The name Frank Werber may not be as familiar as that of a Bill Graham or a Brian Epstein, but judged by his legacy, he is pretty much their equal. Frank was a one-of-a kind maverick driven by the impulse to do better, and who wrought still-unacknowledged change within the entertainment industry in the late 1950s and 1960s. Werber saw how others did it and knew, instinctively, that he could improve things for both artist and audience. Over the past decade, I have been fortunate to have spent many, many hours in Frank's company, revelling in his shared experiences and wisdom.

Frank Nicholas Werber was born in 1929 in Cologne, Germany. His mother died when he was five, shortly after the family had fled to Holland and then Belgium, due to the rise of Hitler. When the Nazis overran the Lowlands in 1940, Frank and his father fled south but were caught by the German army and sent to do time in a prisoner camp in Vichy France. With the help of the resistance, they escaped to Africa and eventually made it to New York. They were desperately poor and lived in Florida and Colorado for a time, until Frank graduated from high school and joined the Navy. After falling in love with San Francisco on a tour of duty, he vowed to return and moved permanently to the city in 1950. Working as a photographer for United Press, Werber fell in with the nightclub scene and eventually became PR and stage manager for Enrico Banducci's legendary hungry i nightclub.... The four years Frank spent there, working closely with singers, comedians and entertainers, from Mort Sahl to Tom Lehrer, attuned his abilities and gave him the experience to make his discovery of the Kingston Trio in 1957 a success.

Frank Werber took three boys from Menlo College on the San Francisco Peninsula, and turned them into one of the biggest popular music phenomena of the mid-20th Century. Any musician around in the late 1950s and early 1960s will have been aware of the Kingston Trio. But even the most ardent Trio fan may not know what Frank did for the act. He nurtured them, though never interfered with their music, and as they became increasingly successful, guided the group intelligently, investing their earnings in intellectual property such as publishing, and physical property like the flat-iron Columbus Tower in North Beach. More importantly, with the Trio Frank established guidelines on how a professional entertainer should be treated: he designed the basis of the rider that is used to this day whenever a performer appears live, to guarantee an environment respectful of both the artist and the audience. He took what had been the college lecture circuit and turned it into the college concert circuit. And most significantly, he avoided the crass exploitation that was the overriding signature of artist representation in those days - the likes of Colonel Tom Parker -- preferring to take care of business in a classy, erudite fashion.

The candy-striped Trio topped the folk boom of the early 1960s with rackfuls of albums to their name, and were a deep musical influence upon the baby-boomer generation. As the whirlwind of activity for the group died down in the wake of the Beatles, Frank focused on developing a roster of artists, of different disciplines -- at various times during the mid-1960s he signed or managed folkie singer-songwriters, avant-garde jazzers, existential performance artists, sultry R&B vocalists and pimply garage bands.... In 1965, his newly-minted Trident Productions got off to a roaring start with the folk-rock smash "You Were On My Mind" by We Five, the highest charting single to emerge from San Francisco for almost four years. Trident was on the cutting edge of what was happening in the city's music scene, and in due course the company inked the Mystery Trend, Sons Of Champlin, Blackburn & Snow and other early participants within the emergent counter-culture. The basement studio, Columbus Recorders, had the first 8-track machine in town and as well as the Trident acts, hosted sessions from Sly to the Grateful Dead to the Beau Brummels and more. It was a mini-empire that Frank surveyed from his penthouse office on top of the Columbus Tower - when he wasn't racing sports cars, or scuba-diving off the Mexican coast. "He was a complete womanizing, 1960s kinda of guy," recalled Terry Haggerty of the Sons, "but Frank also had a complete sense of his spiritual being that was alive."

By 1967 Werber had tired of wiping musicians' behinds and had decided to dissolve Trident Productions, and so he is often written out of the histories of the 1960s San Francisco rock explosion. The Kingston Trio split in June of that year, and though he kept the studio and other investments like the Little Fox Theatre going, Frank focused his energies on the Trident Restaurant, the Sausalito eatery laid out over several floors that he had owned since the early 1960s, and which remained a hip hangout through the next decade. There was a notorious bust in late 1968, for which Frank famously employed a 'religious' defence of his pot smoking. By the 1980s, he had let most of his ties to the Bay Area go and lived in Hawaii for a spell, before permanently retreating to the secluded ranch in southern new Mexico that he bought in the early 1970s.

Frank had been out of the biz for many years by the time I got to know him, but he was still as smart, witty and hip as ever. We had been talking for some time before I went out to visit him in Silver City (an account of that initial trip is here). Having resisted the overtures of many others over the years, his trust and unbridled magnanimity in allowing myself and Ace Records access to the fabled Trident vaults was a true honour. It was notable that he still cared about the artists who hadn't been successful such as the Trend and the Sons, that I was interested in. Once he knew what I wanted to do with the material Frank was happy to let me do what I saw fit with it, and got quite the tickle out of my enthusiasm for his ancient artifacts.

There were several more visits to Silver City over the years, and we also got together regularly when Frank came to the Bay Area to visit his daughter Chala. Each time there would be another great story, or another shrewd observation -- not always flattering - of the various characters he had encountered during his glory years. Yet Frank didn't dwell on the past, unless I brought it up -- he was just as at home discussing the present, or even the future. "I don't wish to denigrate any of my past life experiences," he once told me, "but I feel I have bigger things yet to come: this has all been training. I wanna see what's next."

Sadly, Frank suffered a debilitating stroke. I went to visit him a couple of times in Silver City and though he could occasionally communicate, to be truthful, it was difficult to see him struggle to express his thoughts. He died of heart failure on 19 May 2007 at the ranch with Chala by his side, and his whole family -- another daughter, three sons, two granddaughters, and two ex-wives -- laid him to rest in a natural burial as requested. A public memorial is planned for later this year. Frank Werber was truly one of the coolest and most memorable people I have ever had the privilege to know, and I can't help but feel the world is a lesser place for his passing.