Category: SONGWRITERS

December 25, 1998 – Bryan Andrew MacLean was born in Beverley Hills, California on September 25, 1946. Bryan’s father was an architect to the Hollywood stars and his mother an artist and a dancer. Neighbour Fritz Loew of the composers Lener & Loew recognized him as a melodic genius at the age of three as he doodled on the piano. Bryan’s gift for music was duly noted and he was given piano lessons and taught classical arrangement theory. Bryan’s early influences were more Billie Holliday and George Gershwin rather than Robert Johnson, although he confessed a strong obsession for Elvis Presley. During his childhood he wore out show music records from ‘Guys & Dolls’, ‘Oklahoma’, ‘South Pacific’ and ‘West Side Story’.

His first girlfriend was Liza Minelli and they would sit at the piano together and sing songs like ‘The Wizard of Oz’. He learned to swim in Elizabeth Taylor’s pool and his father’s best friend was Robert Stack from T.V’s ‘Untouchables’. At 17 Bryan encountered the Beatles, “Before the Beatles I had been into folk music. I had been showing my art work at a panel shop (I wanted to be an artist in the bohemian tradition) – where we would sit around with banjos and do folk music, but when I saw ‘A Hard Days Night’ everything changed. I let my hair grow out and I got kicked out of three high schools.”

Bryan started playing guitar in 1963/64. He got a job at the Balladeer before it changed its name to the Troubadour Club, playing back-up blues guitar. It was here he met the pre Byrds Jet Set while dating Jackie De Shannon and he became ‘fast friends’ with David Crosby. He moved away from home and by early 1965 he became road manager for the Byrds on their first Californian tour with the Rolling Stones. He managed one more cross-country tour with the group after they hit big with ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ but the exhausting 30 one nighters broke him physically and when the Byrds left for their first U.K. tour in the summer of 1965 they left Bryan behind.

After an unsuccessful audition for a part in the Monkees Bryan got into a car on Sunset Strip which Arthur Lee was driving. Arthur had a band called the Grass Roots doing a residency at the Brave New World Club and being street wise knew Bryan’s ‘connections’ with the Byrds. He knew all of the scene that followed the Byrds would follow Bryan if he invited him to see the band play at the club as the Byrds were out of town and sure enough after a couple of weeks the crowds were lined up and down the street for blocks. Bryan desperately wanted to join the band and he said, “I’d give my right arm to be in your group.” To which Arthur responded “No – you’re going to need it!” The Grass Roots became Love when another group registered a hit with the name.

Love were rapidly gaining a reputation as the ‘street band’ and Jac Holzman’s Elektra Records snapped them up and they hit big with their version of the Bacharach/David song ‘Little Red Book’ and a very successful first album to which Bryan contributed the beautiful ‘Softly To Me’ as well as co-writing two others and the Byrds arrangement of ‘Hey Joe’ which he sang. In a staggering progression in just nine months Love put out their second album “Da Capo” and the storming hit single – a pre punk blast of a song ‘7 & 7 is’. Bryan’s beautiful ‘Orange Skies’ was just one of the “6 sides of an uncut diamond” that formed side one of this classic “flower power” album. As the band threatened to implode with addiction to hard drugs taking hold; sessions for what would turn out to be one of the classic albums of the “summer of love” began. Bryan’s ‘Alone Again Or’ was the opening cut on ‘Forever Changes’ and although Arthur mixed Bryan’s lead vocal under his own harmony vocal it is still Bryan’s song that Love are remembered for as it has gone on to become a radio classic and Bryan lived most of his life on its royalties as it was covered by the Damned and UFO amongst others. Although Arthur’s songs crowded out Bryan’s, it is Bryan who believed he influenced Arthur more than the other way around. “What you have on the second and third Love albums is a black guy from L.A. writing show tunes.”

