Not Fade Away: A Backstage Pass to 20 Years of Rock & Roll

by Ben Fong-Torres

  And yet it's funny how satisfaction eludes Three Dog Night, in the way it was funny to see Creedence, at the top of the pile in 19 70, throwing an expensive press party to find out why they weren't being taken seriously enough, say, to qualify for a Time or Life cover. Funny how members of Bread, automatic airplay on every album and single in 1971, sat around on the eve of receiving an Oscar Award, seriously claiming they were robbed of all-out "hip" acclaim by one week, by the acoustic sound of Crosby, Stills & Nash. Funny what pop stars will do to keep themselves tormented. "We'd like to be Top Five," was how David Gates put it. "In our own business, the people we look up to-Clive Davis, Bill Gavin-like us; the man on the street likes us. The DJs are on our side. The last stronghold is the public."

  Michael Allsup explained the critical response to and the resultant drawbacks of being, as he puts it, "pros who don't pull bullshit on stage.

  "The first couple of years, we were really an adrenalin group, a lot of moving, and then we started going through all these changes of getting write-ups-Three Dog Night, slick commercial group-and just getting busted left and right. Some of it was right on that we didn't want to accept, but there was a lot of really unfair things, so here's Michael playing guitar: 'OK, I'm not gonna project any more. I'm just gonna lay back and be heavy.' And that's bullshit, too. It was a result of wanting to be underground, you know, accepted, because at one time I was into a lot of acid and I really appreciated, `Hey, man...you're a beautiful person.' And that's not saying it's all shuck and jive, 'cause there's a good trip behind that, but there's a certain commercialness to thinking of yourself as heavy."

  So the Dogs tidied up again. "We played in New York," Allsup remembered, and he remembered the critique: "Three Dog Night had creases in their pants."

  "`Slick.' `Professional.' `Tight.' But in a negative way." Danny Hutton says he's especially sensitive to the criticism, having been part of the L.A. pop scene for ten years and having so many friends in the business getting their impressions of the group from the media. Danny quotes the irrelevance: "`Hey, they move from this song to that song and like, that's not natural.' We could come out in jeans with holes in them. `Hey, man! Kill the pigs!' But in general that's a cheap cop-out for groups that are lame musically. Want to get an audience going? `HEY, MAN, GET FUCKED!' That's not a real situation. When you're onstage, you're not real."

  But things are getting better, maybe.

  "We gain more and more respect now when we work with other acts," says Negron. "There's been so much information... categories everyone's put us in, and once you're successful you're put in a category.... After the show with Bloodrock in Oakland, a guy from their band came up...'Wow, you guys really-we thought you were like the Grassroots, 'cause you had all these hits, and what we've read!' But, so we're gaining."

  Three Dog, Negron said, have always been a well-rehearsed act. And in the old days, when they were the warm-up, they would get the audiences just a little overheated for the laid-back headlining groups. `All of a sudden," said Chuck, "a group had to leave early and catch a plane, so they'd have to go on before us." Or they would stay and be pissed at the Dogs.

  Last month, as part of The Tour of Tours, Three Dog played Three Rivers Stadium in Pittsburgh. First up, playing second base, was Leon Russell. Way off, in the bleachers, were twenty-five thousand people. Leon Russell likes his communication intense, and he cut his set short by twenty minutes and stomped off.

  "He didn't realize he was communicating as effectively as he was," explained Negron. Cory Wells added: "It was not only difficult to see, but to hear the audience. It would take a few seconds before you got the applause."

  "But it was very nice," Negron said. "He stayed for the whole show, and then he came back, and he was full of questions. `How did you do that?' The whole place just got going." In fact, he said, Leon almost got arrested for running out of the dugout onto the field to dance to the sounds of Three Dog Night. A security guard, not recognizing Mr. Warm-up, grabbed the jumping Leon and pushed him back. (Maybe Leon should've sung to him, "I'm from Rolling Stone, so it's OK.")

