Once Upon a Time in Bloomington, MN

In July of 1966,
the Kingston Trio
began a three-week engagement at
the Sahara Tahoe Hotel
in Lake Tahoe. The trio and their manager considered it the beginning of their final 12 months as an active group, and had the tape recorders running -- the idea was that upon the announcement of their farewell tour, a double-LP live set would be in the can and ready to be released. But as it turned out, neither their current label,
Decca Records
, nor their prior label,
Capitol Records
-- which had issued three complete concert albums by the group -- was interested in issuing the farewell album. Instead, the record remained on the shelf until 1969, when
Bill Cosby
's
Tetragrammaton Records
issued
Once Upon a Time
; amazingly, the album made it into the lower regions of the Top 200 albums for six weeks (which leads one to suspect that
Bob Shane
had been correct in his commercial instincts, in his resistance to breaking up the trio in 1967).
Tetragrammaton
folded in the early '70s, and the resulting double LP is one of the rarest in
's output, which is sad -- the best of their concert recordings since those renowned live recordings of 1958, it captured the group ranging freely across its history and the
folk
landscape, including two songs associated variously with
the Weavers
and
Leadbelly
(
"Wimoweh"
"Goodnight Irene"
), a trio of
Bob Dylan
songs (
"One Too Many Mornings,"
"Mama, You Been on My Mind,"
"Tomorrow Is a Long Time"
), and a
Donovan
song (
"Colours"
), and traveling back through their own history (
"Tom Dooley,"
etc.) and giving their best
Decca
single (
"I'm Going Home"
) a fresh airing. If there is a flaw here -- apart from the momentary appearance of
orchestra on the introduction sequences on each platter -- it is the result of a desire not to repeat too much material off of the group's earlier concert albums, so that some songs, such as
"Pullin' Away,"
are not present here. In compensation, listeners get a real live version of
"Where Have All the Flowers Gone,"
which was represented on the
College Concert
album by a studio version with dubbed-on applause; their best piece of released topical humor,
"Getaway John"
; and
"Ballad of the Shape of Things."
The latter leads into the best version of
"Greenback Dollar"
ever issued by the threesome in any incarnation, and they're able to slide from that into a nicely wry intro to
"Mama, You Been on My Mind"
(as
"Babe, You Been on My Mind"
) -- actually, their versions of
Dylan
songs here are a major breakthrough for a group that kept his music at arm's length (or further) for years, and show just how much further the trio could have gotten. In any case, the resulting 72-minute album runs circles around their last live album for
Capitol
Back in Town
), as well as most of their late
work and a lot of their
sides, and it's worth tracking down. ~ Bruce Eder