In the history of popular music, there are a relative handful of performers who have redefined the content of the music at critical points in history -- people whose music left the landscape, and definition of popular music, altered completely. The Kingston Trio were one such group, transforming folk music into a hot commodity and creating a demand -- where none had existed before -- for young men (sometimes with women) strumming acoustic guitars and banjos and singing folk songs and folk-like novelty songs in harmony. On a purely commercial level, from 1957 until 1963, the Kingston Trio were the most vital and popular folk group in the world, and folk music was sufficiently popular as to make that a significant statement. Equally important, the original trio -- Dave Guard, Nick Reynolds, and Bob Shane -- in tandem with other, similar early acts such as the Limeliters, spearheaded a boom in the popularity of folk music that suddenly made the latter important to millions of listeners who previously had ignored it. The group's success and influence transcended its actual sales. Without the enviable record of popularity and sales that they built up for folk music, it is unlikely that Columbia Records would ever have had any impetus to allow John Hammond to sign an unknown singer/guitarist named Bob Dylan, or to put Weavers co-founder Pete Seeger under contract, or for Warner Bros. to record the Greenwich Village-based trio Peter, Paul and Mary.
The group was founded in Palo Alto, CA, by Dave Guard (1934-1991), a graduate student from Stanford University, and two of his close friends, Bob Shane (born 1934) and Nick Reynolds (1933-2008), from Menlo College. Guard and Shane had both been raised in Hawaii, and had originally played together in high school in Honolulu. Reynolds hailed from Coronado, CA, the son of a career Navy officer, and attended Menlo College as a business major. He first spotted Shane asleep in the back of the hall during a very boring lecture on accounting, and they started hanging out, drinking, and chasing women together, and this, in turn, led to playing music, initially as a way of being popular at parties -- Shane's guitar and Reynolds' bongos became a fixture at local frat gatherings, and after a few weeks of this, Shane introduced Reynolds to Dave Guard. It turned out that Hawaiian music fit in perfectly with the luaus that people were throwing locally, and Shane and Guard taught Reynolds some genuine Hawaiian songs. The group was playing at a local tavern two nights a week, but the formation of the Kingston Trio was still not quite in place. Shane returned to Hawaii for a time to work for his father's sporting goods company, and tried to become the future island state's answer to Elvis Presley as a solo act -- meanwhile, Guard and Reynolds began playing with Joe Gannon on bass and singer Barbara Bogue, and became Dave Guard & the Calypsonians. That group didn't last, and finally Reynolds and Shane (back all the way from Hawaii) were brought back to the now newly rechristened Kingston Trio.
Their initial approach to music was determined by the skills that each member brought or, more accurately, didn't bring to the trio -- Bob Shane sang most of the lead parts simply because he had no familiarity with harmony singing, while Nick Reynolds sang a third above the melody, and Guard handled whatever was left above or below. Guard had taken some banjo lessons, but otherwise they were completely self-taught on their instruments, with Shane teaching Guard his first guitar chords while they were still in high school. And Reynolds soon swapped his ukulele for a tenor guitar. They were booked into the Purple Onion, a leading night spot in San Francisco, opening for comedienne Phyllis Diller, and Guard then sent out postcards to 500 people that all three of them knew at Stanford and Menlo, inviting them to a week's worth of shows at the Purple Onion. The result was a series of sold-out shows, and a one-week engagement that was doubled, before the Trio got their own headlining gig at the club lasting five months, from June to December of 1957. During that summer, Capitol Records producer Voyle Gilmore, who had previously recorded Frank Sinatra and the Four Freshmen, saw them play at the Purple Onion, and a seven-year contract was signed soon after.
The Kingston Trio spent the next few months intensively rehearsing, refining, and polishing their act as they went along -- they recognized that musical ability alone was not going to keep audiences entertained, and they quickly developed a comic stage banter, which grew out of their own personalities, and learned how to pace themselves, their songs, and their banter for maximum effect, and also how to make it sound spontaneous to audiences night after night. The group followed the Purple Onion engagement with a national tour that took them to Mr. Kelly's in Chicago and the Village Vanguard in New York, all of them successful appearances. During this tou
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