PART 2
In the spring of 2018, I began rehearsing a show that I’d sold to the Camelot Theatre in Talent, Oregon. This local theatre intersperses their Broadway and off-Broadway productions with shows they call “Spotlight on…So-and-so”. They’ve presented “Spotlight on Billy Joel; Ella Fitzgerald; James Taylor; The Eagles; Fleetwood Mac, etc.” In 2017, I was cast as narrator and band leader for “Spotlight on Peter, Paul and Mary.” The concept is to tell the story of the particular artist being “spot-lit” and include around 20 songs from the artist’s repertoire. For “Spotlight on The Kingston Trio” I had enlisted the services of John Hollis (of Hollis & Haworth fame) to play the role of Bob Shane. Andrew Brock (our church choir director and local school teacher) played the part of Nick Reynolds, and I played Dave Guard/John Stewart.
Just after the show opened on August 8th, I got a call from Mike Marvin informing me that I was in violation of his license agreement by advertising “Spotlight on The Kingston Trio.” He claimed that he had sole rights to the use of “The Kingston Trio” name and that I was infringing. I informed him that it was actually the Camelot Theatre that owned the “Spotlight on…” designation and they plug in the artist’s name for each production. I gave Mike the contact info for the Executive Director of the Camelot and advised that he have his lawyer contact that person. Apparently it was only a “shot across the bow” because the theatre never heard from anyone. In the meantime, we sold out 12 performances of “Spotlight on The Kingston Trio” and many people who saw both that show and my performance with the “real” Kingston Trio later in Grants Pass have commented that our “Spotlight” show was a far better presentation.
On September 6th I received an email from Mike asking if I could “still perform Nick Reynold’s singing parts?” I responded “Of course…his parts are ingrained in my DNA. Why do you ask?” He replied back: “If one of our guys gets sick and cannot perform, myself included, I’d like to think there’s people who are passionate enough to step in at a moment’s notice. Anyway, it’s not about the players, it’s about the KT and the music. Right? That’s why I asked.”
OK, fine. That makes sense. I was on Bob Shane’s short list of pinch-hitters and it’s good to know who to call in the event of a member’s illness or otherwise inability to make the gig. I also recommended John Hollis to fill in for Mike if that need ever arose.
On Friday, September 14th, I was substitute teaching at Kennedy Elementary School in Medford. I got home about 5:00 and found I had received a voice mail from Mike. He was desperately trying to reach me to see if I could make myself available to permanently take Josh Reynold’s spot in the KT. He was hoping I could make it to their gig the next day in Maine. When I finally got ahold of him that evening, he said that he’d been trying to reach me all day and when I didn’t respond he went ahead and hired Don Marovich to do the two dates that weekend. I told him that as much as I would have liked to, there was no way I could get packed and ready to go in less than 24 hours. After all, I’d been off the road for 13 years and my suitcase was somewhere in the attic. So he asked if I could make it to their next show in Virginia on the 19th. I said “can do” to that and once again stepped up to the plate to pinch-hit for a missing Trio member.
Over that weekend while I was packing my long-neglected suitcase, I called Bobbie Childress to get her impression of this odd turn of events. She told me that she didn’t want to see any disruption in the performance schedule, so she was glad that I was available to maintain the continuity, as I had done on so many occasions in the past.
PART 3
I arrived in Virginia on the 18th, and we rehearsed for a couple hours that evening, then again the next day before the show. I had issues right off the bat with tempos, songs that weren’t in the original keys and chord progressions that were incorrect. Also, I’d never sung any of the John Stewart songs before, so I wasn’t quite comfortable with them at first – or to be honest – ever! I struggled to understand why we would include songs that the Trio had never recorded, while neglecting Trio classics like “Zombie Jamboree,” “Sloop John B.” and “Maria”. In fact, on several occasions I had audience members ask me after the show why we hadn’t done one or another of those tunes. When I suggested to Mike and Tim that we add them, they acknowledged that we should, but then they always backed off when I tried to introduce them at sound check.
