Back in the early '60s, the Chad Mitchell Trio was one of the top singing attractions on the campus and club folk circuit, rivalling for a time their somewhat more well established competitors the Kingston Trio and 1960s newcomers Peter, Paul and Mary.
The group became known for their willingness to perform both serious and satirical songs that criticized current events and news-makers, compared to the typical 'folk music' groups of their time.
The original group was formed by university students William Chad Mitchell (from Spokane , Washington); Mike Kobluk (from British Columbia, Canada ); and Mike Pugh (from Pasco, Washington). They were encouraged by Roman Catholic priest Reinard W. Beaver, who invited the three to travel with him to New York City in the summer of 1959 and to try performing in the burgeoning folk-music scene. Unlike many fellow folk-music groups, none of the Trio's members played instruments.
The key people that helped the Trio get going were musical arranger Milton Okun and star performer/singer Harry Belafonte. Okun provided a professional polish to their performing skills, which helped them gain both a key booking at New York City's Blue Angel club and television appearances with Pat Boone.
Belafonte had them appear as back-up singers, with a small featured spotlight, in his May 1960 Carnegie Hall concert, and signed them to his Belafonte Enterprises management firm.
In the summer of 1960, Pugh left the group to return to college. After auditioning over 150 singers, Joe Frazier was chosen to replace Pugh.
The trio was signed to Kapp Records, a division of MCA, in 1961. By that time, the folk music revival was in full swing, and the group found a very receptive and accommodating audience at the Brooklyn College concert that was recorded as “Mighty Day on Campus”. This live recording worked so well that Kapp Records and the trio decided that this was the best way in which to record the group, and their next album, “At the Bitter End”, was done the same way the following year from the legendary Greenwich Village club.
It was around this same time that the group also added to its instrumental muscle in the person of Jim McGuinn, a guitarist who had begun to make a splash locally and from a stay as a support player with the Limeliters. McGuinn remained with the group until 1963 (he can be seen in the background of the cover photo of the “At the Bitter End” album), when he lit out for Los Angeles and eventual rock stardom as cofounder of the Byrds.
The Trio by this time were one of the most popular folk groups in a field that was rapidly filling up with male and mixed male/female vocal groups. Part of the secret of their success, both on stage and on their albums, was that they presented a careful mix of topical songs and humor, and some of the latter, although also at times topical (their recording of "The John Birch Society" remains a very funny song, as well as the probable inspiration for Bob Dylan’s formerly banned "Talking John Birch Society Blues"), was also sometimes just goofy. They were perceived properly as funny and irreverent, but not "dangerous," and sensible rather than radical, attributes that may have helped get them picked as part of a cultural exchange program sponsored by the Kennedy White House and sent on a tour of South America, where more politically oriented folk groups were passed over. Of course, this same "irreverence" made the trio anathema to the more radical political elements that soon overtook folk music and later folk-rock as well. But in 1962, it worked very well, and no one questioned their relevance or that of their records.
Their departure from Belafonte Enterprises in 1962, followed by their move to Mercury Records in 1963, gave them more freedom to add aggressively political songs to their body of folk, love, and world-music songs.
As folk singers the Chad Mitchell Trio was a notch below the Kingston Trio and Peter, Paul & Mary, which is still pretty good. Besides, these guys covered "Blowin' in the Wind" first; the problem was their label delayed releasing it and PP&M beat them to the punch, which is why they jumped to Mercury.
The first real problems for the Trio came up over Dylan’s "Blowin' In the Wind." Dylan was still virtually unknown when the trio had discovered the song in 1962, courtesy of a demo passed to them by Milt Okun, who, in turn, had gotten it from Dylan’s Manager Albert Grossman. They were eager to record it, but their producer at Kapp didn't want them to do the song, either as a single, as they proposed, or even as a track on their forthcoming new album, “The Chad Mitchell Trio in Action”. The dispute blew up in the faces of all concerned when "Blowin' In the Wind," as recorded by Peter, Paul and Mary (also protégés of Okun), became a number two single and suddenly established them as the best-known folk trio of the early 1960s -- their accompanying album, and most of their subsequent records, routinely sold in the hundreds of thousands and millions, while the Chad Mitchell Trio was left in the shadows, part of a commercial backwater. To make matters worse, Kapp Records, seeking to rectify its mistake, hastily re-pressed and re-released the “In Action” album in 1963 with the title “Blowin’ in the Wind”. The damage had been done, however; not only to the group's commercial fortunes, but also to their relationship with their producer and their label.
Mitchell left the Trio in 1965 to embark on a solo singing career. Another audition process replaced him with young singer/songwriter named John Denver. The group retained the well-known "Mitchell Trio" name, with Denver writing some of the group's songs, as Mitchell had done.
Frazier's departure from the Trio in 1966 brought on replacement David Boise. After a final live release, Kobluk left; Denver and Boise replaced Kobluk with Michael Johnson (who would later go on as a solo artist to record "Bluer Than Blue" among other popular songs) and, because of contractual requirements that prohibited using the "Mitchell" name after the last original member left, became "Denver, Boise and Johnson". Soon, however, the group disbanded.
This 17-song compilation includes selections from the albums “Blowin’ in the Wind”, “At the Bitter End” and “Mighty Day on Campus”, among them "Leave Me if You Want To," "Blowin' in the Wind," "The Ballad of the Greenland Whalers," "The John Birch Society," "Last Night I Had The Strangest Dream," and "You Can Tell The World."
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