  Danny is the roving, raving Irishman; Chuck, just a year older at 30, is the friendly, open family man with a wife and daughter, and Cory, like Chuck a New Yorker, is the loner, the outdoorsman. He's the one who'll fly off in a Cessna 180 to the Nantucket Forest and isolate himself, just fishing, for a week. And yet on stage, it is Cory Wells, the man who brought you the Enemies and the Cory Wells Blues Band, who's the hottest Dog.

  When his version of "Try a Little Tenderness" came out on the first album, it was denounced by the critics as sacrilegious to Otis (not to mention Frank), even if Cory did mean it as a tribute. In the studio, the entire band raw, the song did come off as a fuzzy white carbon. But when Cory stood on stage at NBC, at the rehearsal for the Dog TV special, and crooned, "Ooh, she may be weary," a couple of blacks in the bleachers, there to see special guest Roberta Flack, sat up straight and took notice, and nodded along. Wells, eyes closed, took the song to the upbeat, building it vocally and yet giving a show with his body, dancing in place, marching in place, jumping in place, swinging the mike cord in tempo, doing the Chicken, now a breaststroke, a spin in place, a shake of the head, totally lost: a one-man band paying tribute not only to Otis, or to all of soul music, but, most of all, to the song.

  Later, we learn that Cory worked with R&B groups as a teenager, did choreography with vocal groups along the way to the Enemies, for whom he was guitarist and lead singer. His favorite singers are Redding, Sam and Dave, and Al Green; his performing ideal: Joe Tex. `And I like Andy Williams-for his coolness onstage."

  So Three Dog Night are professional and they're tuff onstage. Why can't they write their own music?

  The entire Reb Foster machine is ready for that one. They must've practiced coordinating lines one day in the Conference Room. Bill Utley, the President of RFA: "I don't understand why they don't criticize Marlon Brando for not writing something like A Streetcar Named Desire, simply because he is a great actor and he is very interpretative." Reb Foster: "They're criticized because they don't write, well, neither does Joe Cocker."

  Foster, who speaks in a nervous drawl, continues: "The fact that none of them had any particular heavy writing talent, though it's coming along-as far as I'm concerned, that has been used as a publicity factor. The facts are true, but...people are entitled to think what they want to, but that doesn't mean I have to agree with them."

  That kind of Agnewed/anguished rhetoric has a way, too, of popping out of other parts of the Dog machine. Burt Jacobs, explaining why he got into ball parks: "I got the idea that the biggest hangup in our business has been the pop festivals. We started to get bad publicity for our business. Instead of telling when something good was happening, they were telling about all the problems, about the rapes, the overdoses, the deaths. We gotta prove they're full of shit."

  Or Danny Hutton, prefacing his remarks: "I always feel like I'm being set up. I feel like the Indians and the treaties. `Sign this and the land is yours as long as the buffalo shall run."'

  On songwriting, Michael Allsup speaks a bit more clearly. "Sometimes I get worried about our group," he says. "It's like, `Hey, man, we gotta start getting stuff out, so people can relate to us as being creative, because people don't realize the creativeness that goes into arranging, 'cause they don't hear the stuff before we get it, and they write us off."

  Arrangements are another open-fire area, with all the musicians invited to take shots. Greenspoon developed the opening for one of last year's best-selling songs, "Joy to the World." Sometimes it goes beyond music-as when Hutton carted a mike into the bathroom at American Recorders, called Chuck and Cory in, and spent five hours in the can doing "Liar," the song Greenspoon picked off the first Argent album.

  Richie Podolor is an integral part of the Dog machine, the way Brian Wilson almost was. "He produced us first, and then Van Dyke Parks," says Danny. `And Brian took two weeks on a single. We did `Darling.' We worked on it and di
d the whole thing; then, they needed a single, and they dropped our voices out and put theirs on. We were very disappointed. We felt, `Well, here's Brian with all the hits and the history-if he doesn't work with us, wow, maybe we lost our one shot.' Then we cut another song called `Time to Get Alone,' and Brian had an oxygen tank, and he would roll up and say, `The sign of astrology, it isn't right,' and he would just run out of the studio.