Early on, Tim and I had an argument about the chords for “Desert Pete.” When I tried to correct him he argued that he’d been playing the song all his life and he knew the right chords. I informed him that I, too, had been performing the song for some time and I learned the chords from the Trio’s “Sunny Side” album. I suggested that he go listen to the recording to confirm that I was accurate, but he didn’t want to do that. When Paul finally entered the fray and concurred with me about the correct chord progression, Tim finally backed off. Still, in the whole time I was involved, he never bothered to get it right. And despite the cacophony, I persisted in playing the correct chords against his erroneous misinterpretation.
This was just one of many issues I had with the so-called “musical director” of this group. Despite my nearly 60 years as a professional musician, Tim felt his stated position gave him sole authority over the arrangements and the nuances of performance. As his arrogance in this regard began to annoy me more and more, I found it impossible to deal with some of his notions about how he wanted to “interpret” the repertoire. Rather than perform the songs as originally recorded by the Trio, Tim feels that it’s OK to alter the arrangements to better accommodate his and Mike’s amateur abilities.
As for Mike, he readily admitted to me on several occasions that he was the weak link musically in the group. I tried a few times to help him develop a better sense of rhythm, even laying down a tempo on my metronome app at one sound check to show how the tempo wandered. The worst moment for me in each show (aside from enduring Mike’s horrible renditions of Scotch and Soda from the wings) was having to take the center position for MTA. On my left I had to try and ignore Mike’s wandering tempo (I’m convince that he thinks there are 3-7/8 beats in a measure) while on the right, try my best to tune out Tim’s often out-of-tune banjo. Having had the pleasure and honor of playing for so many years with Bob Shane, who’s rhythm guitar style was natural and always spot-on, and George Grove, probably one of the world’s best all-around banjo players, it was quite a shock to be forced to go on stage with these two rank amateurs.
PART 4
As we were anticipating several dates in Texas during November, Tim and Mike had been working on adding “Remember The Alamo” for those shows. The original recording is in C#, and my recollection is that we did it in D with George and Bob. But Tim wanted it in B because of Mike’s limited vocal range. Mike was playing the guitar part in G, capoed 4th fret. But when I showed him that Shane had actually played it in A (capoed 4th fret) and he could accurately duplicate Shane’s part in the key of B by playing out of A at the 2nd fret. So I wrote out the chord diagrams for him and worked with him over and over to hit that open E string before he strummed the (capoed) A# chord, then dropping down to A. He could never get it. I ended up having to create a way to do that on the tenor. I also TABbed out Dave’s banjo part for Tim, because it is a pretty definitive part in the arrangement, and easy to play. But Tim, with his know-it-all attitude, refused to even look at my TAB. Well, in his defense, it’s possible that he can’t read tablature – I never did ask him. Instrumentally, this song has always fascinated me, but reproducing those parts was beyond their ability. And Mike could never learn the right notes for the back-up vocals, so I had to sing Shane’s part behind Tim’s verse. Just another accommodation based on lack of musicianship on their part.
We received a request from the director of the venue in Federal Way, WA, that we include a couple Christmas songs in our show there on Dec. 7th. I suggested that two easy ones to do would be “We Wish You A Merry Christmas” and “Last Month of the Year” from the KT’s 1960 Christmas album. During the 10-day break after Nov. 18th, I worked to transcribe the vocal parts and wrote chord charts for both songs. Knowing that Mike can’t read music, I recorded his parts and emailed the mp3 files to him. I delivered the printed charts to Mike and Tim when we arrived in Key West on Nov. 27th and suggested that we go to work on the songs at sound check before the next two performances. But alas, no interest was shown and those two dates passed with nary a nod to my efforts.
Again, at the next two venues in Spokane and Grants Pass I suggested that we take a stab at working up those Christmas tunes, but there was no interest in doing so. When we arrived at sound check for the Federal Way show, I once again pulled out my copies of the charts and laid them out in the dressing room for consideration, but Mike informed me that the theater director had since quit, so the request was null and void. No – no Christmas songs. And not even a thank-you for all the work I did.
My former musical partner from my Seattle days, Gary Ballard, dropped by our sound check that day on his way to his own gig. After we finished, Gary commented to me how ragged the rhythms were on the tunes he’d heard. I told him that was what I had to live with while playing with these amateurs. After our show that night I made it down to Gary’s gig at an American Legion Hall. He was working with a 5-piece country band, all local part-time musicians who were excellent players and singers. I sat in with them on a few tunes and the reality of how lame Tim and Mike were musically by comparison hit me over the head like a ton of bricks.