Bryan admits to an addiction to heroin at this point in his life and had a near death experience where he overdosed after leaving Love. Meanwhile band members Ken Forssi (bass) and Johnny Echols (lead guitar) were busted for heroin and armed robbery – they were known as the ‘Doughnut Stand Robbers!’ – and served time in San Quentin and the original Love fell apart.

After an aborted attempt at a solo career – his demos were rejected by Elektra – Bryan wrote film music that wasn’t used and tried without success to record an album for Capitol records in New York. He hit a real low point and shortly afterwards became a Christian, “I was alone in a hotel room in New York and I had lost practically everything. It occurred to me that I was in a tail-spin so I thought ‘well, why don’t I pray?’ So I did and nothing happened for about two or three weeks. At the end of that time, I was sitting in a drug store on 3rd Avenue having a drink and suddenly the drink turned to sand in my mouth and I left the bar and when I reached the pavement and daylight I knew something had changed and from that point on my life has been totally different.

Bryan joined a Christian Fellowship Church called the Vineyard, “The guy that led the church was the guy that converted Bob Dylan.” During Friday night Bible stints Bryan took the concert part of the session and was so amazed at the reaction he gradually assembled a catalogue of his Christian songs. His next move was to open a Christian night club in Beverley Hills called ‘The Daisy’ and when it closed in 1976 Bryan considered going full-time into the ministry but decided once again to devote himself to music. He played an unsuccessful reunion with Arthur in 1978 on two dates but wasn’t paid so he turned down the offer to join Arthur in a U.K. tour as the ‘original’ Love. Ironically the Bryan MacLean band got a gig supporting Arthur Lee’s Love at the Whisky in 1982 which resulted in a stoned Arthur constantly interrupting Bryan’s show and when physically rejected from the stage he threw a cup of hot coffee over Bryan, leaving him with, “a great sense of loss, over someone who’d once been a close friend.”

There were several attempts in the early 80’s to make a solo album for Rhino, which never came out due to Bryan’s continued problems with alcohol. In 1986 Bryan agreed to take Arthur’s place at a gig, as Arthur was too unwell to play the date.

Debbie Boone had a hit with Bryan’s song ‘You Light Up My Life’ which was on her album for which she won a Grammy in 1990 and he worked for a period with his half sister, Maria McKee writing one song for the debut album by Lone Justice ‘Don’t Toss Us Away’ while she went on to success, Bryan sank into obscurity. Then along with Arthur in the early 90’s he started to make a comeback.

Bryan freely admitted that the small amount of success he had with Love nearly killed him and indeed it was some thirty years on from his late 60’s hey day with Love that his Love demos were discovered by his mother Elizabeth in their garage and after 2 years of persistent and patient shopping around record companies a deal was struck with Sundazed and the CD ‘ifyoubelievein‘ was released in 1997 and was critically well received. He had completed a spiritual album of “spooky Christian music” and was about to record a brand new studio album. His famous song ‘Alone Again Or’ had been used on a Miller Draft advert in the U.S. and he’d just recorded a Spanish language version of the same song for the large Hispanic audience.

The mantle of Love had fallen on Bryan as his Love partner Arthur Lee was just two years into a twelve-year jail sentence for firearm offences.

It is a cruel irony that fate should deal him such a blow just as he was finally beginning to resurrect his career. Bryan died from a heart attack on December 25, 1998 in a restaurant. He was 52.

In the album’s liner notes, MacLean adds, “The music that is presented in this collection was written decades ago, when I was in the band Love, and was written with that band in mind, and had been intended to be performed by, and associated with the band, Love. I firmly believe that if things had been the other way around, by now, you probably would’ve already heard a great deal, if not all of what is assembled here. For one thing, I would’ve stuck around the band a lot longer, not feeling the frustration of having such a backlog of unpublished, and unperformed material, and the natural unfulfilled desire for recognition, or even vindication.”

“It’s, in a sense, the Love record that never was: solo demos and home recordings of fourteen original MacLean songs, all written in the earliest and most vital years of Love and all but three virtually unheard in any form since MacLean wrote them,” said David Fricke of Rolling Stone magazine.

