For Limeliters, the Folk Music Goes On

Sometime around AD 2009, some of today’s 20-year-olds may wander into a bar in Elko, Nev., to find a graying Bruce Springsteen singing for a small roomful of beer drinkers.

Or maybe, with any luck, it will be Prince, in a tent at the Alfalfa Fair in Lancaster.

And then they will feel the way scattered survivors of the Great Age of Commercial Folk Music feel as they look at the bill for tonight’s show in the folk music series at Sportsmen’s Lodge in Studio City.

There--back from years of inactivity, sporadic reunions and some strange adventures--are the Limeliters, once famous for such songs as “Have Some Madeira, M’Dear” and a wide range of classic folk songs.

Concert-Hall Days

There was a time when no 100-seat lounge, like the bar at the Sportsmen’s Lodge, could afford to book the trio, one of the most popular groups in the heyday of folk music in the late 1950s and early ‘60s. They played concert halls, not bars. As it said, with only a tolerable amount of hyperbole, on the liner notes of one of their popular albums (of which they sold more than 3 million):

“High up in an isolated mountain cave, uninvaded by radio, television or other civilized means of communication, there lives an elderly recluse who has never heard of the Limeliters. This hermit is virtually unique among the inhabitants of the North American continent.”

Those days are long gone, but the Limeliters are still the biggest names to appear at the Sportsmen’s Lodge series of Sunday night folk concerts, “Bound for Glory.”

The series, which celebrates its second birthday tonight, usually features singers and groups that are coming up or are known only to the small audience of folk aficionados, often part-time singers who still have daytime jobs and never made a record for a major label.

Sellout Anticipated

The promoter of the series, Terry Slegr, said she expected a sellout for the Limeliters. “One woman called and said she wanted to bring a party of 29,” Slegr said.

The Limeliters, who asked for the job, called it part of a strategy of getting back to their roots, acquiring late in life the experience other folk singers get as apprentices--working small, smoky barrooms and the intimate folk music clubs that have long been the heart of the genre.

The Limeliters never did work their way up as a group. They were a hit in their first appearance, at the hungry i in San Francisco, in 1959.

“We decided this year to start making contacts with the folk and acoustic music community, which we’ve never really had,” said Alex Hassilev. “We kind of shot to stardom and were never part of that whole folk music scene, so we decided to go back to a more folky and socially relevant kind of show, playing folk clubs.

“Playing someplace like this is like playing one of the old-time coffeehouses, something we do for ourselves as much as anything else.

“We just played a little place down in Leucadia” that only seated about 60, said Lou Gottlieb. “And we played this place in Berkeley, run by a nonprofit association, people with an abiding love of folk music.”

Original Members

Gottlieb and Hassilev were two of the original three members of the Limeliters. The third, Glenn Yarbrough, whose stratospheric tenor was one of the trio’s trademarks, left to work on his own in 1963. That broke up the group after less than four years at the top of the heap in the era of the Kingston Trio, Harry Belafonte and a newcomer named Joan Baez.

Hassilev, a former actor, went back to acting and became a record producer. Gottlieb, a Ph.D. in musicology whose professorial stage monologues satirize himself and academic lecturers generally, hung around the University of California, Berkeley for three years, attending seminars on old English ballads and “having a nice little mid-life crisis.”

In 1966, he decided that he would make his debut as a serious concert pianist by his 50th birthday--then seven years away--and retired with a piano to practice at Morningstar Ranch, a 31-acre spread he had bought near Occidental in Sonoma County.

By that time however, the ‘60s were in full swing and some of Berkeley followed him.

“Lou is an intellectual,” Hassilev said. “Being what he was, his aura just sort of attracted people interested in alternate life styles. The ranch became a mecca for people disaffected with the establishment. Lou became an executive hippie, running the place.”

‘Health Hazard’

“Eventually,” Gottlieb said, “the county declared the place a public nuisance and health hazard, which was my neighbors’ way of saying the hippies were freaking them out. They got an injunction preventing anyone but the owners from staying there overnight. I still own the ranch and the injunction is still in effect.”

As a legal maneuver during his battles with the neighbors, Gottlieb deeded some of his land to God. That drew a lawsuit from a woman in Texas whose house had been struck by lightning. She sued God as the responsible party, and tried without success to attach the land for damages.

Running the embattled commune didn’t leave much time for piano practice. Gottlieb’s 50th birthday came and went in 1973, and so did the dream of a second career in classical music.

But by that time there was a second career, of sorts, for the Limeliters. Yarbrough was touring and old fans wanted to see him with the trio. In 1973, Hassilev and Gottlieb joined him on the road for about four months each year, adding some reunion numbers to Yarbrough’s solos.

Found Young Tenor

Then Yarbrough, a serious ocean sailor, began spending more and more time at sea. In 1977, the Limeliters vanished again. In 1980, Hassilev and Gottlieb heard a young tenor, Red Grammer, asked him to join them, and revived the trio. They did some “all-star old folkies reunion concerts” with the current version of the Kingston Trio, kept alive by one of the original members.

The Kingstons often play country music bars now.

So, figured the Limeliters, could they.

They were wrong.

“We made a decision to get a commercial record deal, and since folk is non-existent on the air, we decided to do country music,” Hassilev said. “We made a gallant try, but Nashville was unimpressed. It just didn’t happen.”

So they scrapped the six-piece band they had backing them, “and we’re going back to our roots--or being driven back,” Gottlieb said.

Although Gottlieb and Hassilev live in West Hollywood, Gottlieb said, “it’s amazing how little we play in Los Angeles.” They appear mainly in the eastern part of the country, where a folk revival of sorts is under way, he said.

“The word ‘revival’ sounds so pretentious, but there is a renewal of interest, a vortex of activity in New York and Washington, D. C.,” Gottlieb said, which he credited to a reaction to the state of popular music, similar to the reaction that inspired the folk music boom of the late 1950s.

Gritty, Real-Life Appeal

Then and now, he said, pop music was obsessed with slickly done love songs and left folk music to exploit everything else, from humor to politics, with songs of gritty, real-life appeal.

“In those days, it was a fairyland,” Gottlieb said, crooning “ ‘just wrap your troubles in dreams.’

“People got tired of the sentiment. Today there is aural fatigue induced by this desert of perfection, a glossiness that comes from tremendously skillful record producers creating music on multi-tracks, manufacturing sentiments to the dimensions of the radio stations.

“But their songs with few exceptions comment on the relationship between the sexes. Folk singers have fun with other things, too. There’s room for patriotism. With our government going into unprecedented debt, surely any mature performer should have some opinion about what the money’s being spent on,” Gottlieb said.

“There’s a whole scene building up in the East that’s like the old days, only what they define as folk music has nothing to do with the academic definition of folk music--that is, music which has existed for some time in the oral tradition with no known composer. If there is a common denominator in this music, it is that it is primarily acoustic, with almost no electrically amplified instruments, and 80% of it was composed by the performers.”

Add Contemporary Songs

Academic definitions notwithstanding, the Limeliters add the contemporary songs to their repertoire, Hassilev said.

“We continue searching for material that reflects the times,” he said, even though “the audiences won’t let us forget some of our old songs, things like ‘Have Some Madeira M’ Dear,’ and ‘Vikki Dougan.’ We share the nostalgia of our audiences, but we’re not fossilized in amber.”

The trio would like to introduce a younger generation to the pleasures of folk music hangouts like the coffeehouses of Greenwich Village in the 1950s, Hassilev said, “but one of the most difficult things to do is reach a new audience.

“We draw some younger people, but most of our audience is between 35 and 50--our people, the yuppies of the ‘60s.”