Earlier that evening, besides having my many hours of work on those Christmas songs negated, I had engaged Tim in a pretty nasty argument. From day one with these guys, Tim had been pestering me to put geared tuners on my 1932 Martin tenor guitar. Every time the subject came up, I assured him that I was not about to replace those original tuners. They work just fine for me and I’m pretty fussy about maintaining the historical integrity of my instrument. We came off stage for intermission that night after the most horrendous mutilation of “Worried Man” I have ever had to suffer through. Tim’s banjo, despite the fact that he constantly works at tuning the thing between nearly every song, was horribly out of tune, and apparently he couldn’t even hear it. As we headed to the dressing room I suggested to him that he put some 1932 tuners on his damned banjo because he can’t seem to get that thing in tune. He stopped, and with an air of indignity, accused my guitar of being the culprit. I turned on my tuner and showed him that my guitar was perfectly in tune. I suggested he check his tuning again, and when he did, he responded, “Oh, I wonder how it went sharp.” Well, duh – you couldn’t even hear it? OMG!!!
PART 5
I was pretty depressed after that show, and even more so after sitting in with Gary Ballard’s band later. I didn’t know how to address my issues with these guys. It baffled me how two guys who had never had careers as a professional musicians could be saddled with the mantel of representing the iconic Kingston Trio. The group that had sold more records than any act until the Beatles came along was now in the hands of a librarian posing as musical director and a “B” movie producer trying to fill the shoes of the great Bob Shane. I was at my wits end to realize that all my years as a pro carried no weight with these guys and their arrogance had finally eaten through my tough shell.
The next morning I had a two-hour wait for my flight out of Seattle to Medford, and my frustration and anger reached a boiling point. I sat there in the Sea-Tac terminal and wrote a very caustic email detailing all of my dissatisfactions with the way this group was operating and the way I was being treated. My hope was that I might jog these guys into realizing the deficiencies that were evident to me, and hopefully open some dialog as to how to address these weak points. But my words were admittedly harsh, born of three months of living in musical hell with these guys and they obviously couldn’t bear my criticism. We had one more date in December, when amazingly, I was able to extract a rather lame rendition of “We Wish You A Merry Christmas” from the boys to close that show. Two days later I received my “pink slip” from Mike.
While I do have regrets about losing my temper with these guys, causing me to miss out on an $11,000 pay check for the month of January (that would have covered a big chunk of Meri’s dental implant expenses), I am honestly glad to be done with this endeavor. Travel these days is not easy, and issues like 5-hour layovers, lost luggage (my guitar never even left the airport with me on one tour) and just being away from home for days at a time weighed heavily on me. Call me a wimp, but I think that 40 years on the road was quite enough, thank you!
I have several on-going questions about the current status of The Kingston Trio. I have come to the sad realization that, despite the lack of professionalism being offered by the current configuration (Don Marovich and Paul Gabrielson excepted!) the audiences seem to be oblivious. Having experienced befuddling standing ovations and rave revues from audience members during my short tenure with this outfit, I am well aware that it’s the Kingston Trio name, the striped shirts and the songs (or as Mike says, “the music and the songs”) that sell tickets. Mike has invested in a cash cow that he hopes will pay off for a few years until this generational audience has withered away.
A big puzzle to me is Josh Reynolds’ relationship to this business endeavor. My initial understanding was that it was Josh’s familial connection to the original group that facilitated this licensing agreement. Whether Josh quit (Mike’s contention) or was fired (Josh’s contention), he has not relinquished his claim to the license. He and Mike are both signatories to the agreement and I would think that Josh must have some legal rights of say-so regarding the handling of the business. The fact that Mike and Josh have now ended up as adversaries, including a permanent restraining order that Mike has won against Josh from a court, puts the business in a curious predicament. So it will be interesting to see how this evolves. I believe we may hear of more legal disputes between these two as time goes on. And knowing Mike as I do now, I fully expect to hear from his attorney about my writing here. But as I’ve already informed Mike – you can’t stop me from telling the truth. I’ve violated no NDA and there can be no liability for reporting my experiences. As a fan from day one, my final comment is: “RIP The REAL Kingston Trio”.
Responses