When Rock Was Young

In the parking lot of the high school the aging greasers stood by their late model gas guzzlers, trading sips of blackberry brandy washed down with malt liquor. Beyond and below, in the gymnasium of the high school, seats were filling up for a fifties-style dance. With each succeeding circuit of the bottle, passionate and nostalgic anecdotes were imparted concerning the relative merits of such vintage rock 'n' roll groups as the Earls, the Mystics, the Dovells. Injected into the heated discussion, the name of the Kingston Trio hovered in the air like a foul substance, the noxious fumes of New Jersey, say, or the California smog. "Oh yeah," one greaser 1979-model finally sneered, "they're the beatniks, right?"

Progenitors of the draft-dodging, pinko, student protestors, the pot-smoking, acid-swallowing, hippie yippie, and the free-love, back-to-nature, love-and-peace, organic, ban-the-bomb, dropout radicals, early folksingers could be found somewhere south of the Top 40 and east of rock 'n' roll. Like modern Jazz, folk music snob-appealed to the literate music buff -- collage educated, fraternally connected, politically liberal. If, in rock 'n' roll, revolution was implicit in the raucous behavior of its juvenile-delinquent mongrel hordes, in folk music it was overt in the lyrics and life-style commitments of its own proponents, the troubadours, minstrels, and left-wing oracles and balladeers, who backpacked, hitched, and Kerouacked across the country, delivering the mail from the bohemian mecca of Greenwich Village to the beatnik nirvana of San Francisco's North Beach.

The influence of folk music on the Top 40 -- the folk-inspired lyricism and concern, the complex personal and political messages -- stemmed from seed planted in the Dust Bowl by Woody Guthrie in the thirties and nurtured by Pete Seeger of the Weavers, who was banned from TV for his espoused beliefs. Later on, Greenwich Village's own Peter, Paul and Mary would bring Minnesota's Bob Dylan to the attention of the Top 40 masses via "Blowin In the Wind." Dylan's mystic journey to Woody Guthrie's deathbed would immediately add stature to both legends.

Perhaps softening the Pop 40 for such an explosive personality and commentary as Dylan's, the somewhat less radical Kingston Trio evolved from a vibrant San Francisco mid-fifties folk scene, which featured the Gateway Singers -- Lou Gottlieb, Travis Edmundson, and black lady lead singer Emerlee Thomas -- who were staples at the Hungry i. "We thought we were almost as good," says Dave Guard, speaking for his northern California singing cohorts, Nick Reynolds and Bob Shane. Together they spiked their folk music with a goodly dose of collegiate ribaldry, some dry-martini wit, native Hawaiian rhythms (both Dave and Bob were natives), and a touch of trendy calypso (the Trio took their name from the city of Kingston, the capitol of Jamaica). They brought this concoction to the Purple Onion, another San Francisco beer and folk spa, in 1957. "We were sort of trying to sound like the weavers," Dave admits. "It was really Weavers energy. We liked authentic-sounding stuff." But authenticity would have taken them only so far. The Gateway singers, with their racially mixed contingent, were finding it impossible to tour. The Weavers themselves, because of their political activities, had trouble getting work. The Kingston Trio, clean-cut and not at all controversial, made folk music palatable to the masses; not the downtrodden masses, but the upscale, stripped shirt, rep tie, clip-on-pen middle class.

For the most part, this was a management decision. "We wanted to do some songs from the Spanish Civil War, because they were very ballsy-sounding," says Dave, "but our manager, Frank Werber, said 'If you do that it will bring all kinds of people around here.' We said, 'What do you mean?' he said, 'Don't even worry about it.' Politically we didn't know what was going on." None of the individual members of the trio was what you would call an avid activist. "We didn't have too much to do with the beat guys. That was an older crowd, a lot of war veterans who were depressed by everything. We felt they were overly bitter. We didn't care about McCarthyism, or whatever else was stifling those people. We were just starting in the world, full of enthusiasm, in the bloom of our cuteness."

If there motives were less radical-chic than those of their predecessors and contemporaries, their ensuing success in the marketplace distance them even further from their more pristine peers. "We didn't get too much critical acclaim," says Dave. "Critics said we weren't authentic. We didn't feel we could be authentic about anything because two of us were white guys from Hawaii who knew a lot of Hawaiian music, which we sang quite authentically, but in Hawaii they just wanted to hear it from Hawaiians. So everything we played we learned, and we figured everyone else learned it the same way, you know, you just pick up what you like. Kind of like the Beatles. Were they authentic? It's all imported, really; music is international." So they came upon their finely polished gems in old albums they discovered in the Stanford library stacks, from country and folk music sources, from other froups, and even the parents of one of Dave Guard's old girlfriends.

