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| Many people remember or have heard of Three's a Crowd, a very successful Canadian band that blazed a trail through the nascent folk and folk-rock music scenes in the mid 1960s. Over its five-year life span (1964-1969) it featured the talents of an amazing roster of Canadian musicians and singers, including Bruce Cockburn, Ken Koblun (who went on to play with Neil Young's Buffalo Springfield), Colleen Peterson, David Wiffen, Donna Warner, Richard Patterson, Trevor Veitch -- and Brent Titcomb. Brent was a founding member of Three's a Crowd and for the first three and a half years was one of the band's mainstays. |
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| Back in 1962 Brent lived with high school buddy King Anderson and a number of King's art-school friends in a "beatnik" house on Alberni St. in Vancouver. Several of his housemates had musical connections and would befriend folk acts like Bud and Travis, the Modern Folk Quartet, the Brothers Four, and Carolyn Hester  and
bring them home. "It was the days of hootenannies -- it was a wave, a big thing. We would stay up all night
and party with them," Brent remembers. One day a friend played him a new record: "It was the most beautiful
singing I'd ever heard: just a woman and a guitar. I'd never heard anything like it." The singer was Joan
Baez. |
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-Morris Duff
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Brent learned three or four folk songs and started playing at the Sunday night hootenannies at the Inquisition, a club run by Howie Bateman, where Ian and Sylvia would play. "I was so nervous, I was funny, and I got an encore. I didn't know any more music so I played the first song over again." He returned the next Sunday and in a very short time, had became popular as a singer/comedian. One night at the Inquisition, he was offered a three-week job at a lodge in Banff; with only 10 songs in his repertoire, Brent frantically taught himself new songs on the train. Then through Howard Levant, a disc jockey in Calgary, Brent met David Wiffen, and they became fast friends. Brent moved in with David and the two began performing in each other's acts, playing in a number of clubs around Calgary, before Brent returned to Vancouver.  Video Clip (Real Audio) Three's a Crowd on Let's Go Courtesy CBC archives |
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 On
another visit to Calgary in 1964, Brent played at a huge hootenanny at the Calgary Stampede; an enormous arena
became the world's largest coffee house and a shuttlebus took musicians back and forth to the arena and various
local clubs. One group Brent encountered was the Kopala Trio from Edmonton; he hit it off immediately with the
lead singer, Donna Warner. "Donna and I had an instant rapport that was very comedic. After the Stampede,
I continued to play in Vancouver coffee houses and one day bumped into Donna, who had moved to Vancouver. She was
suddenly starting to raise eyebrows because she was such a fabulous singer." Brent also clicked with Donna's
accompanist, guitarist Trevor Veitch, and the three soon became an act known as the Bill Schwartz Quartet -- in
a brilliant promotional stunt, Brent would apologize at every show for Bill Schwartz 's absence, and then for the
last song of the last night of a gig "Bill", aka King Anderson, would turn up wearing an eye-patch and
would play harmonica. Comedy became an intrinsic and very successful element of the group's act -- and Brent was
usually the funny guy.When the Bill Schwartz joke wore thin and club owners objected because they thought they had hired a quartet, a new name was needed. It was King who one day commented: "Two's company, three's a Crowd." Three's a Crowd became the new name of the band -- no matter how many people were actually members of it. In fact, a fourth player, Danny Schultz, soon joined as the group's bass player. Three's a Crowd played everywhere in Vancouver, as well as on Vancouver Island, and in Edmonton. In Edmonton, they put together a supperclub act at the Embers, a club owned by Tommy Banks, and also played on the radio, soon developing a strong following. They became part of the Fourth Dimension coffee house circuit across western Canada. |
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 In Winnipeg, they performed on a
television show called Sing Out, and met Sid Dolgay of the Travellers, who was on the same show. "Dolgay phoned
Bernie Fiedler (owner of the famed Riverboat coffeehouse in Yorkville, in Toronto) and told him 'You really have
to hire these guys.' He hired us sight unseen on Sid's recommendation." They flew to Toronto, and Dolgay,
who had recently founded his own management company, Universal Performing Artists (UPA), became their manager.
