Rejuvenated Kingston Trio on the Road and Loving It

The Kingston Trio will be in town Saturday night, performing with the San Diego Chamber Festival Orchestra on the tennis courts of the new Hyatt Regency La Jolla at the Aventine in the Golden Triangle.

Founding member Nick Reynolds is certain to find plenty of familiar faces in the crowd. He is, after all, a San Diego native as well as a recent returnee.

Reynolds, who was born and raised in Coronado, began singing as a child, at family gatherings and neighborhood block parties. In 1957, he moved to San Francisco and, with a couple of college buddies, put together the Kingston Trio. Over the next six years, the seminal folk troupe scored nearly a dozen Top 40 hits, including “Tom Dooley,” “Reverend Mr. Black” and “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?”

In 1967, four years after their last Top 40 hit, the Kingston Trio broke up. Reynolds moved to a rural town on the southern coast of Oregon and bought a ranch. He sold the ranch in 1986 and returned to Coronado, where he spent the next two years tending bar at Bula’s Pub & Eatery.

In the summer of 1988, Reynolds recalled, he accepted an invitation from Bob Shane, one of the Kingston Trio’s two other founding members, to reunite. Ever since, the rejuvenated trio has again been touring the country, tapping into the rich vein of solid gold it struck in the late 1950s and early ‘60s.

“I’ve been back with the group for exactly two years now, and I’ve never had more fun,” Reynolds said. “In fact, the fun keeps escalating, and the crowds keep getting bigger. All the college kids who listened to us when we were big, they’re adults now, and they’re craving to see and hear something to touch base with. And we seem to be it.”

The trio’s Saturday night show with the San Diego Chamber Festival Orchestra is just one of nearly two dozen dates this year in which the group will be backed by a symphony orchestra.

“It’s an incredible combination,” Reynolds said. “God, we come out and we do a couple of songs by ourselves, then all of a sudden we go into a ballad, the symphony comes in behind us, and tears come to my eyes, believe me.

“It’s just so powerful, so emotional, an experience. It’s a whole different thing from three guys up on stage with just their voices and their guitars.”

Reynolds said he plans to continue touring as long as he’s physically able.

“We’re currently on the road about 30 weeks per year, and I have no intention of slowing down, much less giving up,” he said. “It’s way too much fun, way too great a life.”

Stevie Salas ColorCode--the rock ‘n’ roll power trio led by and named after the local guitar whiz who spent the better part of two years on the road with Rod Stewart--has just completed a two-week tour of Japan.

While there, Salas took time out to attend the grand opening of the $50-million, 3,000-capacity Pax Theater in Tokyo, a combination discotheque/concert hall built by Hiromichi Saeki, founder and president of Pax Corp., one of Japan’s largest and most successful international business-development conglomerates.

The 27-year-old Oceanside native hung out backstage, chumming around with opening-night performers Soul II Soul, Grace Jones, Ofra Haza and Richie Havens, as well as fellow celebrity invitees Sheena Easton, Vernon Reid of Living Colour and former MTV veejay Nina Blackwood.

Upon their return to the United States later this month, Stevie Salas ColorCode will head into a Los Angeles recording studio to start work on their second album for Island Records, which last January released the group’s eponymous debut, which fared much better overseas than it did in the U.S. The as-yet-untitled follow-up is due out by Christmas.

In the meantime, a new song by Salas, “What’s Going Down,” will be appearing on “Tame Yourself,” a compilation album benefiting People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, a nonprofit organization fighting the use of animals in laboratory experiments.

Other contributors to the album, which is scheduled to come out on Island in early August, include R.E.M., Edie Brickell (sans the New Bohemians) and the Indigo Girls.

Salas recorded “What’s Going Down” earlier this year, during a brief break from his group’s U.S. tour with Joe Satriani. Joining him in the studio on background vocals were Robin Zander and Rick Nielsen of Cheap Trick.

LINER NOTES: Nearly 300,000 people attended the 1990 Del Mar Fair grandstand concert series, which ended its 20-day, 22-show run last Wednesday. Willie Nelson, who played June 26, drew the biggest crowd, 22,000, breaking the previous attendance record of 21,500 set by Smokey Robinson in 1988. In second place were the Oak Ridge Boys (July 4, 19,500), followed by Expose (June 22, 18,500); Natalie Cole (July 2, 17,750), and the Charlie Daniels Band (June 17) and Air Supply (July 1), each with 17,500. The poorest draws: the Little River Band (June 15, 7,500); Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam (June 18) and Johnny Rivers (June 23), each with 6,000; the Harry James Orchestra (June 21, 5,000) and Carmen McRae (June 28, 3,500). . . .

X-Fest III, the third outdoor mega-concert produced by progressive-rock radio station XTRA-FM (91X) since 1983, will take place Aug. 18 at San Diego State University’s Aztec Bowl. Performing will be the B-52s, Ziggy Marley and the Melody Makers, the Cramps and They Might Be Giants. . . .

Local country singer-songwriter Candye Kane made a big leap from nightclubs to San Diego Jack Murphy Stadium last Friday night. She sang the national anthem before the San Diego Padres- St. Louis Cardinals baseball game. . . .

Tickets go on sale Saturday at 10 a.m. for Howie Mandel’s Aug. 10 appearance at Symphony Hall downtown. . . .

This week’s concerts: Chaba Fadela, tonight at the Belly Up Tavern in Solana Beach; Keiko Matsui with Dan Siegel, Thursday at Humphrey’s on Shelter Island; Willy DeVille (formerly with Mink DeVille), Thursday at the Belly Up Tavern; the Tod Howarth Band with Blacklist and Threshold, Friday at the Bacchanal in Kearny Mesa; Caterwaul, Friday at Rio’s in Loma Portal; 7 Seconds with Liquid Jesus, Friday at Iguanas in Tijuana; L7 with the Chemical People and the Sort of Quartet, Saturday at the Casbah in Middletown; Alabama with Clint Black and the KSON Flatbed Band, Saturday at the 32nd Street Naval Station Athletic Field in National City; Mick Taylor, Saturday at the Belly Up Tavern; Ray Kane with Ledward Kaapana, Sunday at the Del Mar Shores Auditorium; Johnny Mathis, Monday and Tuesday at Humphrey’s, and the Church with the Blue Aeroplanes, Tuesday at San Diego State University’s Montezuma Hall.