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POPULAR FOLK MUSIC TODAY, SPRING 1991

MANTRA (OM NAMAH SHIVAAYA)

Muktananda gurave
Shishya - samsaare - haarine
Bhakla - kaaryaika - dehaaya
Naniasle chit - sadaa -lamane

0m Namah Shivaaya gurave
Sach - chidaa - nanda- moortaye
Nish - prapan - chaaya shaantaaya
Niraa - lambaaya -tejase

0m saha naavavatu
Saha nau bhunaktu
Saha veeryam Karavaa - vahai
Teja - sui naa- vadheeta - mastu
Maa vidvishaa - vahai

0m Shantih Shantih Shantih

Sadguru - naath mahaa - raaj Kee Jay
0m Namah Shivaaya (11 times)

Hi, Dave. I'm really glad I got to hang out with you a couple of weeks ago, and spend the whole afternoon with you. I really enjoyed being with you and just talking about all those things we used to talk about. I just want to tell you a couple of things that I think will always stick with me as long as I live. I'm certain of it.

There aren't really that many people that I've come across in my life who had a tremendous influence on me. There are a few, and you're one of them. I think it was always that way, even when I was in school. It was before I knew you, when I listened to your music. I was gonna say you don't know how much it meant to me, but you do. All those hours I spent listening to you sing and play, and how much you influenced me in so many different ways just because of the love that you had for the music. That always came through.

You turned me on to types of music I'd never heard before and steered me in directions... the reason I play the 5-string banjo is on account of you. My whole point of view about having a musical career that is diverse and being into a tot of different things is something I got from you. I watched you do it so well and I thought 'it was so hip; all that stuff that you were doing. And it was beautiful. All the feelings and images and just all those wonderful moments I had.

I remember that afternoon when I got to the hotel in San Francisco to find that a young lady (who was really Catherine) dropped something in my mail box. Here was this handwritten manuscript of Scotch & Soda with your phone number on it. I remember feeling so excited. Nobody will ever know how excited I felt when I saw that phone number because I knew I was finally going to make a connection with you that I had always dreamed of. Going upstairs to my room and dialing that number - you and I must have talked for 2 hours. The next day I remember renting a car and driving down to your house. We eyeballed each other and that was it. The start of 2 maniacs sharing a lot of really ridiculous moments together. Talking about things it seemed like nobody else ever understood. But we knew what we were talking about!

One of the things I really want to thank you for is for all the stuff that I read and all the schooling I had about God (and I was sent to religious schools) nobody ever gave me an idea about myself and my relationship to God like you. It all started that afternoon in that Stanford book store. You just turned to me and said "Hey, Tim! Did you ever hear of Muktananda?"

"Yeah, but I don't know anything about him." "Well do you know anything about Kundalini yoga?" "No, but I've heard of it."

"You know that energy that goes up and down you spinal chord?" "Yeah." "Well, that's you."

I thought, My God! That's amazing. You explained it to me in a way that made sense. You put me into a place and direction that changed my life.

I'm grateful to you for a lot of things, both musical and spiritual. You are certainly one of the most wonderful human beings I ever met in my life, and people like you don't happen too often. I feel so blessed and so lucky that I got to meet you and be your friend. I'm going to miss you, David, but I'm always going to remember and feel things inside of me. There is a part of me that's you.

The best thing that I can say is I'm going to do my best to give those things to somebody else, just like you gave them to me. I think that's what it's all about.

So, like you used to say, "Strangle the Falcons." See ya, Dave.

-- Tim Hauser

"We're better off being active today Than radio active tomorrow"

By: Lou Gottlieb

Dave Guard was perhaps the most affable genius I've ever known.

Dave Guard, was a great American — a unique combination of singer, songwriter, music theorist, folklorist, religious aspirant, father, friend, and above all, a real entertainer. (An entertainer is someone who feel good in public; who may sing, dance, play a musical instrument, juggle or jump on a trampoline - those are only media, the message Is In the Imperative mood: "FEEL GOOD!" and It is communicated to the audience involuntarily and supra physically.) Dave also had the life-threatening experience of becoming a mega star in his early twenties. (A star is a performer who receives many more requests for his/her services than he/she can possibly fulfill. In other words, a star must turn down many gigs. Problems with humility arise later when the offers drop off precipitously and you have to take every gig that comes along and there's not enough of them to pay the bills.) Dave persistently sought new means of communication and never allowed himself to become a nostalgia peddler like I have to some extent. Brains like his are rare. Nick Reynolds put it well, "Dave was self-taught; he could teach himself to do anything in about three days... a brilliant man and real sensitive - a sweetheart."