"For the first time we had a real manager and an agency, and there was a conscious attempt to build us as
an act." Now based in Toronto, they played the Riverboat as well as gigs in Winnipeg, Regina, Edmonton, Calgary,
Vancouver, Ottawa, Montreal, Halifax, and Detroit, Michigan. They appear on the highly rated CBC TV programme The
Juliette Show. It was in Toronto that their musical
direction was influenced by an emerging trend: folk rock. "At the Penny Farthing, we heard a group called
the Stormy Clovers; they were the first folk-rock band I'd encountered -- with drums, electric bass and Ray Purdue
on electric 12 string guitar." By that time the Byrds were popularizing folk rock; their example motivated
Three's a Crowd to amplify their acoustic instruments. So when bassist Danny Schwartz left the band and returned
to Vancouver, he was replaced by Ken Koblun on electric bass. Koblun would become an on-again, off-again member
of Three's a Crowd, leaving and rejoining the band several times to play with Neil Young in Buffalo Springfield
or for personal reasons; Comrie Smith usually replaced him. Wayne Davis also played bass for a time. |
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  After being
awarded an RPM Award (forerunner to the Junos) as Best Folk
Group of 1966, Three's a Crowd signed a deal with Epic in
New York and Columbia in Canada to record four singles. The Len Chandler song Born to Fly was the first single
recorded in New York and was a hit in Canada, but the other three singles were never made due to a disagreement
about the group's musical direction. In early 1967, two other musicians joined the group: Brent's singer-songwriter friend David Wiffen and drummer Richard Patterson, who had both been members of the Ottawa folk-rock band The Children . Three's a Crowd had suddenly become six. The expanded group appeared on CBC's Take 30 and played the Riverboat, the Mariposa Folk Festival, Steve Paul's The Scene in New York, the Back Porch Club in Columbus, Ohio, and the Ontario and Canadian Pavilions at Expo 67 in Montreal.  It was at Expo 67, that Cass Elliot
of the Mamas and Papas saw the group perform and offered to act as producer for the group. "Through that connection
we got signed to ABC Dunhill in Los Angeles. The Mamas and Papas had broken up and we were seen as a similar type
of act that could fill that spot in Dunhill's roster." Shortly after recording their first album, Christopher's Movie Matinee,
in Los Angeles, they returned to Canada to appear on their own national CBC TV special called Our Kind of Crowd.
Their two special guests were relative unknowns: Joni Mitchell and American comedian Richard Prior. Also in 1967,
the band received another RPM Award as Best Folk-Rock Group
in Canada, and a cover of Bruce Cockburn's Bird Without Wings,
with Murray McLaughlan's Coat of Colours on the flip side, was another hit. |
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 But by the time the album was released
in early 1968, some of the original members were getting tired. "By that time, we'd been together about three
years and we were worn out. Also [the US group] The Christy Minstrels were after Donna and were offering her all
kinds of enticements, and we had to struggle to keep her in the band." Initially, Dunhill had planned a major
promotional effort for Christopher's Movie Matinee, but once they sensed the group was not secure, they scaled down their promotion.
In the meantime, Donna Warner had repeated throat and other general health problems, and Colleen Peterson began
subbing for her and eventually became part of the band.In March, 1968, Three's a Crowd played a number of gigs at the Ice House in Glendale, California. Invited by Neil Young to an informal jam in Topanga Canyon, Brent and Donna Warner narrowly avoided being arrested in the famous Buffalo Springfield drug bust (arriving after the police, they were given the option of staying and being arrested or going home). Later in the month, they performed at Massey Hall with members of the Toronto Symphony. |
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 But by May, 1968, Donna Warner had dropped out due to health problems and Brent and Trevor Veitch decided to leave the band to pursue other interests -- in Brent's case to pursue a solo career as a singer-songwriter. The band's manager, Sid Dolgay, wanted to keep the band going, because two investors, Harvey Glatt and Toronto film producer Sid Banks, had not recouped their investments in Three's a Crowd and there was an opportunity to include the band in a new TV series. David Wiffen and Colleen Patterson elected to stay in the band and were soon joined by the Children's former guitarist Sandy Crawley, bassist Dennis Pendrith and guitarist/vocalist Bruce Cockburn. Three's A Crowd disbanded permanently in 1969. Looking back on his days with Three's a Crowd, Brent notes that the band was a pioneer on several fronts. "Although we started out in the traditional folk idiom, we had more entertainment, we had comedy -- we were an act." In expanding beyond acoustic instruments into folk-rock, they expanded the form, and were one of the first bands in Canada to be influenced by jazz and eastern music. Three's a Crowd also played a pioneering role in actively promoting Canadian songwriters -- they were the first to record songs by Murray McLauchlan and Bruce Cockburn. |
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-Victoria Freeman |
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A special 'This Week' edition of the Juliette show features a cross-section
of the Canadian entertainment scene on Saturday at approx 19:15 p.m chans. 2 and 6...
For
Brent, the band provided a rich education in all the ups and downs of life as a professional musician during a
seminal time in Canada's developing music scene, and attracted an audience that has watched the further development
of his solo career with interest.