With help from family and friends, Noah Margo, center, reminds audiences what made his father’s band, The Tokens, special. (photo courtesy of Noah Margo)

Noah Margo, president of the Beverly Hills Unified School District Board of Education, spent more than three decades touring with his father and uncle, original members of the doo wop band The Tokens.

When Margo took the stage for the Concerts on Cañon music series on Aug. 17, he was keeping alive a musical legacy spanning three generations.

“When I started out, I was the son and nephew, and now my own son and nephew are with me on stage,” Margo said. “The joy that I feel, if it’s anything like my father felt when he looked at me on stage, it’s an amazing feeling to have.”

The Tokens were formed in 1960 after Margo’s father and uncle, Phil and Mitch, respectively, joined an existing group made up of Brooklyn high school students.

A year later, The Tokens released “Tonight I Fell in Love,” which rose to No. 15 on the Billboard Hot 100 and prompted a performance on “American Bandstand,” a dance and music TV show hosted by Dick Clark.

The Tokens’ stardom peaked the same year with the release of “The Lion Sleeps Tonight,” a cover of a song by a South African Zulu singer named Solomon Linda that topped the charts and was adapted into the score of Disney’s “The Lion King.”

Margo grew up around the music industry, and though he started playing drums as a kid, he lost interest after moving from New York to California in the fifth grade and struggled to form a band.

It wasn’t until college, when Margo set up his father’s old drums in the basement of his USC fraternity, that he fell back in love, practically teaching himself.

He started playing in a band with his brother and some friends, recording demos and performing occasional gigs, but the music always remained a hobby secondary to his studies.

And then, in 1993, about four-and-a-half years after picking the drum sticks back up, “The Tokens came knocking,” Margo said.

The band’s drummer had left, and when they were unavailable to find a replacement for a show at a festival in Riverside County, Margo was asked to sub in, he said.

“I never intended to join the group, I just wanted to get a feel for what it was like to play on stage for a bigger audience,” Margo said. “I’m very open to experiences in my life, and this was just one of them.”

The band intended to keep looking for a new drummer after the festival, but one of the members, who Margo noted was neither his father nor uncle, suggested they keep him on.

Margo continued touring with the band throughout the following decades, juggling shows even as his life – marriage, fatherhood, career, public service – evolved.

It was only until 2017, when Margo’s uncle died, that the band’s momentum began to slow. The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic brought things to a definite halt. Shortly after, his father died.

So, in the spring of 2022, when the city of Beverly Hills asked him if he wanted to play a show, Margo said yes, and then realized he needed to find a band. He called his son Solomon, who had been performing and writing music for years, and had recently graduated college.

Margo then enlisted two other musicians: Rebecca Curci, a family friend who had sung with The Tokens before, and Jay Leslie, the band’s saxophonist of 30 years.

Leading up to the show that summer, emotions ran high, Margo said.

“There was a lot of crying because I had just lost my father less than six months before we started rehearsing,” Margo said. “To be in that configuration, to be playing those songs and not have my father or uncle in the space with me was something I had to get through. It was kind of a catharsis for my grieving. And I think I’ve come out of it on the other end feeling better.”

Margo also sees The Tokens revival as an opportunity to highlight aspects of his father’s and uncle’s careers that are sometimes overlooked.

The popularity of “The Lion Sings Tonight” distracts from the depth of the band’s catalogue, and from the role that many of its members played as producers of other big records, Margo said.

“An important thing for me is to kind of cherish and bring attention to the fact that, hey, they didn’t just do ‘The Lion Sings Tonight,’” Margo said. “We get on stage for 90 minutes and play hit song after hit song, and The Tokens are responsible, in some way, for writing or producing all of it.”

Margo has not closed the door on expanding the band’s catalogue, so long as he treads lightly.

He has considered recording a song with his son that he wrote with his father, and his son, who performs original material at their shows, has written songs of his own that “could be good for The Tokens to record.”

“So in my head there’s a couple of songs we could record and say, ‘hey, here’s something new,’” Margo said. “But for me, there’s a kind of magic to the original group … that I don’t know if we could ever duplicate.”

Even if Margo’s ambitions for new music are limited, he has scheduled upcoming shows across Southern California, and is intent on building the band back up as a touring operation, carrying on a musical torch lit generations ago.

“We’re having a good fall,” Margo said. “Next year, I’d like to get about 10 shows on the schedule, and then the following year I’d like to get up to about 20.”