March 17, 1996 – Terry LaVerne Stafford was born on November 22, 1941. A native of Hollis, Oklahoma, he is best remembered for his 1964 hit song, ‘Suspicion.’ The song, written by Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman, and originally recorded by Elvis Presley, became Stafford’s only hit song and a Top Ten single. He sounded uncanningly like Elvis.

Stafford grew up in Amarillo, Texas, and then moved to Los Angeles, California, after high school, so that he could pursue a music career. Stafford began performing at social events and local dances, until he got his break in 1964, to record the single, ‘Suspicion.’

The song was remastered by a local Disc Jockey and the song was released, going to number three on the pop chart. Although he was never able to duplicate his first success, he did have a Top 30 with his follow-up recording, ‘I’ll Touch A Star.’ He later turned to acting and writing, he appeared in the film, “Wild Wheels,” and wrote the song, ‘Big In Vegas,’ for country singer Buck Owens.

In 1973, Stafford signed with the Atlantic Record Company and released a country album entitled, “Say, Has Anybody Seen My Sweet Gypsy Rose,” with the title track landing on the Top 40. He also the wrote the song, ‘Amarillo By Morning,’ which was later a major hit for country singer George Strait. In 1974, after a year or so with the Atlantic Record Label, Stafford left music. Stafford’s other recordings include, ‘If You Got The Time,’ ‘Am I Fooling Myself,’ ‘Kiss Me Quick,’ ‘For Your Love,’ ‘Pocket Full Of Rainbows,’ ‘Hoping,’ ‘Sospeto,’ and ‘Soldier Boy.

Stafford passed away in Amarillo, Texas, on March 17, 1996, from the effects of liver problems at age 54.

December 5, 1993 – Doug Hopkins was born on April 11, 1961 in Seattle, WA  but raised in Tempe, Arizona. It’s unknown when exactly the Hopkins family arrived in Arizona, but the family lived in suburban Tempe. Little is published about Doug’s younger days, prior to attending McClintock High School. As a senior, Hopkins picked up an acoustic guitar and began taking lessons. An instructor encouraged him to change to bass, on account of his large hands. Doug’s interest in music kept him busy, often practicing the guitar on a Friday night rather than going to parties. Doug successfully graduated McClintock in 1979, even after a gym short incident resulting in a two week suspension during his senior year.

After High School, Doug briefly studied music at Mesa Community College, before becoming disenchanted with the emphasis on classical music. Following this, he enrolled at Arizona State University, studying Sociology.

Doug’s first foray into music was playing for bass for a little known cover band in Fountain Hills. At the time he was largely into classic rock. Stories of Doug engaging in strong arguments about music are peppered throughout his life. One of the more notable instances of this was around this time with McClintock pal Bill Leen. In the late 70’s and early 80’s the pair would argue the validity of classic rock vs. punk rock, with Bill championing the latter genre. Eventually Doug saw the value to punk rock and put it to Bill that they should start a punk band. Doug decided that he’d teach Bill to play bass, and he’d pick up the guitar again. The fact that neither of them could play all that well, instruments worried them too much. There was born Moral Majority, Doug’s first serious original band, with neighbors Alan Long and Jim Swafford on drums and vocals respectively.

True to the punk genre, there was not much musical training between the bunch, but the punk rock power chords, reminiscent of many 70’s punk rock bands was a perfect backdrop for Doug’s interest in literature and his intelligence was expressed through his clever lyrics, often targeting political and social issues. After months of practicing and playing living room gigs with family and friends as spectators, Moral Majority secured a position opening for then local heroes The Jetzons.

