The Kingston Trio - Sunny Side!

Artist : The Kingston Trio

Album : Sunny Side! (1963; 28 minutes)

Genre : Folk

Rating : ***** **½ (out of 10*)

This Month I Converted...
I found this LP for $8 at Bookman's, so I bought it and took it home and converted it. For a 45-year-old album, it was in pretty good shape - only a couple major scratches, and (more importantly) no skips. For the most part, the only K3 CD's you can find nowadays are "Greatest Hits" and live albums. Sunny Side! was their 14th studio release, and is one of their lesser-known efforts.

What's To Like...
It's vintage K3 stuff. By this time Dave Guard had quit the group to "seek other musical directions" (bad career move, Dave). He was replaced by a young John Stewart, who gave the group a more political-activist bent.

There's a great variety of songs here. Besides two tracks that make it onto most "K3 Best of" anthologies (a cover of Dylan's "Blowin' in the Wind", and the track "Desert Pete") , you get the following genres : Spiritual (Sing Out); C&W (Jackson); Hawaiian (Marcelle Vahine); Silly (Goo ga Gee); Historical (Ballad of the Thresher) and several generic ballads. There is also a great Rod McKuen anti-war song (Two-Ten, Six-Eighteen), and a K3-penned tune, Rider, which was later covered by The Grateful Dead, and remains to this day my favorite Dead song.

What's Not To Like...
The inherent drawback of such a great variety is that some of the songs won't appeal to you. Jackson was much better done a bit later by Johnny Cash & June Carter. The Ballad of the Thresher, commemorating the loss of one of our nuclear-powered submarines, falls remarkably flat. Which is strange, since that tragedy affected our national psyche, much as the loss of the space shuttle Challenger would do 30 years later.

You want albums?! We'll give you albums!!
I'd be tempted to also carp about the shortness of the LP (barely 28 minutes), but The Kingston Trio was an amazingly prolific group in the early 60's. Here's a breakdown of their LP output : 1958 (1 album- their debut); 1959 (4); 1960 (3); 1961 (3); 1962 (4); 1963 (3); 1964 (2); and 1965 (3). I think only two of those are "Live" albums; the rest are studio efforts. At 10-12 tracks per LP, that's a lot of songs to learn.

The Kingston Trio were teh folk group of the late 50's and early 60's. Alas, the times, they were a-changin'. New voices such as Dylan, Joan Baez, and Phil Ochs, were leading folk-music in a different, more radical direction. Then Beatlemania hit, and by-and-large relegated the whole folk genre to "geezer" status. By the end of the 60's, the Kingston Trio had disbanded due to lack-of-interest. That's a shame really. We'll give Sunny Side! 7½ stars, and hope that their music someday becomes popular again.