DOGGING IT IN THE GREAT AMERICAN HEARTLAND
The heat in the Warehouse can kill you, fry your eyeballs and turn your brains to prune-whip yogurt. It’s bad enough in the middle of the day, bad enough standing empty when there’s no one there. But put 4500 screaming kids, all sweating out Patchouli at the same time, put them belly-to-back in that hundred-and-twenty-five-year-old cotton&coffee shell, and it’s instant sauna city.
New Orleans, 1970.
And there’s the writer, way out of his depth doing an article about a rock group on tour in the Deep South. The writer makes no bones about it, he ain’t that fond of rock music. He’d much rather sit and smoke his pipe and listen to Kipnis rendering a Bach fughetta on the clavichord. But Huntington Hartford and Show magazine have said, “There’s something happening out there with this weird-named rock group and we will lay on you B*I*G M*O*N*E*Y if you travel the tour with them for a week and report back what it is that’s happening.” So the writer, who cannot be bought but certainly can be rented, is standing in his own sweat in the middle of a converted warehouse, in the middle of New Orleans, in the middle of 1970, cranky as hell and not loving that rock group a whole lot.
New Orleans. An uptight city where rock music is a definite threat; a threat to the tourist trade, to the heritage of jazz, to the landed order of things. New Orleans never actively tries to keep rock out, but it just happens there’s no place to hold a rock concert. The halls and the auditoriums just somehow don’t get available.
So in 1968 Bill Johnston decided to bring rock to New Orleans. To provide for the hordes who buy all those albums a place to go to hear something more innerving than Al Hirt. He found the Warehouse, and proceeded to get stiffed by every big-name outfit in the country. “Sure,” they tell him via long distance, “you can have Mountain, but you gotta book the opening act from us, too.” But Bill Johnston wants to put on Poco, not some mickeymouse no-draw what you couldn’t sell if you were giving triple S&H green stamps as a bonus. So he tells them to pick it and stick it, because tonight, just tonight, he’s golden.
Because tonight he’s not getting a lousy 1400 soft-ticket advance. Tonight, just tonight, he’s sold out.
SRO, and the scalpers are getting so fine they’ll be able to feed their jones for a month.
Three Dog Night is booked, and at three-thirty in the sweaty afternoon the crowd is already marabunta swarming the sticky sidewalks on Tchoupitoulas Street. The gig isn’t until nine tonight, but at three-thirty they’re already lying up against the walls, hanging out, waiting. Waiting out the heat, waiting out the prowling gumball wagons, waiting out the crowds to come, waiting out the time. The kids who somehow aren’t imbued with the roots and the nobility of Dixieland Jass, who’ve been musically starving in the delta lands…they’re out there on folded-up denim jackets, cooling it, hanging out till nine o’clock comes, bringing a Three Dog Night.
And the writer sees that look on their faces, and he begins to understand. Seven days later he’s back in the Real World and writing about it, and the stereo behind him is banging “Mama Told Me” and Igor Kipnis has some potent competition. Bach doesn’t venture an opinion.
The abos of Australia, who dig holes in the earth, in which they sleep—rather than building huts or highrises or bomb shelters where thermostats are turned down to 68°—use their dingo dogs to keep them warm on bitter nights. When the nights get terribly cold, they may need as much as three dogs’ body heat. A three-dog night is considered a very heavy night indeed.
June Fairchild, who was Danny Hutton’s lady friend, found the group’s name in an issue of Mankind magazine. Danny Hutton is 31, is so thin he looks like a reject from Auschwitz, has the disposition and inherent temperament of a borstal boy, and he co-founded the group that bears the name Three Dog Night. He is one of the three lead singers with the group.