Moral Majority dissolved towards the end of 1981, and by the beginning of 1982 Doug had started a new band, The Psalms. Throughout his life, each new band often showcased a genre shift from the last. With The Psalms, Doug put to bed punk rock and moved towards a new wave sound. The Psalms were able to pick up where Moral Majority left off, opening for the Jetzons, and later more high profile spots opening for the likes of Billy Idol. During the bands two or so year tenure they received a reasonable amount of local press, and released a single and an EP with some help from Ed Reilly. Six months into the band Doug began to experiment with keyboards and synthesizer, teaching singer Jim Swafford to play guitar to devote more time to those instruments. A decision that he later regretted towards the end of the Psalms. The Psalms disbanded in early 1984. The same year Doug graduated from Arizona State University.

With both his studies and The Psalms behind him, Doug started putting together his next band in early 1985. Despite having jammed with former Psalm band mates through 1984, the line up of Algebra Ranch was made up of new players, including Damon Dorion from the newly defunct Jetzons. Algebra Ranch are cited as the band in which Doug grew significantly as a writer and honed in on the jangly pop sound and style which a few years later would become the trademark of the Gin Blossoms. Around this time he was working on future hit songs such as Hey Jealousy and Found Out About You. The latter of which was inspired by an ex-girlfriend who put him in a hospital with a shattered cheek bone, with a Tai-Kwondo kick to the head at an R.E.M concert the same year. Despite the advancing in his song writing and arrangement craft with the Algebra Ranch material, Doug’s on stage antics and unserious manner saw the band only last about a year before breaking up.

The following year, Doug teamed up again with Jim Swafford to form the Ten O’Clock Scholars. Although the band held on to some Algebra Ranch songs, and their set lists were virtually a blue print for the early Gin Blossoms, working with this singer David McKay gave this band more of a folk slant than any of Doug’s previous work. After a few months of jamming, the band dissolved when Doug up and left for a recording contract in L.A, but was soon picked up in Portland after David McKay convinced the rest of the band to move to Portland. On arriving in Portland, Doug garnered a spot with a local cover band to help pay the bills along side Scholars gigs. Despite local television exposure, the gigs were hard to come by for the Scholars, and by the end of 1986 the band had broken up and members had returned to Phoenix.

Doug’s next project would become his most famous band. The Gin Blossoms formed in late 1987, and soon became local favorites in Tempe, Arizona. After some lineup changes, a trip to Austin’s South By South West and independent cassette release, the band was signed to A&M Records in 1990. The band achieved local success with the recording of their A&M debut Up and Crumbling in 1991, and the following year started recording their follow up record in Memphis. During the recording sessions, tensions rose within the band and label as Doug was reported to be “moody, homesick and unproductive” and drinking heavily throughout the time in Memphis. The situation came to a head when he was sent back to Phoenix and soon learnt that he’d been fired from the band.

Back in Phoenix, Doug was a local celebrity and had no problem putting together new bands. The first of which was The Eventuals, with Marc Norman and Brian Blush, both Hopkins fans who have been quoted as saying he inspired them to become musicians. Blush and Hopkins had become friends years earlier when the underage Blush attempted to sneak into Long Wongs, caught by Doug who told him to buy him a beer or he was going to shanghai his ass out of the bar. The Eventuals were short lived, only ever playing one gig together.

Soon after Doug, hooked up with Lawrence Zubia to form the Chimeras. The Chimeras, with a solid lineup of musicians paired with Doug’s writing skills garnered a near immediate local following and played showcases like South By Southwest. By early 1993, the Gin Blossoms album New Miserable Experience was starting to find footing, and the success of his former band fueled Doug’s song writing desire for revenge, as well as increase his inner turmoil and self destructive behavior. Despite the impressive following and arsenal of songs that could rival the Gin Blossoms, in April 1993 while performing at the KUKQ Birthday Bash festival, Doug fumbled a solo and promptly quit the band after the set. While the next day he asked to rejoin the band, his inner turmoil was obvious to the band who denied the request, although Hopkins and the Zubias remained good friends.

