One Dog Night— One is the Loneliest Number

Went to see what’s left of 3 Dog Night at the beautiful EKU Centre for the Performing Arts…

The venue by itself is worth seeing. What’s left of 3 Dog Night is Danny Hutton, because Cory died in 2015, and Chuck Negron after becoming clean and sober in the late 80s or early 90s did not rejoin the band. The band does still include a couple of the original band members who were not any of the original 3 lead singers plus Hutton. And they’ve been at it for 50 years. In fact they joked that they’ve been at the top of the pop charts, the rock charts, the R+B charts, the country charts…. and the medical charts! Here’s a couple of shots of the performance….

What happens now is that the backup band members fill in the gaps of the missing other two lead singers… and while they are not bad, they certainly aren’t Corey and Chuck for sure. And here’s the other part of the problem— the vast majority of their hits Danny was not the lead singer on those particular songs. So in some ways it was sad to see the band in this diminished state, a shadow of what they used to be in their heyday, but then this can be said of almost all acts still performing after 50 years. There are a few exceptions, but not many (Paul McCartney and Paul Simon were both great four years ago…. less so now).

For the record, very few bands had more top 40 hits on AM radio than these guys between about 1965-75 (One, Easy to Be Hard, Eli’s Comin, One Man Band, Old Fashioned Love Song, Joy to the World, Celebrate, Liar, Mamma Told Me not to Come etc.) The interesting thing about tunes in those days was they all had to be about 3 minutes long or less to be on AM radioi. So…. even if you go see this band do all their bigs hits…. the show can be done in less than two hours…. And there is another side to the story, Chuck’s side… which is partially chronicled in the following You Tube interview…

It seems that classic rock is following the dictums of Dylan Thomas… ‘do not go gentle into that good night, rage rage against the dying of the light’. Well maybe not rage…. maybe just keep singing until you can’t do it any more….