The second singer, co-founder with Hutton, is Cory Wells, 33. He started singing when he was sixteen, for free, in Lulubelle’s Bar & Grill in Buffalo, with dynamite big name groups like The Peelers and The Gear Grinders. When he wasn’t working a set, he was out boosting hubcaps and breaking into boxcars. Typical Horatio Alger success story: music saved him. 1959, he went into the Air Force straight out of high school. 1960, a hardship discharge so he could help support his three sisters and his brother. His stepfather had gone out for a pack of cigarettes and didn’t bother to come back. Back to Lulubelle’s and working in a furniture factory till a little man with a big cigar told him he could make him a star.
The star was about as impressive as Kohoutek: Wells wound up gigging with The Enemies as the house band at the Whisky on the Strip for a year. He met Hutton while on tour with Sonny & Cher, he made a few movies, split for Phoenix in ’67, worked a topless joint called the Satin Doll as Cory Wells’ Blues Band, and hungered to get back to L.A.
He made it in 1968 and, during the fifteen-minute breaks between sets he was playing at The Haunted House, he sat in the car in the parking lot, planning Three Dog Night with that crazy Irishman out of Buncrana, County Donegal, Danny Hutton.
Still dancing for dimes, the two big dreamers came up with their third lead singer, Chuck Negron, now 32, through Tim Alvarado who had produced Danny at MGM Records.
Negron should never have become a singer; he had it made as a basketball star. Born in Manhattan and brought up in the Bronx, Chuck Negron made the All-City All-Star basketball team while still in PS 22 Jordan L. Mott Junior High. And even though he was hated by every Jewish daddy who hated the good-looking goy for dating his daughter, it didn’t slow Negron’s dribble and he played in the high-school basketball finals in Madison Square Garden. Let Elton John match that one!
Bobby Pittari, a friend of Negron’s, entered him in a school talent show without Chuck’s knowledge. When Negron rehearsed for the first time, he was so twitchy he fainted. Tried it again, made it, and began singing around. When he was in the 9th grade, fourteen years old, nothing more than a little pisher, he and Bobby cut a demo for fifteen bucks—“Dream,” the old Everly Bros. number. He went down to the Brill Building at 1650 Broadway and sang in the halls. Some wiseass handed him a mop. Somehow, he wangled a managerial contract and began playing black dances, black clubs. Was he good? Had to be. Negron is white. At fourteen, he was singing on the same bill at the Apollo with Jackie Wilson.
Time passed, calendar pages flipping over in a Warner Bros. film, and he went to college, continued singing, kept dribbling, cut some sides for small labels and Columbia heard him in 1963. Irving Townsend signed him to a contract. In mid-1965 they got around to releasing his first cut, a single called “Speak for Yourself, John.” Chuck calls it a flat, grooved piece of cow flop. More calendar pages. Went to Hollywood and bummed around, met Danny, went away on a three-week Job Corps gig, came back just in time to save Hutton from a coronary: “Where the hell you been, man, I’ve been trying to reach you for days! We’ve got a sneak audition.” Fah-joomp, as Lenny used to say before he got planted…Three Dog Night had its front line and they were moving. Three years later they made one and a half million bucks, between twenty and twenty-seven thou a night, and grossed $90,000 in one evening at The Forum.
You wouldn’t think three bums like that could do so fine, would you?
For the purchasers of Three Dog music (who number sufficient to have garnered for the group 10 gold LPs and 9 gold singles) it is a cold and naked fact of life that the group is a musical entity of unquestioned excellence. Yet to read the maunderings of Olympian ingroup critics, one might never perceive that cold and naked fact of life. One might never realize Three Dog Night has been a top-of-the-charts, top-of-the-draw, top-of-the-heap group for over six years. Virtually the same personnel, never a layoff season to bind up the knife wounds, same front line all the way, a viable gestalt…for six years. If you’ve got all your fingers on one hand maybe you can fill out the pinkies naming the other four groups with records of continuity as long or longer.
And if you’ve never seen them in person, live, turning a cow-barn amphitheater of fifty thousand individual souls into one enormous epiphany with celebration humming in its synapses, you are the poorer for it. The writer saw it, and understanding of why Three Dog Night has been so damned popular for so damned long came flooding in like a moment of satori.
