FOLK’S GIBSON AND CAMP : ALMOST 20 YEARS OF REUNION MUSIC

If they gave an award for the longest series of reunions after the shortest original career, the folk duo of Gibson and Camp would definitely be in the running.

Bob Gibson and Hamilton Camp have been getting back together for almost 20 years now. Their shows tonight and Sunday afternoon at the Heliotrope Theater are part of what has become a yearly tradition: a couple of weeks of reunion shows in the spring, a couple more in the fall.

Add up all of those reunions, and they’ll probably outnumber the original shows that the influential but short-lived Gibson and Camp did when they played together for the first time in the early 1960s.

“Heck,” Hamilton Camp said with a laugh earlier this week, “I can’t believe we played for more than a year together, all told. But now we do a few weeks every year, just to keep a hand in and to keep the people reminded that we’re still here.”

Most of the time, though, they’re on opposite coasts: Gibson lives in New York, where he sings, teaches writing workshops and has a children’s TV show.

Camp, meanwhile, acts occasionally, does voice-overs for shows like “The Smurfs” and “The New Flintstones,” and runs the Heliotrope Theater, where he stages concerts every Sunday afternoon and improvisational theater games Friday and Saturday nights.

“It necessarily has to be catch-as-catch-can,” said Camp. “But the secret of our act is that because we’ve had so little time to be together, being on opposite coasts and so many separations, the stuff we do we mostly improvise. It’s like an old map, and you just keep finding different things in it.”

But then, he adds, Gibson and Camp shows were always “half-concert, half-rehearsal.” They got together in Chicago in 1960, introduced by manager Albert Grossman, who wanted to form a folk trio. When the two singers decided they weren’t interested in adding a woman, Grossman formed Peter, Paul & Mary instead--and, as Camp puts it, “They got the opening night in the Garden, and we got the one-way ticket to Palookaville.”

Actually, Gibson and Camp frequented folk clubs in New York and Chicago, where their adventurous harmonies and Gibson’s unique twelve-string guitar stylings proved enormously influential on the entire folk scene.

They recorded only one album, but “Live at the Gate of Horn” became one of the era’s must-have folk records. Then, in short order, they disbanded when Camp became more interested in improvisational theater and joined the Second City comedy troupe.

Gibson kept singing, Camp became an actor, and their first reunion came a decade later. “We hadn’t seen each other for eight or nine years,” recalled Camp. “We rehearsed for 15 minutes, then did an hour on stage. We barely knew what we were doing, but that thread was there, so we trusted it. And we raised the roof.”

Since then, they’ve appeared together when their schedules permit. They found time in the late ‘70s to record a new album, “Homemade Music.” Last year, they re-created the long out-of-print Gate of Horn album, repeating all of the earlier LP’s songs and patter.

“It’s fun having worked with a guy for 30 years,” said Camp of the arrangement. “When you first get into the music business, you have lots of ambition to make the big time and things like that. And after a while, if you actually experience some of that, you realize that most of it was just in your mind, and all those big ambitions probably had something to do with your mother or your father, you know?”

He laughed. “But if you break through and keep working with somebody over the years, then you start doing it because of the work itself. We keep coming up with new combinations of old stuff, and brand new associations.

“That’s the glory of living on the intuitive. But to do that you have to have a rope to hold on to--and our rope is the music that we’ve played all our lives.”