The folk music boom that took root in America in the late 1950s reached its peak in 1963, the year Craig Smith graduated from Grant High School. Spurred by the commercial success of folk acts like the Kingston Trio, Peter, Paul & Mary, Joan Baez, the New Christy Minstrels, and the Rooftop Singers—who topped the national pop charts early that year with “Walk Right In”—thousands of American youngsters reached for acoustic guitars or banjos and added their voices to the growing throng in coffeehouses, bars, nightclubs, and college campus parties across the land. Folk music was a grass roots movement that actively encouraged participation. Hootenanny, loosely defined as a gathering of folk musicians, was the buzzword of the day—“the whole country is having one” buzzed Time magazine in November 1962—finding currency on radio and television and in countless newspaper and magazine articles.
By the summer of 1963, Craig Smith was venturing into the burgeoning folk music scene in Los Angeles, which was centered in clubs like the Ash Grove, the Ice House in Pasadena, and the Troubadour in West Hollywood. He began participating in the Troubadour’s popular Monday Night Hoots, where novice folk musicians were encouraged to get up onstage and showcase their talents. It was there that Craig attracted the interest of Tom Drake and Michael Storm, who were in the process of forming a new, ten-piece folk ensemble to appear as regulars on television’s Andy Williams Show. It was a meeting that would change the course of Smith’s life.
When they first met Craig Smith, Drake and Storm were already seasoned folk musicians, having played together for several years as the Other Singers. Drake, 27, was the older and more experienced of the two. Born in Vancouver, B.C., in 1936, as a child he’d been a successful CBC radio actor. Drake and his family relocated to Los Angeles when he was 12 and he developed his talent singing in a professional boys’ choir, at one point performing as a soloist at the Hollywood Bowl. Drake began making inroads into the folk music scene in the late ‘50s when he started writing songs with Bob Shane of the Kingston Trio, a creative partnership that would continue for several years. In 1960 he accepted a job offer to be an English teacher at Helix High School in La Mesa, so Tom, his wife Sally, and infant son Steven relocated to the San Diego area. Two more children followed in short order. Drake taught English and coached swimming by day, and spent most of his weekends and many evenings playing folk music in bars and coffeehouses around town. There were several different configurations of the Other Singers before Drake met Michael Storm sometime in 1961.
Twenty-one years old at the time, Storm was still eight years away from landing the role that would end up more or less defining his career, that of Dr. Larry Wolek on the daytime television soap opera One Life to Live, a part he would play from 1969 through 1992 (and as a recurring role for 12 years after that). With his chiseled features, strong jawline and full hair, he looked like an archetypal Hollywood leading man, and with his family’s background in show business, Storm’s career as a successful actor seemed almost preordained. “My grandfather was a silent film actor and a legitimate stage actor,” he told me, “although he died long before I was born. My grandmother, his wife, was a Floradora Girl. The Floradora dancers were a group of traveling women dancers who danced all around the country. Her daughter, my mother, Margaret, was a child film actor, so acting came into my life genetically. My father, John Storm, was a screenwriter and a book writer, and an actor and a director. But the last thing I ever imagined doing was something in show business because I heard nothing but a lot of failure stories. My father kept saying, ‘Do whatever you want to do, just don’t be an actor.’ And, what happened? Up popped a devil and I became an actor. I loved it, but I found out subsequently exactly what he was talking about. It’s a horrible business. It’s guaranteed to break your heart. Guaranteed,” he repeats emphatically, “to break your heart!”
Although Michael is perhaps the most ‘famous’ and successful person I interview about Craig Smith, he’s also one of the most generous with his time. When our first scheduled interview in Los Angeles falls through, he and his wife instead come to meet me at my home in La Mesa—coincidentally, just a stone’s throw from Helix High School where Tom Drake taught English. Like Tom, Michael married a lady named Sally, and as we talk she chimes in to clarify or elaborate on various details of the story.
In the early ’60s Michael was living in La Jolla with his mother and older brother Jim. While Jim pursued a career in acting, Michael worked by day at the Del Mar racetrack, and spent his evenings in the local bars and coffeehouses playing folk music. Folk music’s attraction was its simplicity. “It was just something I could do,” he shrugs. “I could sing, and with three chords you could do it. And you met girls, and people would buy you beer.”
In the small circle of San Diego-area folkies, it was inevitable that Storm would eventually cross paths with Tom Drake. “I met Tom because I was working with a guy, Dick Noren, at the Del Mar racetrack. We would work at the racetrack, and then we’d go out, and I would play guitar and he would sing, and we’d usually get drunk and sing and get more drunk, and then finally go home. Anyway, Dick said he knew a guy named Tom Drake who had a trio and one of his trio was leaving to go back into the Air Force, and would I be interested in replacing him? And so I met up with Tom and I auditioned—and that meant I knew which side of the guitar to play,” he laughs, “and Tom said, ‘You’re on. We’ll meet on Friday at the Pour House.’ So we started to perform at the Pour House in La Jolla, which was a tiny little beer house with a stage. Again, there were girls every night and free beer, and 25 dollars a night, which was enough money to live on back then.”