For the latter part of 1993 Doug continued playing with local musicians, however his depression worsened as the Gin Blossoms success continued to grow. In November 1993 he received a gold record for sales of Hey Jealousy, which hung on his wall for 2 weeks until he smashed it. Concerns for his well being by friends and family escalated, and Chimeras band mate Lawrence Zubia took to checking on him daily. On Dec 5, 1993, a week after Doug smashed the gold record, Lawrence found that he’d taken his life in his Tempe apartment at the age of 32.

“I told him I was sorry I couldn’t make him happy,” Hopkins’ sister, Sara Bennewitz, remembers of her last conversation with him Thursday. “He just said, ‘I was born unhappy.’

“I told him I loved him and that I knew I wouldn’t see him again. He patted my hand and said goodbye.”

Hopkins’ sister, Sara, told The Associated Press that this was Hopkins’ sixth suicide attempt in 10 years.

Doug’s death hit the Tempe music community hard, with former band mates Lawrence and Mark Zubia turned their Sunday night set into an impromptu wake. A memorial service was held in Tempe a few days later. Immediately following the service, Robin Wilson of the Gin Blossoms was approached by a women with a relaying a message from Doug – that he had poured sugar in their tour van’s gas tank, causing the van to breakdown and the band miss that night’s show.

Doug’s musical legacy lives on, with his songs still being heard on radio, and performed by the Gin Blossoms. Over the years, many band mates have recorded and performed cover versions of his songs, as well as songs in tribute to him.

May 28, 1993 – Duncan Browne was born March 25th 1947. As a boy, Duncan Browne intended to follow his father, an Air Commodore (British equivalent of a one-star Air Force general), into the Royal Air Force, but his poor health even as a youth precluded this as a possibility.

Instead, he chose to pursue his interests as an actor — he played the clarinet and studied music theory, but wasn’t possessed to consider a career in music until, at age 17, he saw Bob Dylan in an appearance on a BBC drama called The Madhouse on Castle Street, during the American folk-rock star’s first tour of the U.K. It was Dylan’s guitar playing rather than his singing that served as Browne’s inspiration and entryway to rock music. “Most people find that odd,” he recalled in a 1991 interview from his home in London, “but I was interested in the way he tuned and played his guitar, especially on The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.” In response, he bought a Yamaha acoustic model and taught himself to play in a technique that was heavily classically influenced.

He then spent some time busking around London and later traveled across Europe on 30 pounds borrowed from his father, before entering the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. During his three years there, in addition to studying drama, he kept up with his guitar playing and developed a greater command of music theory — which he’d begun studying as a teenager — and formed a folk-rock trio called Lorel. They were later signed to Andrew Oldham’s Immediate Records and cut one single, ironically enough an original song that had the bad luck to use as its source the same Bach-originated tune that Procol Harum had utilized for “A Whiter Shade of Pale”.

Immediate saw no point in releasing the single, and the trio soon dissolved. Browne was able to salvage his own career out of the debacle, however — he had done some arranging for other acts on the label and Oldham was impressed with what he’d seen, and wanted a solo album from him. He turned to a former student friend of his, David Bretton, to serve as lyricist, and the two composed a dozen songs together. The resulting album, Give Me Take You, was one of the jewels of the Immediate Records catalog, a quietly dazzling work that embraced elements of folk, rock, pop, and classical, all wrapped around some surprisingly well-crafted poetry and Browne’s stunning voice.

Over the decades, it has been compared to the best work of Paul McCartney and the Moody Blues, and also to such albums as Astral Weeks by Van Morrison, while Richard Goldstein of The Village Voice has described it as an example of “Pre-Raphaelite Rock,” a reference to the Renaissance revival movement in art, formed in England in the mid-19th century.

Despite its many virtues, the album died a commercial death, largely as a result of its being released just at the point when Immediate’s financial underpinnings were beginning to collapse. Both Browne and Give Me Take You did get some notice in England, and especially from his fellow musicians — “Keith Emerson [of the Nice] heard my work on Give Me Take You,” he recalled in 1991, “and rang me up to ask if I would arrange [the choir and accompaniment on] “Hang on to a Dream.” I enjoyed working with the Nice — we would support each other when we toured together, and Keith asked me at one point if I was interested in replacing their guitarist, Davy O’List, as the fourth member of the band. I think by the time that happened though, he was in the process of putting together the group that eventually became Emerson, Lake & Palmer.”