That was a night in Houston. I’ve got it sharp and clear in the storage banks of my brain; it was a spectacular night. But here’s how a nerd from the Houston Post, who couldn’t keep his dinner table companions awake through a single anecdote, reported it: “They’re tight, flashy and commercial and the kids ate ’em up at Hofheinz Pavilion Wednesday night. Three Dog Night, that is, freaked-out Monkees with a little talent thrown in.
“It’s essentially a stage act, even in the studio. The barbershop trio—Chuck Negron, Danny Hutton and Cory Wells—do Top 40 arrangements of songs by the better composers, add a standard four-piece backup band and wait for the gold records to roll in.
“Negron…sounds like he’s working, but he’s not…In between numbers, and often during them, the gang horsed around and goofed off. Kid stuff…Everything ran on time, smoothly and, so long as I was there, peacefully.”
Let me tell you, in this life filled with ogres and Furies and shadows, there are few things I despise as much as lousy reportage, and a sterile imagination making points off his betters. I’ll forgo any comments about the aridity of prose, the banality of perception, the stupidity of viewpoint or even the reactionary Fascistic attitudes indicated in the final sentence of that pickaxe job. I’ll merely tell you what that evening at Hofheinz Pavilion was really like:
Three Dog Night is a highly physical act, carefully and professionally mounted to produce a seamless, sparkling stage presentation. As the Post’s resident brain-damage case clearly stated, the audience for god’s sake belonged to the group that night. From the first emergence on stage to the final moments of their third curtain call, not one kid in that auditorium would have traded his or her seat for a front row center at even something as spectacular as The Coming Impeachment. They laughed, they clapped, they sang and, during the cresting-wave high point of the concert’s final number, “Eli’s Coming,” they did something I’ve never seen a rock audience do.
I’ve been in audiences of Stones, Beatles, Grand Funk and Elton John concerts; Joe Cocker, Chicago, Bob Dylan and Leon Russell concerts; Blood, Sweat & Tears, Simon and Garfunkel, Buddy Miles and Stevie Wonder concerts; and I have seen entire Visigoth hordes break and run, swarming over the wheelchair cases used as barriers down front, climbing to the stage over the broken backs of screamies fallen into the orchestra pit; I’ve seen them overwhelm the stage like marabunta army ants devouring a laggardly ibex, raging into a backstage from which the group itself had departed seconds before, abandoning their instruments to the looters and pillagers. But at Hofheinz Pavilion that night I saw fourteen thousand adoring Three Dog fans swarm toward the stage…and stop.
They wanted to be close, they wanted to suck up all that joy and music right through their pores. But they respected the group. They would do nothing to halt the sound, to panic the musicians. I was on that stage, right beside drummer Floyd Sneed, and I had visions of that cute little writer being trampled to green mint jelly. But they came up to within mere inches of Sneed’s machinegun paradiddle and stopped.
The purest loving tribute a musical act could receive.
They stood there and moved like a field of winter wheat. God, you should have seen those faces! For a few glorious minutes kids who couldn’t believe in family, government, religion, authority…hip and cynical and wise beyond their years from a decade of civil unrest and being lied to…for a few minutes they were home. While that music possessed them, Three Dog Night had a backup group of not four…they had fourteen thousand, and it was a jubilant thing to behold.
And that was what happened that night. That was what the arrogant and tunnel-visioned self-styled authority of the Houston Post missed by splitting early. And even had he seen it, would it have altered his concretized view of Three Dog Night? Probably not. He was one with the wrecking crew who still feel it infra-hip to badmouth one of the most musically successful groups ever to come out of rock.
