Published on Dec 8, 1999
When I was a youngster, one of the records that I remember as
being among my dad’s favorites was one from a group called The
Mitchell Trio,
That’s The Way It’s Gonna Be. While I was too young to
understand some of the humor that this group – which, at the time,
introduced a young singer to the world named John Denver – I knew
that I liked what I heard. In the end, I ended up commandeering the
record (along with most of my dad’s collection), and the record got
ruined through overplay and careless handling.
Many of the group’s albums are long-deleted, but some of the
band’s output while on Mercury Records (honestly, I wasn’t aware
until reading the liner notes they once recorded on Kapp) is now
available on
The Best Of The Chad Mitchell Trio: The Mercury Years. While
it would be a stretch to say that such a disc would win over new
fans over three decades since this group called it a day, anyone
who enjoys folk music from the ’60s will have been eagerly awaiting
such a collection.
In one sense, the power that a lot of these songs once had has
all but vanished with the passage of time. When they were recorded,
songs like “Alma Mater” and “Barry’s Boys” were stinging
indictments of the society that the group’s members – Chad
Mitchell, Mike Kobluk, Joe Frazier and, in later years replacing
Mitchell, Denver – were growing up facing. These days, if you were
to play these songs for your kids, they’d probably give you the
“deer-in-the-headlights” look.
Ah, but there is still a lot of magic left in some of these
songs. Tracks like “I Can’t Help But Wonder Where I’m Bound,”
“Stewball And Griselda” and “Cherry Tree Carol” all are bound to
make you sit up and pay attention to what the group is singing
about – “Cherry Tree Carol” especially during the holiday
season.
And the dry humor that The Chad Mitchell Trio oozed in
performance is still plainly visible. Check out “A Dying Business”
(a commentary on the racket some funeral homes seem to run), “The
Draft Dodger Rag” or “Your Friendly, Liberal, Neighborhood
Ku-Klux-Klan”. (Don’t let Jesse Jackson listen to “An African Song
(On That Great Civilized Morning)”; he probably won’t understand
that the song was a condemnation of America’s way of thinking about
Africa in the ’60s.) Strangely missing from this collection is one
of my favorites of all-time, “The I Was Not A Nazi Polka”… wonder
why they chose not to include it.
The shifting of the band’s style from folk group to an attempt
at pop success is clearly heard on two songs, “Dark Shadows And
Empty Hallways” and “Stay With Me”. And while they’re pretty, they
seem to go against the grain of what the band had been for all
those years. It’s no surprise then that these songs marked the
beginning of the end for the group – and the start of Denver’s
eventual solo career.
Even if the kids might not understand some of the politics, and
they might get a little bored with some of the more
traditional-sounding folk tunes,
The Best Of The Chad Mitchell Trio: The Mercury Years is a
disc they should be exposed to, if only to show them how popular
music has evolved over the last 30 years. For their parents – or
those of us who grew up with the music of our parents – this disc
will represent both a blast from the past and a re-education about
the music we thought we knew.