Stanford University Mendicants • 65

Mendicants are not homeless beggars; they are men of song. They are also many other things an actor, a psychologist, a couple of engineers, a playboy, a poet, and a few wandering scholars. Every day for an hour, these sixteen men come together from their various realms of interest and activity to sing. They prepare a continually changing repertoire and then they perform ... at the Airport Marina Hotel ... at a U.C.L.A. dorm for a weekend ... at an award banquet for President Sterling ... at houses and dorms all over campus. They sing songs of various genres like Dave Getty's Blue Shadows, Hank Adams' You're My Girl, Peary Spaght's All My Trials, and Craig Williamson's Dump on You. They enjoy themselves most at Mendicant parties where vocal chords are loosened by potent brew and spirits are livened by the presence of the weaker sex; they enjoy themselves least at the end of long recording sessions when it's two o'clock in the morning. Mendicants is not a unified fraternal group; factions arise and tempers flare as they inevitably must when men of conflicting opinions and varying aesthetic tastes spend any time together. There is ultimately, however, that certain warmth which is generated by the spirit to sing and the desire to create. These are sixteen men- you may count them on the cover but the sound inside is one. It is a sound of jazz, of old standards, of bossa nova, of rock and roll; it is the sound of Mendicants.