The Story of the Chad Mitchell Trio
Non-Fiction
Date to be Published: August 11th
Publisher: Acorn Publishing
Of all the groups to emerge during the folk era of the 1960’s, first the Chad Mitchell Trio and later The Mitchell Trio were unequivocally the best. Their complex harmonies, sense of comedic timing and stage presence were unique to the folk movement. They didn’t enjoy the commercial success of other groups because their material made political and social statements that radio and television refused to play. They were wildly popular, though, on college campuses throughout the country during this turbulent time and fostered political and social awareness among thousands of young men and women as they faced the challenging era ahead.
But as Mike, Chad and Joe Frazier raced along a frantic treadmill of rehearsals, recording sessions, nightclubs and concerts, Mike and Chad began to realize the demand for musical perfection was the only thing they had in common. Their personalities were and remain polar opposites. When Chad left in 1965, neither mourned the parting. John Denver replaced Chad. Two years later, Joe’s demons caught up to him forcing Mike and John to fire Joe.
When folk reunions became popular, fans and folk historians agreed that The Trio was the one group that would never take the stage again. Their schism was just too great.
Mike and Chad and Joe hadn’t spoken in twenty years. Then came a call. I will if he will. Their mentor and music director Milt Okun worried they were making a mistake. They couldn’t possibly be as good as their fans remembered.
They were. Mike and Chad kept their day jobs, and their distance. But once again, they shared the music.
EXCERPT
— CHAPTER ONE —
A trio is the worst combination you can have.
When there’s three of you,
it always ends up being two against one.
—Chad Mitchell
OCTOBER 2007
Spokane, Washington
T
he last time The Chad Mitchell Trio performed before their hometown crowd—summer of 1964—a reviewer for a local newspaper called them “depressing.” While allowing they were “fine sounding and fine-looking young men,” Ed Costello bemoaned their choice of material. Making fun of Nazis and the John Birch Society, he said, were examples of something new being called a “social and political conscience,” which, he intimated, had no place in popular entertainment.
Forty-three years later, Chad stood in the dark, off-stage wings at Spokane’s Opera House and smiled at Tom Paxton’s lyrics. Tom, who had written so much of their material, served as opening act this evening for The Trio’s long-belated return to Spokane.
As Tom took his bows, a towering screen at center stage came to life with clips of a Chad Mitchell Trio appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1963. While the Opera House sound system detailed every nuance of exquisite harmony from those twenty-year-old voices, Mike Kobluk stepped to Chad’s side, resting a hand on his shoulder.
“Damn, we were good,” Chad said, gesturing to the screen. “Can we still do this? Are we making a mistake?”
Mike laughed. “I guess we’ll find out.”
Chad glanced to Mike and could only imagine what emotions were shuttered behind his calm stoicism—what this performance must mean. When Mike turned The Mitchell Trio over to John Denver in 1968, he found his way back to Spokane and became entertainment director for Expo ’74, the city’s version of a World’s Fair. He parlayed that gig into a three-decade run as Spokane’s manager of entertainment facilities.
Now, finally, Mike would perform here.
Mike seldom shared his feelings, but Chad wanted to know.
“This crowd is mostly here for you, Mike,” he said. “You ran this building. They all remember that.”
“They’re here for The Trio,” Mike said.
“You’re the one who came back. You’re this town’s real anchor to who we were. Come on. Haven’t you thought about performing here?”
Granted, this wasn’t Carnegie Hall, where they’d sung on four different occasions. Still . . .
Chad and Mike exchanged a long glance—even after all these years, in many ways they remained strangers.
Of course, Mike had thought of performing here. A few days ago, Mike—who retired in 2000 after twenty years of managing this building—told Chad that the people he worked with here knew few details of what he’d done before he’d finished his degree at Gonzaga and gone to work for the city.
“A few weeks ago,” Mike said, “I visited the Opera House to see the promotional posters for our concert being installed and a janitor, who I’d known for years, approached me.”
“That’s you in that picture,” the janitor said, pointing to a poster.
“Yes, it is.”
“But why? What are you doing in a concert advertisement?”
“Those other guys are Chad Mitchell and Joe Frazier. We used to sing together. We’re doing a concert.”
The janitor regarded Mike quizzically for a few moments. “Yeah. But really. Why are you in that picture?”