Dave was also a very good singer both solo and in ensemble. He sang "in the mask" so you never have to "turn up the highs" to hear his voice dearly in any register. Listen to his last recordings on the CD titled, UP & IN. He sounds so young, and his "Nucalypso" is the best "anti nuke" song I know. He also sings "Scotch & Soda," an interpretation which does not top Bob Shane's definitive treatment, but has a validity which is more than historical. He also put "Zombie Jamboree" on the record, a tune he never failed to include whenever he sang in public. "Livin' On Easy" is a wonderful island song. Dave spent his youth in Hawaii, had the experience of being a "haole" (white) minority in school and understood the effect of the 23rd latitude on motivation.

The breadth of Dave's interests was amazing. I was gonna discuss his achievements in music theory and pedagogy (COLOUR GUITAR) as well as his researches and publications in Celtic and Hawaiian mythology (DIERDRE and HALE MANO), but they're covered definitively in the "Dave Guard Interview" by Elizabeth Wilson in THE KINGSTON TRIO ON RECORD published by Kingston Korner, Inc. I can't add to what is said there. It's recommended reading. (Note: The article in question is partially reprinted later in this section. Ed.)

Dave Guard was nothing if not au courant. Last year Ramon Sender downloaded some material from The WELL, concerning nootropic or cognition enhancing drugs (Piracetam, Hydergine, etc.) excerpted from MEGABRAIN REPORT: THE PSYCHOTECHNOLOGICAL NEWSLETTER. I thought it was something Dave might be interested in so I printed it out and sent him a copy. By return mail I got a photo-copy of the whole NEWSLETTER and some order blanks from the two or three firms here and in England who sell these pills. He already knew all about that stuff. Dave stayed up on the latest developments in an amazing number of areas.

When we first became friends in 1958, I was doing a comedy turn on the same bill with the Trio and Maya Angelou at the Purple Onion in San Francisco. He was just starting to use musical notation, and his manuscript was large and childish. He gradually developed a beautiful musical hand. His scores and leadsheets are models of legibility.

I always dug hangin' out with Dave. I invariably learned something useful. He Introduced me to the music of his friend and mentor. Gabby Pahinui and many others. It seems like every time I saw him he had discovered some new sounds about which he communicated his enthusiasm gently. One night on a tour of Australia, in 1965 I visited the Guards at Wayo Beach near Sidney. Dave was working with some young musicians who sang his charts skillfully. He was a patient teacher.

I always enjoyed watching Dave perform. He was funny. I wrote a review for the San Francisco Chronicle of his appearance at the Great American Music Hall in 1974 with Mike Settle and my long time partner, Alex Hassilev. They sounded good together. Alex still has some tapes of the act. I heard him at Chuck's Cellar in Los Altos, California when he was working with the Modem Folk Quartet, "Time to cluster our wits. Bombs away, dream babies." Dave had a life long love affair with the English language. In a motel room after that show he sang a marvelous version of Huddle Ledbetter's "Cow Cow Yicky."

For a few weeks in 1974 or '75 while the Guards were living in Portola Valley, California near Stanford, Dave and I tried working on some tunes, but the product of his green house tended to keep us from completing any project efficiently. He had reharmonized and rescored the Trio's biggest hits Incorporating some of the harmonic concepts he learned from George Russell and wanted to sing them again in this new setting with Bob and Nick. That never happened.

The way it looked to me Dave was a model pater familias, and his relationship with his kids was charming. I was surprised when he and Gretchen broke up, because I never picked up any bad vibes between them, and I am hyper-sensitive to domestic hassle of any kind. But I think he was 43 when it happened, and 43 is that dangerous age when men are particularly susceptible to acute attacks of "what-does-it-all-mean-itis." In the "Interview" he says he was "really worried and nervous about the way things were going in the world... thinking all was doomed, or sitting around biting my lip about one issue or another."

Shortly thereafter he became a devotee of Muktananda Swami and successor Chidvilasananda. He said it was "very nutritious." One day he came by my pad in 'Frisco, picked me up and took me to Muktananda's Ashram in Oakland to hear the chants sung in that yoga. I think he finally wrote out a lot of them in a song book.

When Dave moved to New Hampshire I kept up with his activities in the Kingston Korner Kolumn, but I did not see him again until he got sick in '89. The Limeliters played a fair in Bangor and on the way we stopped to visit Dave at the Shaws. He was just out of the hospital and seemed his old self producing a videotape of aerobics for equestrians. The Shaws deserve a big vote of thanks for the unprecedented hospitality they extended to Dave during his terminal trouble. Hey, I miss him terribly. Why he had to go, and others who do nothing but cause pain live on is that perennial magnum mysterium.