Lou Gottlieb; Bass Player With Limeliters

Lou Gottlieb, bass player with the 1960s folk trio the Limeliters, has died near the west Sonoma County ranch where he once founded a controversial commune. He was 72.

Gottlieb, who had performed only last month, died Thursday of cancer in Palm Drive Hospital in Sebastopol. He was taken there after he became light-headed, fell and broke his nose at the Morning Star Ranch commune.

At the outset of the folk music craze in 1959, Gottlieb joined the other two original Limeliters, Alex Hassilev and Glenn Yarbrough, to become an immediate hit at the hungry i in San Francisco. Recording contracts with Elektra Records and RCA Records quickly followed.

“We caught a wave,” Gottlieb told The Times last month prior to a performance at the Alex Theatre in Glendale. “We were doing something right.”

The trio churned out a dozen hit albums with songs including “Have Some Madeira M’Dear.” They even were featured in a series of television cigarette commercials.

Gottlieb, who held a doctorate in musicology from UCLA, did the vocal arrangements and enhanced the group’s concert appeal with his sophisticated monologues satirizing academic lecturers.

The group broke up in 1963 when Yarbrough decided to pursue a solo career. Hassilev returned to acting. Gottlieb spent a few years attending UC Berkeley seminars on old English ballads.

In 1966, at 42, Gottlieb decided to become a concert pianist by the time he turned 50 and retreated to his 61-acre ranch to practice.

But part of Berkeley’s alternate lifestyle crowd followed, and Gottlieb became an executive hippie, too busy running the commune to practice piano.

Country neighbors became increasingly angered as throngs of long-haired, shoeless people migrated to Morning Star, where they built shacks, dug holes for toilets, grew vegetables and smoked marijuana.

“Eventually, the county declared the place a public nuisance and health hazard, which was my neighbors’ way of saying the hippies were freaking them out,” Gottlieb told The Times in 1986. “They got an injunction preventing anyone but the owners from staying there overnight.”

Gottlieb lived in India for a while and in the early 1970s moved to his native Los Angeles. In 1973, he revived the Limeliters with Hassilev and various tenors. The trio performed about 25 concerts a year, often as an opening act for Yarbrough.

Gottlieb, who had moved back to the Sonoma County ranch, is survived by three children and three grandchildren.

A memorial party is scheduled for 10 a.m. July 28 at Morning Star Ranch.