Chad smiled as he glimpsed row after row filling with people, the crowd extending into the balcony. Among them were other curious people who came to see why their old boss or friend or neighbor was in this picture.
Chad thought of all the artists Mike had ushered to this stage. From Van Cliburn to Isaac Stern to Ella Fitzgerald. Harry Belafonte. Peter, Paul and Mary. Folk to rock to classical to opera. Hal Holbrook doing Mark Twain Tonight. Broadway shows. Every significant performer in America for the past thirty years.
Chad prodded him again. “Really, how can this be just another show for you?”
Mike shook his head and took a breath. “Back when I was booking this building for Expo ’74, when the Opera House was brand new, Bing Crosby came to see what the Expo development was doing to his hometown. He wasn’t performing, but he wanted a tour. So, I showed him around. We walked to the stage in this empty building and he stood right over there.” Mike pointed to place just beyond the curtain.
“And he crooned this too-raloo-raloora thing in that Crosby voice that rang through the auditorium, then turned to me and said, ‘Boy, the acoustics in this place are great. Is this where Hope will perform?’
“I told him no. I said Bob Hope was scheduled to play the Coliseum, because we had more seating available there. Bing said, ‘Good. This place is way too classy for Hope.’”
Chad smiled at the story.
“So, yes,” Mike said. “I’ve thought about singing with The Trio on this stage more than once.”
On a huge screen above the stage, Mike, who was raised in a rock-solid immigrant family in Trail, British Columbia, stood tallest of the three. Mike and Joe, both handsome and solidly built, had dark hair. While Mike had chiseled facial features, Joe radiated a more subtle hardness, drawn by childhood in a Pennsylvania coal town.
A year older than his compatriots, born in 1936, a young Chad Mitchell seen on the big screen still had to produce ID at liquor counters. Smaller and slight of build, with blondest of blond hair and an almost cherubic visage, he would have fit seamlessly on the set of Leave It to Beaver.
Back in 1960, he offered reassurance to mothers across America who might be otherwise concerned about their daughters getting mixed up with all this coffee house, beatnik, folk music stuff. The product of a single-parent home, raised by his mother in a blue-collar Spokane neighborhood, he might have looked like a choir boy. His childhood, though, was much more complex than that.
Then, as always, audience eyes and ears found Chad first.
All three were gifted choral singers. Joe offered a classically trained baritone voice with both range and power to slip down to bass or sneak up toward tenor. Milt Okun, The Trio’s musical director, mentor and guardian, found Mike’s voice most difficult to pin down. While as harmonically adept as his partners, Mike added a unique, lower-register smoky tone to their vocal blends. Milt described it as “this lovely low, rich, informal, untrained sound.”
Just as his appearance stood in contrast to Mike and Joe, so did Chad’s vocal instrument. He could rein in a powerful tenor to meld seamlessly with the others—always on perfect pitch—but Milt’s direction frequently sent it soaring above Mike and Joe’s harmonies during a song’s final stanza with a commanding, almost operatic, descant melody that no other folkies could begin to approach.
The Trio’s genuine vocal distinctiveness, though, was their ability to blend. While Milt spent hours using studio tricks to achieve the right vocal mix for Peter, Paul and Mary, that was never the case with Joe, Mike and Chad.
“They were so good, their harmonies so intricate. And they measured their own voices against each other,” Milt recalled wistfully during an interview related to an earlier reunion performance. “They almost mixed themselves.” When a recording session occasionally failed to produce a good separation of the three individual tracks, Milt said, “I could take the initial mono track, and it would be as good as if I’d mixed it.”
About The Author
Mike Murphey is a native of New Mexico and spent almost thirty years as an award-winning newspaper journalist in the Southwest and Pacific Northwest. Following his retirement, he enjoyed a seventeen-year partnership with the late Dave Henderson, all-star Major League outfielder. Their company produced the Oakland A’s and Seattle Mariners adult baseball Fantasy Camps. He is author of the award-winning novels Section Roads and The Conman… a Baseball Odyssey along with his Physics, Lust and Greed time travel series. We Never Knew Just What it Was is his first effort at non-fiction. Mike loves books, cats, baseball and sailing. He splits his time between Spokane, Washington, and Phoenix, Arizona where he enjoys life as a writer and old-man baseball player.
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