Hang down your head

I just ran across the news that Nick Reynolds, the little guy in the original Kingston Trio, died earlier this week of respiratory failure in San Diego.

I can't say I really knew Nick Reynolds. I met him a couple of times when I was playing drums in a blues band in the early 1960s in Austin. Back then there wasn't that much of a club scene in Austin and we were like the house band at a club along Lake Austin. The club was out in the country then; it probably doesn't exist today and, if it did, would be regarded as being in the heart of town. But the Kingston Trio often played Austin in those days and would hang out at the club where we played for two or three evenings after their Austin concerts to give the women a chance to flock around them. And flock, they did. During our break, Nick would come over to say hello to the band, sit down and chat. Those were my only real encounters with Nick Reynolds.

I do know this, however. I have a whole lot of Kingston Trio songs on my iPod. And you can say what you want about those guys (too many claim they were folk poseurs more than they were folk purveyors) but they left their mark on the music scene. Both Dennis Wilson and Mike Love of the Beach Boys told me in separate interviews that the Kingston Trio was their major musical influence and, in fact, they wore striped shirts as a salute to the Kingstons. Stephen Stills and David Crosby also told me that the Kingston Trio was who Crosby, Stills & Nash initially imitated.

Reynolds played the clown of the group. Actually he played tenor guitar and congo drums and sang a third above the melody line. I'm afraid most of the music world won't pay a lot of attention to the passing of Nick Reynolds and that's a shame. Nick and the rest of the trio, Dave Guard and Bob Shane (and later John Stewart, who replaced Guard) were not great musicians, but they were a whole lot of fun and they left a mark. And their success made it a lot easier for the likes of Bob Dylan and Peter, Paul & Mary to gain attention. Would there have been a folk music "boom" without the Kingston Trio? Who knows. But there is no doubt that a time when rock 'n' roll was in some desperate straits (Elvis was in the Army, Jerry Lee Lewis and Chuck Berry had been banned from the airways, Dick Clark was trying to destroy rock 'n' roll), the Kingston Trio permanently refocused the music world in a new and refreshing direction.