TIN PAN ALLEY: Like from Halls of Ivy

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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."