Three of a Kind: Very Good Hand
by Bernard Decker, The Knickerbocker News, July 29, 1969
A Peter, Paul and Mary concert is a religious experience. How else explain upwards of 4,000 true believers baring themselves to last night’s elements to hear the popular trio at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center?
Yes, did they come…parkas and ponchos and blankets and plastic and under umbrellas and on chairs to sit upon the lawn, while another 6,000 enjoyed the security of being under the amphitheater’s roof. (One hardly soul perched himself on the limb of a tree.)
THE TRIO rewarded its followers with the usual delightful mixture of something old, something new, something borrowed, but very little blue. The initiates even were allowed to take part in the ritual, joining in the singing of such favorites as the new “Day Is Done” and the old “Puff, the Magic Dragon” and “Blowing in the Wind.”
In the event you don’t know, the trio consists of Peter Yarrow, Paul Stookey and Mary Travers. One of the reasons for the success of the trio is the pure mix it achieves with Paul’s strong baritone, Peter’s nice tenor and Mary’s purity and clarity.
Their voices are capable enough, too, to carry a song solo.
Yarrow apparently uses the psychology he majored in at Cornell to arrange the program, for the trio could undoubtedly move such a receptive audience to frenzy. The songs usually break pattern, however, a rousing, crowd-pleasing number followed by either a ballad-type or something amusing to lower the adrenaline.
Their appeal is, primarily, to the younger crowd. Therefore the repertoire relies heavily on protest and anti-war songs: “Times They Are A-Changin ‘,” “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “Take Your Place on the Great Mandella,” “And When I Die”… And these were the songs that drew the strongest applause.
Expectedly so, for the audience was at least three-fourths those who don’t trust anyone over 30.
There was gray sprinkled throughout the audience, however, and the question is how this part of the audience accepted in their minds the words of Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin'” when they are summarily told to “get out of the way.”
THE TRIO even has a humorous side to its nature. Stookey is kooky, strumming away at his guitar and making wild asides. Yarrow (Peter) has a more astringent brand. He pokes fun at the “literary analysis” applied to “Puff the Magic Dragon” by a news magazine which finds the song a thinly disguised peon to pot.
Using the method of the news magazine, Yarrow took the words of “The Star-Spangled Banner” and showed how that could be read likewise.
He also is adept at the ad-lib. When the men working the lights were a trifle slow in responding to his plea to soften those focused on him, he waited a moment, then remarked — to the delight of the audience: The requisition slip has been submitted…”
Mary doesn’t do anything but sing. Why should she? Whether wringing the heartbreak out of “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child” or “You’ll Know Me by No Other Name” or clowning around with “I’m Being Swallowed by a Boa Constrictor,” she pleases.
Not only her voice pleases, but the way she throws her willowy self into each number, flicking that lank blonde hair and slinging her hips.
The group has released a statement concerning its beliefs. The statement says, in part: “We have never performed a song which did not move us, either emotionally or cerebrally…” It is for this reason that the trio has never done a commercial (“…we haven’t found a brand of toothpaste or beer which has deep, personal meaning for us, and until we do we’ll pass”).
They have walked out of a television show because a sponsor objected to a line in a centuries-old ballad they were scheduled to sing, have been active in the Civil Rights movement despite the fact it has hurt their bookings in the South.
You have to admire people like that. And when they can sing besides, that’s frosting on the cake. Ask those true believers who sat on the lawn of the Saratoga Performing Arts Center.
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