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Three Dog Night - Harmony

Three Dog Night

Three Dog Night has been one of those nifty pleasures for me over the last couple of years. As a kid they were on the radio all the time ... at least it seemed that way up to around 1974 or so, then they weren't on the radio anymore. I'd always liked music and my little AM radio was always on. When Harmony came out in 1971, I remember really liking "An Old Fashioned Love Song", although at the time I had no idea that's what the album was called.

Of course over the decades time has a way of blurring and over the last couple of years I've picked up a number of their albums I've really enjoyed. The records have come to me out of sequence, and I want to find the classic hits and then allow the deeper album tracks some time to breathe.

I'm still in awe of the band. The fact that Three Dog Night wasn't centred on a lone front man is a source of wonder. Cory, Chuck and Danny were amazing singers and the band was so good. Mike Allsup, the guitarist, is so good, and my goodness keyboardist Jimmy Greenspoon to me is the foundation of the band's sound. Everything is anchored and propelled by the rhythm section of Joe Schermie on bass and Floyd Sneed on drums.

Three Dog Night may not have written their hits, but their versions are definitive. Harmony yielded two classic songs, Hoyt Axton's "Never Been to Spain" and Paul Williams' "An Old Fashioned Love Song." These are the big radio hits, and while they're the best songs on the album, the rest of the record was really enjoyable. One of my favourite deep cuts is simply called "Jam" and was written by the band. The other is "My Impersonal Life", which has a great groove and some great organ work by Jimmy.

Of course it's kind of hard to be objective with the weight of five decades of nostalgia tipping the balance to the more familiar songs. The ones that are new to me will never feel the same no matter how good they may be.

back cover

For me it's been about the discovery of a band that had way more to offer than the hits on the radio ... and my goodness they had a lot of hits on the radio. For all their success they don't seem to get any respect because they were interpreters of songs rather than songwriters. Which seems to be a bit rich considering how many artists never wrote anything they sang. Three Dog Night may not have written their hits, but you'd be hard pressed to find a better version of the songs they recorded.

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