"I was pinned to the girl named Katy, and we were going to surprise her one Easter vacation. We went down to Fresno, but she wasn't home. So her folks had Bobby abd I come in. They said, "You know, if you ever have use for this tune, it's a song we've sung since our honeymoon, way back when. 'That was Scotch and Soda.' When it came time to record it, we couldn't find out who had written it; so I just put my name on it and I figures the guy would come in and claim it, who ever he was, as soon as he heard it on the air. But nobody ever came forward, so we figured we saved it, kind of like finding a bottle in the ocean or something. We sent Katy's parents a big bunch of money, since they were the source on the song. You try to take care of your sources if you can.

Another famous source whom Dave Guard has long since dispaired of locating provided the impetus for the Trio to tackle the folk chestnut "Tom Dooley." Seems they overheard this certain folksinging psychologist one Wednesday at the Purple Onion, doing it as part of his audition for a slot at the club. He didn't get the job. "His name was Tom," says Dave, "I don't know his last name. I wish he'd identify himself. But he wouldn't get any money out of it, because Alan Lomax claims he wrote it." The Gateway Singers had already added the song to their repertoire, but the Kingston Trio's unique signature, "Tom Dooley" soon became virtually their own trademark. It was on their first album for Capitol, recorded in January 1958 and released the following June.

"I remember it was June 1, 1958," says Dave, "because my oldest daughter was born on the same day." During the Summer of 1958, the group played the Hungry I, opening for mathematician/satirist/songwriter Tom Lehrer, and pulling down approximately forty-five dollars a man. "We bought a whole bunch of our albums wholesale for seventy-five cents copy," Dave recounts, "After our set we'd go get dressed, lock the front doors of the club so people couldn't get out after the show broke, and sit at a card table. People asked what are we doing. We said 'Oh, we're just personalizing albums -- you want one?' We sold upwards of seventy-five records a night."

Meanwhile, however, "Tom Dooley," the beneficiary of incidents and coincidence, was being heavily played in Salt Lake City, Utah, and Spokane, Washington, largely through the efforts of a lone persistent deejay who had been fired from one job and had logged his hot albums up north to the next. Still, those two major-league towns were hardly enough to hoist "Tom Dooley" into the ballpark of Top 40. That was left, fittingly to Tom Dooley himself -- that is, Dr. Tom Dooley, no relation at all to the Tom Dooley in the Song -- a man who at the same moment, in another realm of the world entirely, was garnering huge amounts of press for his good Samaritan deeds in the jungles of Southeast Asia. That the two namesakes should intermingle and mesh in the summer and fall of 1958 surely meant that fate had a hand in "Tom Dooley"'s arrival at the top of the charts, in November of the same year.

"I think it must have been designed that we should support him," says Dave Guard. "We met him in St' Louis, where he'd been doing some fund raising. He stopped by to thank us. Since the song had become a hit, the money coming in to him had been about ten times higher than usual. But part of the fame of that song came from the fact that there already had been several articles in LIFE magazine about him. He's been made into a sort of a national hero before we came along."

Nine months later, the Kingston Trio were themselves national heroes of a sort, courtesy of their own LIFE magazine cover story. "That firmly plants you in the public consciousness," Dave allows, "But we were already hot before LIFE got onto us." They'd had four albums in the Top Ten. They'd headlined at both the Newport Jazz and Folk Festivals. Heroically, they'd all walked away unharmed when their rented Twin Beach crash-landed on a turkey farm in South Bend, Indiana, on Friday March 13, 1959, just five weeks after Buddy Holly perished in a similar accident. "We had a concert to play at Notre Dame that night," Dave recalls. "I think that's what probably saved us." Two days later Bob Shane was married in Washington, D.C.