The Other Singers, Michael Storm (guitar) and Tom Drake (banjo), entertaining teenagers at a La Jolla, California shopping mall in December 1962
The third member of the trio was Richard Conte, who banged on a conga drum. “That, ironically, was a very valuable instrument to have,” notes Storm. “He could keep time—because Tom and I were awful at keeping time! But it didn’t matter. Mainly the people in the audience wanted to sing. We would do an old song called ‘Hey lally lally lo’ where you’d make up these endless couplets, and we could sing a 40-minute set just singing ‘Hey lally’ because the audience loved it. They’d throw in a name and we’d sing that, and we’d get away with it. We’d go have a beer; we’d wait for the next set, and do the same thing. So it was Tom, Richard Conte and me. Little by little we started getting really good. We were actually a pretty good trio.”
Storm and Drake formed a tight friendship that would last until Tom’s death on August 8th, 2008. “Tom was great,” says Michael. “He was about four years older than I. He was an English teacher, he was very intellectual, and had a bawdy, wonderful sense of humor. I have a similar sense of humor and we would use that in our act. We just had great, great fun. He was a lot more mature, and he could do all the business stuff; that was his thing, he loved that—and thank God because I had no acumen for the creation of a workable business model, and Tom just fell into it. We were tremendously close—really brothers. Onstage I could tell what he was going to do next—and he what I was going to do next. We really supported each other in a wonderful way. Tom, being a teacher, loved to talk, and I love to talk too, so a lot of our singing was talking. It’s hard to sing for 40 minutes in a row, and so you create some shtick. So we would do that. We’d try to bust each other up. We were closer than brothers.”
By 1962, the Other Singers had expanded their playing radius to Los Angeles. Storm was attending UCLA, majoring in Fine Arts, and commuting back and forth between La Jolla and Los Angeles—a two-hour drive. Drake was now making almost as much money playing music as he was at his teaching job, which, according to his wife Sally, he hated. One day, out of the blue, a check arrived in the mail for back royalties on songs Tom had written for the Kingston Trio. “A check for $4,728 landed on our doorstep,” remembers Sally Drake. “It was Tom’s favorite number. That was a very big amount of money for us at that point. He was making $275 a month teaching high school. It was bare bones.” Sally had just given birth to their third son, and they decided it was time to leave La Mesa behind and head back up to Los Angeles.
Drake took a teaching job at Palisades High School, and the Other Singers increased their presence on the L.A. live circuit, and even broke into television, appearing on an episode of CBS’ The Lloyd Bridges Show. “It was our first TV job, which in and of itself was momentous—at least to Tom and me,” says Storm. “I think the appearance would have been called a ‘cameo’ but for us, back then, it was a real showbiz event!” In 1963 the Other Singers appeared on a live album released by Dave Hubert’s Horizon label, Hootenanny at the Troubadour, alongside Hoyt Axton, Judy Henske and others, and shortly afterwards recorded their own album for the label, The Other Singers Sing Other Songs for Other People. Although they played all over Los Angeles and San Diego counties, it was at the Troubadour that they spent most of their time. “The Troubadour was the most important single location of the era,” states Storm. “Everybody hung out at the Troubadour, and if you performed there you had free entry. It was where we all congregated. You broke new material in there. It was just family.”
It was at one of the Troubadour’s Monday Night Hoots in August of 1963 that Drake and Storm first got word that The Andy Williams Show was looking for a ten-piece folk ensemble to appear as cast members. The New Christy Minstrels, led by Randy Sparks, had filled that role during the 1962–63 season, but having since released a million-selling hit single—“Green Green,” sung by the group’s Barry McGuire—they were now demanding too much money. The Williams show was scheduled to begin rehearsals in two weeks and the producers were in urgent need of a similar blend of wholesome young folkies to take their place.
David Jackson, who would become the Good Time Singers’ bass player, remembers how it went down. “It was a Monday when The Andy Williams Show called Randy Sparks, and it would have been about two weeks before the first show went to rehearsal,” he recalls. “Randy told me this story. They said, ‘OK, we’re going to do the second season of The Andy Williams Show, we’ll see you here in two weeks.’ Randy said, ‘Great, at twice the money.’ They said, ‘No.’ He said, ‘Then goodbye.’
“He hung up the phone and then Don Williams, Andy’s brother, called the Troubadour and said, ‘We need a nine- or ten-piece folk group by next Monday!’ Doug Weston, the owner of the Troubadour, went around the Hootenanny that night and asked if I could make a rehearsal tomorrow, Tuesday, and I said yes. He did that to a number of people. Tom and Mike were a duo already so he put them in charge.”
