever it is, it works. It works very well.

"We're nostalgic in the fact about 70 percent of the tunes in the show are old. In those days we probably did more ballads. Not that I don't like them. This show is a little faster paced than the old show was, and a little looser.

"The main difference to me is personalities," Shane added. "In those days we weren’t as friendly toward each other all the time as we are in this group."

In 1981, a friend of Shane's, Nick Heyl, formed a record company, Xerex, in Norwich, Vt., to record the Kingston Trio. He put out 25 Years Nonstop, old hits newly sung, and Looking for the Sunshine. They're sold by mail and at concerts.

Dave Guard left the Kingston Trio in 1961, replaced for six years by John Stewart. In 1967, Shane and Stewart started solo careers and Nick Reynolds started farming.

"I was doing a solo about nine months in 1968," Shane recalled. "I didn't like it. I realized I enjoyed singing with a group. Then I started the New Kingston Trio with a couple of other fellows. We made one single record for Capitol. It was horrible. I don't remember what it is.

"Basically we were doing bars, hardly any concerts at all. We couldn't get any better jobs. We were singing mostly new material.

"If I was going to keep the name," he continued, "I was going to have to do the old material, because of the amount of people we had sold records to. It took four or five years before that sank in with me."

Gambill was with Shane by that time. They say they added Grove because they all got along. His voice helped, too, and so did his playing banjo and guitar. Shane and Gambill play only guitar.

"I thought, 'It's time to go out on a limb and buy the name,' " Shane said.

"It cost me everything I had. It was owned by Kingston Trio Inc., a corporation of three major stockholders. Now it is owned by me. We may go public."

How does the Kingston Trio pick new songs? A fan brought one back stage and it ended up on the new album. If a song pleases them, they put it into concerts a few times and if audiences like it. It stays.

And which of the old Kingston Trio hits are they so sick of they don’t sing any more?

All three maintain that they aren’t sick of any of them. Why, said Shane, he was singing Scotch and Soda solo in college three years before the Kingston Trio sang it.

From the European Edition of The Stars and Stripes, Monday, September 19, 1983

-- THANK YOU to Reed Blair for providing a transcription
of the foregoing article for our reading enjoyment.

Last revised: February 23, 2006.