Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

Peter, Noel & Mary?

Noel Paul Stookey, the middle man in the group, hasn't needed his full name for 35 years. Neither have Peter Yarrow and Mary Travers. It's enough to say Peter, Paul & Mary.

"Close friends would definitely call me Noel," Stookey says. "But I tolerate both names."

The name Peter, Paul & Mary derived from a folk tune circa 1960 called "The Oldest Man Alive," which had a chorus that went "I saw Peter, Paul and Moses playing ring around the roses, and I'll whup the guy that says it isn't so."

"That alliteration was in the folk idiom. That, and the fact that it was suggested by our manager, made it no less of a good idea," says Stookey, who wanted to expunge Paul from the name in favor of Noel.

"Everyone said OK, but then, in our first interview, the guy said, 'So, tell me Paul ...' And I thought, 'OK, what am I gonna do, explain to him what my first name is or am I gonna answer his question?'"

There and then he thought the taking on of Paul would have a much larger impact on his life than he first believed, "and it has for 35 years."

The trio formed in the teeming creative atmosphere of New York City's Greenwich Village in 1960, performed publicly for the first time in 1961 and recorded its first album in 1962. And, except for a period between 1970-77 -- "what I refer to as seven years off for good behavior," Stookey says -- it has remained intact ever since.

When the group reunited in 1978, however, it found it didn't have a radio audience anymore. Which probably didn't come as much of a shock. Stookey says folk music had already stopped being a pop form of expression by the end of the '60s, the traditional lone voice and acoustic guitar replaced by psychedelic rock groups.

And although Peter, Paul & Mary have rediscovered their constituency, Stookey says it remains the case to this day.

"Aside from the occasional Tracy Chapman or an excerpt from a new Springsteen album, you don't hear acoustic guitar and one voice."

But you do hear folk music, Stookey says, whether you know it or not. Much of it is cloaked in pop, country and western and, believe it or not, rap.

"I applaud someone like Bruce Hornsby, who wrote a song called 'The Way It Is.' That could have been played on the radio in the '60s, when they were talking about intolerance during the civil rights movement."

He also singles out Sting's "Even Russian Mothers Love Their Babies."

"That's an anti-war song," Stookey says. "And though I don't listen to much rap music -- and when I do I'm more put off by the attitude than the lyrics -- I know there's stuff happening there about life in urbanville."

Folk, Stookey believes, never loses its relevance, although he doesn't necessarily agree that we're in a time when its most important element -- an exchange of ideas -- is needed the most.

"If you're talking about needy, that we need to have a philosophical discourse (about the condition of society and the world), yeah, maybe," he says. "Though, frankly, the time we really needed it was in the '70s, when all the disco was out there. Now, at least, it seems rock 'n' roll and the unplugged phenomenon offer some opportunity for dialogue.

"Even country and western is coming on strong as an arena to talk about meaningful things, although it also suffered the slings and arrows of 18-wheelers and 'my wife and dog left me and all I got left is my pickup truck.'"

Conversely, folk music exploded on the scene in the early '60s, Stookey says, because it proved music could speak about more than boy-girl relationships.

"When that happened, it impacted all of popular music."

And Peter, Paul & Mary were at the forefront of the movement, touring constantly for most of the next 10 years. Their first album, "Peter, Paul & Mary," remained in the Top 10 on the Billboard charts for 10 months and in the Top 20 for two years, and spawned the hit single "If I Had a Hammer."

In 1963 the group recorded perhaps its most famous song, "Puff the Magic Dragon." Stookey says it existed as a piece of poetry when Yarrow, who co-wrote the song with Leonard Lipton, his college roommate, was attending Cornell University.

"His college roommate had written the first verse, what's considered to be the first verse in the chorus. We were looking for children's material for our second album, and Peter fleshed it out with a couple more voices. Who knew? We were as shocked as anybody when it got lifted off the album and started playing as a single."

The song is not, Stookey says, a metaphor for marijuana use.

"It's not the first time I've heard that. It's not true."

In the last few years the group has performed fewer and fewer concerts, a trend Stookey says will continue.

"It'll be about 55 times this year and about 45 times next year," he says. "We're close to 60, so even though it's folk music and it doesn't matter how old we are, to a certain extent our personal lives take on a priority. We'll always be available. There's a saying: 'Old folk singers never die, they just do benefits.' I think we'll find ourselves doing fewer concerts and more appearances."

Stookey says about a third of each concert is devoted to recent material, a third to material they'd be hard-pressed not to perform and a third to fare from their new release, "LifeLines," which features legendary guest artists Ronnie Gilbert, Fred Hellerman, Richie Havens, John Sebastian, Pete Seeger and Dave Van Ronk, among others -- PP&M's mentors and contemporaries.

A PBS special of the same name, featuring the same artists, aired in March.

Stookey enjoys the challenge of new material -- particularly if it's issues-oriented. Although, he adds, referring to his oddball song "Virtual Party," "I kind of find it difficult to presume the Internet is an issue."

It is a passion, though, with Stookey running the largest bulletin board in Maine -- a 20-line operation targeting adolescents. The number is (207) 667-0800.

"Obviously, teleconferencing and chatting is the big thing," he says. "We have e-mail, news groups that deal primarily with folk, and teens have their own forum."

Stookey says the group has come to have a higher regard for one another's input over the years, and continues to support each other in regards to individual arrangement choices.

"I think the true test is going to come this spring, when we go into rehearsal," says Stookey, who calls himself the loose cannon of the group. "I've got a couple of far-out tunes that I don't know if the group is going to be able to handle. Many times one of us will do a song on stage, and after a month it will become obvious that it's a good song. But it takes that long for the other two members to figure it out."

He anticipates that being the case with his new "Parallel Universe."

"It's an off-the-wall tune about this guy who senses that there are other realms of consciousness coexisting simultaneously with ours. It's not an unusual concept," Stookey says, "but I don't recall the group ever having done anything like it."

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