Sally Drake remembers it only slightly differently. “On one Monday in late August 1963 Andy Williams’ manager, Alan Bernard, was in the audience scouting for a replacement for the New Christy Minstrels. He caught Tom and Michael’s set and contacted Tom the following morning and asked him if he was interested in forming a group of ten singers to audition for Andy’s show. He said there was a serious time restraint, because the first show of the season was scheduled to tape in two weeks.”
Drake and Storm quickly went to work assembling their team. Nineteen-year-old Dave Jackson was an obvious first choice. He was an excellent stand-up bass player and background singer who’d already accompanied the Other Singers on several occasions, as well as playing with more established artists like Bob Gibson, Josh White, and Joe & Eddie. Next to be signed up was Margaret Beasley, a young singer who had been a student of Drake’s at Helix High, and had babysat his children. “I heard her singing to the kids one night before we went out, and thought to myself, ‘She has a good voice,’” Drake told the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner. “So, when the opportunity came along to form a group, I called her in. Funny how things work out sometimes.” For the Good Time Singers Beasley adopted the folksier stage name of Maggie Patton.
Drake and Storm selected two more female singers, one of whom was Alexandra Brown, a young black woman with a background in gospel music. A mixed-race group was not a common sight in 1963, especially on mainstream television, so this was a bold decision. It would have repercussions down the line. According to Jackson: “We had the first rehearsal Tuesday, they found her on Wednesday. We thought it would be a good idea since Josh White was playing at the Troubadour that week and the inclusion of a black person in 1963 was a pretty darn big deal.”
The Good Time Singers, 1963. Back row (left to right): Dave Jackson, Doug Brookins, Michael Storm, Craig Smith, Bob Flesher. Front row: Tom Drake, Alexandra Brown, Maggie Patton, Marilyn Miller, Lee Montgomery.
More young faces filled out the cast, including Lee Montgomery, a big gruff teddy bear of a guy with a voice somewhere between Hoyt Axton and Barry McGuire. “I was a folk singer in the L.A. area at the time,” says Montgomery. “Doug Weston, the guy that owned the Troubadour, was kind of my manager.”
Young and outgoing with a dazzling smile, Craig Smith was selected as much for his personality as his musical ability. Although he had a pleasant singing voice, he was still only a novice guitar player, but Craig won Drake and Storm over right away. “Craig was terrific,” says Michael. “Craig was charming, fun. He played with a twinkle in his eye. He was just having fun. And he could be silly—you could laugh your head off with him. He was just a fun guy.”
Craig didn’t make as much of an impression on Tom Drake’s wife Sally. “To me he was just a cute young guy who could sing,” she says. “He was not particularly hip. He did not smoke pot. He was just a clean-cut young blah kid.”
The ten-piece group rehearsed three songs together, and auditioned for Andy Williams and his producers on the Thursday. A few days later they got word that they’d passed the audition. Contracts were signed, and days later they were at NBC’s new studios in Burbank rehearsing for their first TV appearance. The entire process had taken a little over a week.
They needed a name, and picked one based on their collective personalities. “The name the Good Time Singers was chosen in a laugh-filled round-robin at a late-night session at the local Denny’s restaurant,” remembers Sally Drake. “As I recall, it was Doug Weston who said, ‘How about the Good Time Singers?’ Everyone cheered and the group was born.”
Weston, who had been instrumental in forming the group and getting them signed, had expectations of becoming their manager, but, according to Sally, Williams’ manager nipped that idea in the bud early on. “Alan Bernard told Tom, ‘I want this guy out of your situation. We will not work with him.’ Doug thought that he would be managing them and Tom had to tell him, ‘Sorry, they don’t want you.’ Doug was very nice about it, and he didn’t hold a grudge.”
With Weston out of the picture Bernard stepped in as their manager. It was a shrewd power play because it enabled him to contain the group’s success and keep them bound to the show. “Tom was the worst businessman in the world,” insists Sally Drake, “and it started with the Good Time Singers. He got so screwed over by Alan Bernard, who insisted he was managing them. He didn’t want what happened to the New Christy Minstrels to happen to the Good Time Singers. He really didn’t. And Tom didn’t stand up to him.”
“Don Williams and Alan Bernard were the production company,” explains David Jackson. “Don being Andy’s brother. And so they bought us as an act and they managed us—so therefore they also sold us, which is now illegal, but that’s what happened then. So we didn’t make a lot of money, just took our union scale—three hundred and something dollars a week, I think. That was pretty OK dough, but in retrospect they really should have signed us as an AFTRA act. We should have been principal actors, which would’ve been about three times the money—which is why they didn’t do that, because they had to sell us and buy us back at the same time, so they’d buy us back at the cheapest price.”
According to Michael Storm, during the first season the singers were each paid around $250–$300 per week and received a pay increase each year thereafter. Adjusted for inflation, that’s a weekly paycheck of around $2,000 in today’s money. For an 18-year-old kid like Craig Smith, right out of high school and still living with his parents, that must have seemed like a small fortune.