Those who heard it tended to love Give Me Take You, and Browne probably could have gotten some concert work from the release, but for a certain degree of confusion as to who he was, owing both to Immediate’s slipshod publicity operation and the design of the album jacket — the triple superimposed image of Browne, coupled with the multiple overdubs on many of the songs, led some promoters to think that Duncan Browne was a trio of some sort. When the company’s collapse came in 1969-1970 — with Oldham, trying in the final days to raise money from any and every source, actually presenting Browne with a bill for 2,000 pounds (about $6,000) to cover the recording cost of the LP — Give Me Take You was buried under the rubble of Immediate Records. It resurfaced briefly in the mid-’70s on the Canadian-based Daffodil label and then disappeared until the early ’90s; for years, as with most of the Immediate library, the master tapes to Browne’s work were missing, lost in storage in some forgotten vault.

Browne went on to record a single for Bell Records’ British unit (an unusual label that also recorded the not-dissimilar Amazing Blondel during this same period), and had a short but more substantial liaison with Mickie Most’s RAK label in 1972, where he issued a single, “Journey,” with its extraordinary Spanish guitar figure, that went top 20 in 1972 and was voted “most unusual single of the year”. A self-titled solo album that was a direct stylistic follow-up to his Immediate LP followed. Neither did well enough to justify more recording at the time, and Browne spent the next several years as a session musician, working on a pair of albums by Colin Blunstone and one album by Tom Yates.

In 1973 he decided to transfer his classical technique to electric guitar, during which period he met Peter Godwin. They worked together for two years in Paris and London on the prototypical songs, sound and style of what was to become “Metro”. Duncan’s only album with Metro was released in 1976 on Logo Records. Suddenly, Browne was near the cutting edge of music again, and in addition to his work with Metro he released a pair of solo albums, The Wild Places and Streets of Fire, which were also issued on Sire in the early ’80s. This was as close as Duncan Browne ever got to rock stardom, his records sought after in locales like New York’s East Village and played on American college radio stations. Creem magazine critic Janis Schact pegged him as the voice that was “about to launch [a thousand romances] into the 1980s.”

Despite some beautiful and surprisingly hard-rocking music that was sort of new wave melodic, however, there wasn’t enough interest or activity to sustain this phase of Browne’s career. By the middle of the eighties, Browne had moved into the field of film and television scoring, and worked on Jonathan Miller’s series Madness, among other productions. He was pleasantly surprised at the outset of the 1990s when the CD boom led to new interest in his 1960s and 1970s rock efforts — Browne was gratified, in particular, to learn that Sony Music Special Products was preparing a CD reissue of Give Me Take You in the United States.

Alas, he was stricken with cancer in the early ’90s, and died on May 28, 1993 at the age of 46.

In the years since, most of his catalog, including his early-’80s solo albums, was re-released and Browne’s music may well have had a larger following in 2002 than it ever did in the 1960s and 1970s.

In the 1990’s, battling cancer, Duncan had begun working on his first album of new songs in well over a decade. But tragically, Duncan would not see the completion of “Songs of Love and War”. The task of completing the album fell to Nick Magnus, who with the help of Colin Blunstone and Sebastion Graham-Jones, put the finishing touches on a haunting and beautiful collection of songs. The album was released on Nic Potter’s Zomart label in 1995.

Duncan Browne’s songs have been covered by Patti Smith, Ian Matthews, Barry Manilow, Colin Blunstone, John English, and particularly successfully by David Bowie.

I guess you have to be in a particular mood, but I loved the achingly beautiful song by Duncan Brown titled Niña Morena.