But all was not fraternal good-fellowship and camaraderie, beer suds and finger picking. The star trip itself, at least to Dave, was proving hollow as a gourd. "I was the first in the group to get married, so I was married before the group started to get heavily into things. But there were always a lot of people who wanted to meet you. I saw a lot of one-night-stand-type business, where people would come up to you expecting one thing and not being prepared to deal with your whole personality, only with your media image. So it was like being stampeded for autographs. As soon as they get a foot away, everybody realizes it's a human being standing there, instead of a statue, and they stop screaming and take a look in your eyes, and a lot of their head trips disappear."

There were even hints at discords within the ranks, printed in the media, where Dave Guard maligned the musicianship of his trio-mates. "I started to ge4t bitter that they weren't studying music or anything." Says Dave. "I just felt that we should keep on pushing to learn all kinds of instrumental techniques and to keep getting better every week. I told them we had a responsibility to the fans to be good musicians and we should all take lesson to improve our stuff. The other guys weren't big hot students in school or anything; they didn't see how taking lessons would do any good. They had the idea that people liked us for what we were and that's how it was. But they kept their musical ears intact. They brought in some very good tunes in the last stages. And they were true to themselves, in that I don't think they've taken a lesson since."

To compound the strain of being national celebrities and the very model of campus cool, Capitol Records greedy marketing campaign called for the Kingston Trio to release three albums per year, a strategy that rather rapidly depleted their library of arcane cherished material. "I liked just about all our first four albums," says Dave. "The first three for sure, I'd say the quality of our work went up, but the enthusiasm for the songs didn't. On the first three albums in particular, we were very interested in all the tunes, those were songs we really liked. Later on we were just looking for tunes that would keep up the quality of the group, that sounded like Kingston Trio songs. Some good tunes would come by, but they didn't grab like the early tunes. Finally, we had to record on such short notice that the tunes would be very respectable, but they just didn't get your heart like the other tunes did." On the other hand, they would sell enough to comprise about twenty percent of Capitol's gross volume one year.

But beneath the claims of the lack of musical growth on the part of his mates, beyond the thinning store of acceptable songs, apart from the media histrionics and the pressures of the road and everything else that goes with supporting the mantle of a superstar group, at the core of Dave Guard's growing dissatisfaction with the others was a plaint not unheard in this and neighboring corridors of the Top 40. "Our music publisher was ripping us off," says Dave. "He dropped $127,000 at the tables in Vegas and took it out of our publishing royalties. I had a big check bounce -- my writer's royalties just bounced -- at a time when you were not supposed to touch those things. When I went down to protest, it turned out that he and our manager were vacationing together in Puerto Rico. So here you are with the cop and the crook in the same boat. I had to get out of the situation."

He shifted his portion of the publishing to Harold Leventhal, Pete Seeger's manager, who also handled the Woody Guthrie estate. This didn't sit too well with Nick and Bob. "They thought I was splitting up the group. But I just couldn't have all this bread disappearing in large chunks." About a year and a half later, in 1961, Dave Guard performed with the Kingston Trio for the last time. "The fans were upset about it," he says, "But to me it was kind of inevitable. I guess the others thought their best shot was to just stay in place. They took an honest look at their chances and saw that getting out of the Kingston Trio would be the end of their money-making days. Ironically, that's pretty much what happened to me." He did, however, net a sizable amount in goodwill severance pay, with which he started a new group, the Whiskey Hill Singers.

"I was thinking of getting something with Joan Baez in it," says Dave, "because I wanted to have a girl singer. But then I talked to Harold Leventhal and he said, 'Don't touch her, she's too idiosyncratic; she'll never work in a group.' We were at Newport when she first opened up with Bob Gibson and electrified the crowd. Gibson was singing and everybody was kind of nodding, and then she jumped on stage and everybody just emptied backstage; the performers dropped what they were doing and came out to see her, like something really heavy was going down. The next week we were working at Storyville on Cape Cod and she came up with her sister, Mimi, and her mother. Joan asked me, 'What should I do? It looks like I've got a career, and a lot of people are shooting me these hot songs.' I said, 'I think you ought to do just what you are doing, stay in your style.' So I guess she more or less did that.

