TIN PAN ALLEY: Like from Halls of Ivy

The Kingston Trio’s Sold Out was anything but. With fond backward glances at Billboard’s bestseller chart, where Sold Out last week led all the rest, Capitol Records was keeping all music shops well supplied with the hottest album cut so far by the hottest group in U.S. popular music.

Reckless, roll-less and rich, the Kingston Trio by themselves now bring in 12% of Capitol’s annual sales, have surpassed Capitol’s onetime Top Pop Banana Frank Sinatra. Scarcely out of college, Kingston’s Nick Reynolds, Dave Guard and Bob Shane are making some $10,000 a week, can pick up a six-day fee of $25,000 any time they can conquer their distaste for Las Vegas—”we prefer a less Sodom-and-Gomorrah-type scene.”

The Golden Noose. Hoisted to these heights by the noose that hung Tom Dooley—the ballad was sleeping in an album they cut early in 1958—the Kingston Trio have added to the burgeoning U.S. folk music boom (see Music) a slick combination of near-perfect close harmony and light blue humor. To help their predominantly collegiate and post-collegiate audiences identify with them, the three do their best to festoon themselves in Ivy, wear button-down shirts, even chose the name Kingston because it had a ring of Princeton about it as well as a suggestion of calypso. Sporting close-cropped hair and a deceptive Social Studies i-A loo, they strum guitars and banjos, foam like dentifrice, tumble onto nightclub stages as if the M.C. had caught them in the middle of their own private party.

“We had the good luck of picking up this in Mexico,” said 25-year-old Californian Reynolds last week, introducing a song called Coplas to one of the few well-scrubbed audiences that has ever visited Los Angeles’ Cocoanut Grove.

“That’s not all we picked up,” admitted Hawaiian-born Bob Shane, 26.

Moments later, Dave Guard, 25, and also from Hawaii, turned to the audience and—apropos of nothing—announced in a singsong Oriental accent: “You see, I was educated in your country—Washington and Rhee.”

Wild Hairs. Guard (“our acknowledged leader”) actually was educated at Stanford (’56), Reynolds (“the runt of the litter”) and Shane (“our sex symbol”) at nearby Menlo College of Business Administration (’57 and ’56). Until they came together as a trio in 1957 at San Francisco’s Purple Onion, they were, says Guard. “a bunch of wild hairs pointing in all directions.” At Stanford, Guard—belying his present Groton look—had earned a reputation as a sort of stubble-bearded prebeatnik who was heading nowhere except way out. Reynolds, after graduation from Menlo College, had dedicated his energies to tennis. Shane, who only half-jokingly describes himself as “an alcoholic at 15,” had been spending his days counting sand at Waikiki Beach and his nights developing the bourbon elements in what, is now called his “whisky voice.”

The Purple Onion squared the trio away; they acquired purpose and, along the way, a manager: a shrewd San Francisco beard named Frank Werber, who insisted on voice lessons, is still with them. The acquisition of wives all around stabilized them still further. “They’re all gentlemen,” said one of the Kingston’s close friends last week, adding candid estimates of each: “Bob is the only one who could make it alone. He’s also lazy, the least articulate and most collegiate —like he’s still in school. Nick is considerate, sweet. Dave probably has a genius IQ, but is also the most difficult. Big man on campus. He’d rather quit than be an also-ran.”

For three people working at chafingly close quarters—278 days on the road last year—the Kingstons get along remarkably well, remain far more congenial than such longtime fellow voyagers as the members of the Budapest String Quartet, who make a point of confining their relationship strictly to business hours. Even though they boast a road manager to handle their 18 pieces of luggage, the trio still divide up household chores as they did in the days when they used to sleep three in a bed in fleabag hotels. “When we fight nowadays,” said one of the Kingstons last week, “it’s mostly about business—what to invest in.”