March 22, 1991 – Dave Guard was born October 19th 1934 and along with Nick Reynolds and Bob Shane, was one of the founding members of The Kingston Trio. He spent his early years first in San Francisco, and then his junior high school and high school years in Honolulu, pre-state Hawaii. Guard grew up hearing the soft vocal melodies and strummed guitars of Hawaiian music. He was particularly attracted to the unique rhythmic sounds of finger-picked slack-key ukulele and guitar music masterfully performed by the many of his neighbors and beach boys.While an undergraduate at Stanford, Dave started a pickup group with Nick Reynolds and Bob Shane.

He called his group Dave Guard and the Calypsonians. He kept the group together after Reynolds and Shane left, changing the name to The Kingston Quartet.

In 1956 a publicist in the area, Frank Werber, offered his services to Guard and his bandmates, including Reynolds at the time. Werber’s offer, however, was contingent upon replacing Gannon and Bogue, and shortly thereafter, both left the group. Guard and Reynolds contacted former Calypsonian member Shane (who was performing part-time in Honolulu) asking him to join the reconstituted group. In 1957, back again as a trio as in their previous college days, they changed its name to The Kingston Trio.

With material gathered from a variety of sources, under Guard’s musical arrangements and direction, the Kingston Trio quickly became a success. Guard, Shane and Reynolds worked well together. In addition to developing the characteristic “Kingston Trio sound” of the group’s two guitars and a banjo, success came to the group from Guard’s musical arrangements and renditions of folk and Irish ballads, Shane’s talent for style and performance along with an innate knowledge of what pleased audiences, and Reynolds’ management of the group’s logistics.

Under contract with Capitol Records, the Trio became a huge commercial and influential success with hit songs such as “Tom Dooley,” “A Worried Man,” “Hard Travelin’,” “Tijuana Jail,” “Greenback Dollar,” “Reverend Mr. Black,” “Sloop John B.,” “Scotch And Soda,” “Merry Minuet,” “M.T.A.”, “Zombie Jamboree”, “Hard, Ain’t It Hard,” “Three Jolly Coachmen,” and “Raspberries, Strawberries”.

In the following years Guard was aware that among the Kingston Trio, he was the only one who could read music and who had some understanding of music theory; his partners basically played by rote, and the three of them sang in simple three-part harmony. With help from the Trio’s bassist and musicologist David “Buck” Wheat, Guard embarked on a self-education program of learning more about harmony, and becoming more and more disenchanted with what appeared to him to be a lack of willingness or effort to “improve” on the part of his partners.

By late 1960, Guard’s frustration and discontent with his partners, combined with an alleged embezzlement of the group’s finances, had reached a point where he no longer wanted to work with Reynolds and Shane. Giving his partners notice that he intended to leave the Trio, and unwilling to cause the group he had founded to disband, Guard agreed to stay on with the Trio until his personal commitments were completed, and until Shane and Reynolds were able to find a suitable replacement for him. By early 1961 Shane and Reynolds had found a replacement for Guard. After a reportedly acrimonious meeting with Shane, Reynolds, and the Trio’s business manager over the future of the Trio, Guard quit the group. The group continued to perform for another six years as the Kingston Trio before disbanding in 1967, with John Stewart taking Guard’s place.

In 1961, shortly after leaving the Trio, Dave formed a new group, The Whiskeyhill Singers, They toured and released an album and were asked to perform several folk songs on the Academy Award winning soundtrack of How the West Was Won. Their voices can be heard on “The Erie Canal”, “900 miles”, “The Ox Driver”, “Raise A Ruckus Tonight”.

Dave performed solo on the tracks “Wanderin'” and “Poor Wayfarin’ Stranger”. In late 1962 he moved to Sydney, Australia. There he hosted a national TV variety show called Dave’s Place. Until his return to the United States in 1968. Through the ’80’s he continued to do solo performances, along with several “reunions” of the old Kingston Trio.

In 2000 The Kingston Trio was inducted into the Vocal Group Hall of Fame. He died from lymphatic cancer on March 22, 1991 at age 56.