The question asks itself unbidden, why do they do it? What brings out the assassin in the cult critics’ manner when confronted by a new Three Dog Night album? These same dynamiters grow charitable and ameliorative when they confront a second-rate album by a talent then currently fashionable. “He’ll do better next time,” they say, spin around widdershins, and hit a solid Three Dog album with, “Another big, brassy, overproduced Three Dog Night set by the Ringling Bros. Barnum & Bailey’s of pop music.” Why? Come on, fer chrissakes, why?
For the cataclysmic answer to this soul-shattering question stay tuned for the Further Adventures of Captain Rationale and His Cartesian Coordinates!
They don’t strike the correct socioeconomic postures. They are not into politics or revolution or moral or spiritual uplift. They are into rock. As Fred Astaire is into dancing, as Bob Griese is into the long bomb, as Wanda Landowska is into fugues, as George C. Scott is into the expansion of acting space, Three Dog Night is into rock. They are not one of the “artificial” produced studio groups hyped with horns and string sections, they chart and choose and play all the cuts on their albums.
But because they are utterly professional and musically adept, and dare to be arrogant about it (“When you got it, baby, flaunt it!”), and because they have not taken public stands on the burning topics of our times—because they are merely into making special music with a cohesive sound—and because they play other people’s music (remember what the banana from the Post said?) they are continually bumrapped by the third-world magazines and their lint-examining critics. Because Three Dog Night has the taste and perceptivity and reputation for making hits out of songs that might otherwise languish unnoticed, the underground press calls them simply entertainers. What a terrible slur! And while you’re in that place, add the names of Al Jolson, Frank Sinatra, Barbra Streisand and Nat King Cole as simply entertainers who made millions for composers and lyricists no one would have paid a dollar to hear sing and play their own songs.
Simply entertainers? It is to boggle.
The Paul Whiteman Orchestra, The Mills Bros., Bing Crosby, Diana Ross and the Supremes, Mary Martin, Alfred Drake, Gene Kelly, Elvis Presley. They were all performers whose status and accessibility to audiences drew to them the best writers of their days. No one ever dumped a Mosler safe on Crosby’s head because he didn’t write “White Christmas.” The rigid, uncompromising and infantile attitude that merit only resides in musicians who write the material they record is a fairly recent aberration. For ten thousand years of the performing arts no one would have conceived of such a ludicrous concept as being viable. But the pop music industry is often a nasty, incestuous, daisy-chain little universe, and if I had a quarter for every yo-yo with a typewriter who wanted to make a rep as a critic by bandwagoning badmouth interpretations of stars, I’d have at least enough funds to launch a Saturn rocket.
Apparently the only redeeming qualities possessed by Three Dog Night are such nebulosities as a) everything they record becomes enormously popular (but hell, what do the record buyers know? they can be stampeded into buying any sorta crap, right? look at how successful Terry Knight’s Faith was, right? how many hundreds of thousands did United Artists lose on that superhyped fizzle?), b) other estimable musicians—such as B. B. King and Elton John—consider them sensational musicians (see the quotes on the next page), and c) they are one of the three or four top American rock groups of all time.
Three Dog Night serves the not inconsiderable commonweal of allowing fresh writing talent to ride their coattails to public attention. By serving as scintillant figureheads whose every recording gets massive attention, they keep the lifeblood of the rock idiom red and rich and flowing. They aren’t alone. Carole King might not be such a hot number today had it not been for James Taylor. Burt Bacharach might today be only a legman for his father’s gossip column if it hadn’t been for Dionne Warwick. Leon Russell’s top hat would likely be a tam today if Joe Cocker had never existed. It’s a symbiotic relationship, and why the effete snob critics cannot perceive that is one of the great unsolved conundrums of the Modern World.