Instead of Baez, Dave added another powerful and distinctive voice to the Whiskey Hill Singers, Judy Henske, who would have her own brief solo career before retiring to domesticity. It was 1962, and the commercial folk boom presaged by the Kingston Trio in 1958 was blossoming all over the Top 40. Well-scrubbed three- and foursomes, complete with banjo and crewcut, were popping out of dormitory woodwork on seemingly every campus in America in the early years of the sixties. The highwaymen came out of Wesleyan University with "Michael," a Number 1 song. The Tokens represented Brooklyn College with "The Lion Sleeps Tonight," which also hit Number 1. The Brother Four from the University of Washington had already brought "Greenfields" to Number 2 in 1960. The groves were rife with the sound of four-part harmony, the rich-man's doo-wop, with The New Christy Minstrels entering the fray in 1962, along with the more satirical-political Chad Mitchell Trio, whose "The John Birch Society" spent a week on the chart in May. Out of Greenwich Village, where Joan Baez and Bob Dylan were becoming an item, and where every guitar-playing college dropout in the land was immigrating, Peter, Paul and Mary were scoring with their first release, "Lemon Tree," then their second, Pete Seeger's "If I Had A Hammer," which made the Top Ten. Earlier in the Year, The Kingston Trio, with new member John Stewart, did well with "Where Have all the Flowers Gone?" For folk music it seemed potentially the best of times.

But for a liberated Dave Guard and the Whiskey Hill Singers, it turned out to be the worst of times. "Capitol really stomped on the group," he reveals. "You know they put out the cheapest kind of master. It got no promotion whatsoever. But on the strength of my being semi-respected in the industry, we got a contract to score "How the West Was Won." And that won an Academy Award. But after seeing how I'd have to fight Capitol all the time, I decided to Hell with it." Frustrated, tired, Dave disbanded the group and, with his wife and three kids, moved to Australia. Dropped out.

"I wanted to leave it all behind totally," he says. "I didn't want to have anything to do with the Trio at that time, either. I remember John Stewart wanted to be very friendly and he asked me for a lot of advice, but I didn't want to get involved. I was kind of like graduating from school, you know? I wanted to keep it in the past, otherwise I would have been permanently frozen into it." Australia proved beautifully untouched and tranquil. "It was a lot different than being on road in a string of motel rooms, where the only food you eat you have to unwrap, the only people you talk to are taxi drivers. No matter how much bread you could make you weren't getting any life value. I decided that my values lay with hanging out with my kids when they were young and raising a family. Australia was a bit of sanity, I would say. I did some studio work out there. I got a lot of writing in, and practicing. I had my own TV show. I wrote a guitar method book called "Color Guitar," where the colors and the notes would be comparable, and I taught that for a while. I wrote a book called "Deirdre," collecting all the various versions of an Irish legend of two thousand years ago. We stayed until 1968, mainly to raise the kids. We got good property right on the beach at a very good interest rate, and it seemed that World War III wasn't going to be starting there."

The mention of World War II is mot an idle metaphor in the vocabulary of Dave Guard. Born in Honolulu, raised on Waikiki Beach, Dave was the son of an army engineer; his mother was an air force commander's secretary. He was all of seven years old at the start of World War II. The attack on Pearl Harbor occurred literally in his backyard. "Yeah, we could see the faces of the pilots as they came over the house. Ws saw Jap planes going down and antiaircraft fire; It was right there. We watched it for about half an hour, then cut out of town. We slept under the road in a culvert for at least a week, expecting an invasion." He and his family spent a year in Washington D.C. before it was safe to return home. In the racially mixed, post war days, he hung out with Portuguese sailors and the sons of diplomats. His best friend was the son of the Chinese counsel. Jazz bands were big on the islands. He worked at a record shop, haunted the nightclubs, thought he might become a bartender. He was in college in California when he heard Joe Turner, Clyde McPhatter, and Little Richard. He was in grad school when Elvis hit.

Meanwhile, Bob Shane and Nick Reynolds were doing some casual singing at Menlo College, where they were students. As teenagers in Hawaii, Dave and Bob had sung for the tourists on the beach, seasoning their more authentic material with some Las Vegas lounge humor borrowed from the Four Jokers, who frequently played the islands. In San Francisco, with Bob back in Hawaii after college doing Elvis impersonations, Nick and Dave sang together in a group called the Calypsonians. Eventually, they put it all together in Redwood City, en rout to the Purple Onion, where they would displace Phyllis Diller as headliners.

