The Faculty

"The proprietors here," said Lou Gottlieb, Ph.D., last week to an audience at Manhattan's Basin Street East, "have asked that we knock some of the polish off our act. We have succeeded beyond all dreams." This was, in a sense, true; for Gottlieb, Alex Hassilev and Glenn Yarbrough, a folksinging trio called the Limeliters, have sung and quipped their way into an expanding fortune by establishing themselves as antonyms of showbiz gloss. Their concert tours (notably with Mort Sahl) have been unvaryingly successful; their most recent LP album has been on Billboard's bestseller chart for 15 weeks; they are worth $3,000 to $5,000 a week at the big blue grottoes like Basin Street East or Los Angeles' Crescendo. But they prefer to perform before college students in the afternoon. "There are no illusions in daylight," says Dr. Gottlieb. "It eliminates all show business gimcrackery and focuses attention on the music."

The music--which is alternately light and serious, old and new--is as pleasant as an international blend of good coffees. The trio sings in half a dozen languages, from carillon French (The Monks of St. Bernard) to olive Portuguese (Curima) to blue-book English: "It's not that she won't, young man," go the surprisingly workable lyrics of Hey Li Lee Li Lee, "it's that she has so many unresolved problems in her personality structure that it makes it very difficult for her to achieve a decision in a time of intensified emotional stress." The group has so much natural rhythm and waterflowing harmony that even such cold prose provokes steady foot tapping in the audience.

In medias res. If the button-down, scrubbed-looking, youthful Kingston Trio (TIME, July 11) are the undergraduates of big-time U.S. folksinging, the Limeliters are the faculty, and the chairman of the department is 37-year-old Lou Gottlieb, who in 1958 took his doctorate in musicology at the Berkeley campus of the University of California, presenting a thesis consisting of previously unpublished 15th century cyclic masses. On and offstage, Gottlieb continually seems to be wondering if he really exists, drops great polysyllables and 18-carat cliches like in extenso and in medias res, which are woofed into Ciceronian syntax with words like "risible," "emolument," and "mentation." Then he turns around, describing the group's preference to stay apart when not working. "After the performance, it's Splitsville, Daddy."

Son of a Los Angeles orthopedic surgeon, Gottlieb describes his present occupation as "something you do until you grow up." Now following a schedule that permits him to see his wife and two children only about 75 days a year, he is consciously gathering money so that he can return to the college world and resume his career as a music scholar with the most practical kind of academic freedom--the economic kind.

No Cupids. Gottlieb's two partners, if not ready for chairs at Harvard, also have backgrounds creditably academic. Hassilev, 28, a handsome, international polychrome, was born in Paris, the son of a Russian civil engineer, and was eventually educated at the University of Chicago. Yarbrough, 31, who looks like a Bavarian bobsledder and sings in a Dennis Day tenor, was educated at the Great Books college, St. John's in Annapolis. The two met in the folksinging circles of small New York nightclubs. Gottlieb, who had helped pay his graduate school expenses as one of San Francisco's Gateway Singers, heard them on the West Coast in 1959 and suggested that they form a trio.

Now they can work almost anywhere. In New York until early July, and off to Los Angeles after that, the Limeliters will appear in 29 cities before Christmas, but they are so sensitive to the environment of their performances that there are some places they try hard to avoid, such as 1) any auditorium with cupids on the walls, although "Bobby Darin might not mind it," says Gottlieb; 2) Las Vegas, a place "I would gladly join an organization to eradicate"; and 3) the Jack Paar Show, which "is like listening to a Methodist minister who has had four martinis."

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