The painstakingly evolved popular appeal of Three Dog Night is used to lend clout to the careers of other young talents. Anyone doubting the foregoing need only consider how much notoriety and money has been garnered for talents like Laura Nyro, Randy Newman, Hoyt Axton, Harry Nilsson, Paul Williams, Danny Moore, David Arkin, David Loggins, Alex Harvey, and a pressboxload of others via the express route of a Three Dog Night interpretation. Consider the common good, if you will: while a McCartney writes and sings his own work and draws down the adoration of the critical gurus on crystal mountainpeaks, Three Dog Night juice the careers of twelve different creators per album. Nothing at all wrong with an artist self-serving, but who the hell has the chutzpah to put down a group that carries so many others with them as they rake in the goodies?
ALEX HARVEY: “I’ve long admired Three Dog Night as an outstanding and entertaining musical group. But it was not till they cut my Tulsa Turnaround that I realized how much they could add to a song with their unique interpretations. In fact, I liked their version so much I copped it for my own act.”
RANDY NEWMAN: “What can I say about them that their music doesn’t say better? They have great taste, they work hard, they’re at core musicians. Anyone who questions that should stop to consider how big they’ve been, and for how long…
“Mama Told Me would not have been a hit if they hadn’t recorded it; it’s that simple. When I heard it was going to be a single, I thought they’d bomb with it. I’m glad I left them alone; what they did for that song is going to put my son through college.”
BRIAN WILSON: “Why don’t you ask who I think is better, Danny Hutton or Frank Sinatra? I’d tell you Danny Hutton. Wow! Wow! Three Dog Night! Wow!”
DANNY MOORE: “Three Dog Night is really a workhorse group…music is a serious business with them. They’ve helped my career enormously. I was ecstatic when they recorded Shambala: to date it’s sold over one million two hundred thousand copies. They can do that for a song because they keep going for perfection in their performances, and so they appeal to such a broad range of audiences. There just aren’t many groups that can do something as difficult as that.”
And if you think this largesse is extended only to the favored few composers whose names are now common currency, consider that Gary Itri, who wrote “Midnight Runaway” (on the Seven Separate Fools album), was the cleanup janitor in the recording studio where they were cutting that album. He took his time sweeping up the rancid coffee cups and dropped chunks of cheese danish the night of the session, and when Chuck Negron stumbled off wearily into a corner to get a breath of untainted air, Itri braced him to listen to a song he’d written. Negron, head sunk into his neck like a Galápagos tortoise, from the endless hours of sifting tunes and rehearsing, might just as easily have pleaded exhaustion or boredom, or simply told the eager young guy to take a push-broom walk for himself. But he didn’t. Itri got an acoustical guitar, played the song and fah-joomp, instant success. If Itri had been Mickey Rooney, MGM could have gotten Judy Garland to play the lead girl singer and made it into one of those loverly implausible musicals.
Ask Gary Itri how worthless is Three Dog’s stock as merely entertainers.
Look: this writer has been paid to put this article together. I’m hardly an altruist. But I don’t write flack. What you find in these pages is what I came away with from a week on tour with Three Dog Night. I started out cynical and very Missouri “show me.” What they showed me is contained herein. As flack for the group, it may not satisfy. Hell, it doesn’t even satisfy the group itself; I’ve related personal data they never even knew I’d glommed eavesdropping, I haven’t devoted appropriate lineage to the other members of the group—Jimmy Greenspoon, Floyd Sneed, Mike Allsup, Jack Ryland and the new keyboard guy, Skip Konte—and I haven’t even said what a wonderful human being and credit to his race is Jay Lasker, the President of ABC/Dunhill, the label on which the group performs. I’m not a rock critic and I can’t abide about 98% of what I hear on records these days. But I buy—not get freebie for review, I buy—every Three Dog Night album, and I take an almost pathological delight in what they do on records.
And I was approached to do this piece probably for those reasons. And because I won’t buy the bullshit that artists who don’t write what they record are dismissable.
For me, Three Dog Night appears to be an entity suffering the perils of a double-edged sword. They cut clean in promoting other people’s music in a way few other groups could…or would. But the backswing leaves bloody marks on them because they aren’t The Rolling Stones.