Recently there has been talk of a reunion of the original three, plus John Stewart -- a sentimental gathering that would make a lot of salt-and-pepper-haired executives feel like sophomores again. "John Stewart is very interested," Dave mentions. "Lindsay Buckingham of Fleetwood Mac has made some positive statements in that direction, and Al Jardine of the Beach Boys has a recording studio that he's like to get us into. "For now, however, the Kingston Trio name is owned by Bob Shane, who bought it from Nick and Frank Werber in 1976. With two new members he's continued to tour, playing before primarily the same people who were fans in the Trio's heyday. They've released a new album on the Nautilus label, out of California, which contains quite a few vintage Trio cuts. "I saw Bobby in 1975," says Dave. "He wanted me to join the group, but I didn't like that particular configuration that he had. They were a bunch of sleazy cats; it was just like gang-bang humor, with a lot of drinking on stage and stuff like that. But since then, the guy who took the job I would have had is very good, and Bobby has cleaned up his act pretty well, so it sounds almost respectable now. He learned the hard way. He tried to do it real sloppy, and then he turned around and cleaned it up."

If Dave Guard's Top 40 credentials made him suspect to certain folkie purists in the fifties, in later life he's more than paid his Bohemian dues. When He returned from Australia in 1968 he got involved with Stewart Brand (of Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters, immortalized by Tom Wolf) in putting together "The Whole Earth Catalogue." He's carried the torch for folk music in bands with Mike Settle and Alex Hassilev, in the Modern Folk Quartet, and his own Dave Guard and the Expanding Band. Recently on Hula Records he produced a double album of the songs of legendary Hawaiian guitarist Gabby Pahinui. He's also in the process of divorcing Gretchen, his wife of twenty-two years. "Now that we've raised our family, we decided we're two different people."

In 1976 he became a student of the guru Swami Muktamanda. "I've cleaned up my whole act behind him," Dave says. "I'm a vegetarian, don't smoke; I'm into a lot of good health, yoga, meditation. I'm studying Sanskrit and Indian philosophy. I'm even taking Indian cooking." Indian music too, has entered his repertoire. "I'm writing out sheet music for all these Sanskrit tunes. It's real good music, real strong. It doesn't sound eerie or anything like that; it sounds like the Russian army chior -- real emotional stuff. The tunes are thousands of years old and they really have a heavy effect on you; everybody sort of leans into them."

In November 1978 Dave Guard was operated on for skin cancer. A piece of his shoulder was removed. "I had a local anesthetic, but they thought it might be a very extensive sort of thing. So I decided to go through the operation doing a mantra that Muktamanda gave me, and I saw golden lights waving around and everything was very cool; my blood pressure and heartbeat were absolutely stable all the way through, from the first reading to the last. So the operating team was very confident that I had my processes under control. I had a follow-up operation about two months ago. They just wanted to make sure that tall the cancer was gone, and it had been completely eliminated, completely cleaned out. My body was able to clean up all the last remaining little cells. Maybe it was, you know, good health, not having any kind of a depression. If your health is headed toward the good side, then you can handle a lot of these things. That's what kind of really brought me in. I played for Muktamanda's birthday celebration, and I talked at this thing he had for Easter and I feel really rejuvenated. I've been looking to see if it's freaky, but I've had no evidence of that. So I'm getting stronger with it all the time."

Folk music, long thought terminally ill by some, buried under the decibels of rock 'n' roll and the detritus of pop culture, has lately been showing signs, like Dave Guard, of rejuvenation. Gone flowers of the sixties back in bloom; seventies seedlings just beginning to sprout -- the ageless beatnik dream incarnate. "Folk music is still pretty vigorous," says Dave Guard. "There's as much now as there ever was. Peter, Paul and Mary just came through town. Arlo Guthrie plays around here quite often. Joan Baez and Mimi Farina are still active of course, and I think Odetta has recently been seen on the boards. I just talked to Pete Seeger and he's as healthy as ever. He's a fine cat; he was my idol. I had the pleasure of seeing him about a month ago when he came out to San Francisco to play for an antinuclear concer. There were moments during that concert when he looked about twenty-two years old."

THE KINGSTON TRIO
TOP 40 CHART SINGLES

1958 "Tom Dooley"
1959 "Tijuana Jail"
1959 "M.T.A."
1959 "A Worried Man"
1960 "El Matador"
1960 "Bad Man Blunder"
1962 "Where Have All The Flowers Gone?"
1963 "Greenback Dollar"
1963 "Reverend Mr. Black"
1963 "Trouble Is My Middle Name"


Last revised: February 23, 2006.