  "So two weeks later we got this thing done, but we would be in there singing, And I looked at you, baby,' and he would say, `Uh, OK, `And I looked at you" was good, but pick up "baby."' And it took two weeks to do that."

  Three Dog Night then got Gabriel Mekler as producer and took less than a week to put together their first full album. On the second album, all the Dogs became arrangers, sparked friction, and Mekler gave way to engineer Podolor.

  Three Dog, it's been said enough times, were the discoverers, in the sense that they put them on the pop charts, of Nyro, Nilsson, Newman, and even Elton John and Bernie Taupin. The composers generally appreciate being picked. After all, any song Three Dog Night puts on an album-save a couple of the jam cuts and the live LP-is liable to become a hit single by album airplay and radio response. Elton and Bernie, after hearing the Dogs doing "Lady Samantha," sent the group an advance tape of the album that eventually launched them in America. A note was attached, informing Three Dog Night that they were the only band given permission to perform any of the songs prior to the LP's release. As for Randy Newman, Cory had been a fan long before Randy released "Mama" on 12 Songs. He'd picked the song off an Eric Burdon album.

  "It may offend some people," said Cory, returning to the main theme, "that we don't write. But the object for any entertainer is to put out the best music he can. We're not incapable; they just haven't allowed the time for us to put into writing."

  "They?"

  "They crowd more and more work down on us and expect us to be creative and come up with product all the time. That is the thing I resent. I think everyone else does, too. Is that where it always-you have the cliche of a music machine or a money-making machine.... Well, it's the other people around who almost start pushing you in that direction-to become a machine. And we are not music machines. We can't sit down and say, `This here is a hit.' It is almost impossible."

  You would think that somewhere along the line, Three Dog Night would stop complaining. Say, at the point they became, like it or not, a money-making machine. But the barks just keep on coming. Here's Danny:

  "Sometimes reporters or people like that say, 'Oh, you guys, you're just doing it for the bread, aren't you?' And what they don't realize is that most of the group are millionaires. If we are doing it for the money, why are we doing it? Obviously I didn't start at 18, 19 years old because I thought it was a safe, great way to make bread. I did it because I liked music. Everybody in the group did it that way. We got to the point where we had the money. We can just stop and retire. So we are doing it-pride... ego... and also because we like music.

  `And money to me can be the root of all good," Danny continues. "Really, because with me, the more money I get, the more power I will have ...I can go out and do my own album someday, or we will have the time to say, `Let's not do pop festivals, let's not tour for a year.' Let's spend six months in the studio and not do it in-between gigs, where we don't have to say, `Well, it's good enough.' Sometimes we are very disappointed when we hear the final product because we heard it in the studio and we say, `If we had two more weeks to mix down, we could have really...' It's just little things that irritate us."

  That still leaves the question of Three Dog's seeming lust-for bigger grosses, nets, gates, year-end figures. "Unfortunately, money impresses people," says Reb Foster. And Bill Utley concedes, "The money emphasis is somewhat misplaced. Obviously, income is one way of keeping score as to whether or not you're successful. It is very satisfying to any artist to play before a very large audience and to do it very well.

  "But," he added, "they spend a great deal of money with these big crowds. The people get their money's worth. The large video screens, sound equipment, so on and so forth. Some of these big things can achieve that festival feel but with controls, and it's more, frankly, than just Three Dog Night, because we will go out and work towards getting the best supporting acts as well. And the group will limit the maximum price below what we know can be sold at a given market." The top price for a Dog concert is $6.

  "Our society is all set up in rules and roles," said Cory, "and you are always breaking somebody's record."

  "But when you see it too much," added Chuck, "you kind of get embarrassed. You see too much of it and you start going, `Oh, why did they put that'...it can be embarrassing."

  Part of the Three Dog Machine is Levinson & Ross. Most of the acts that can afford $250 to $1,000 a week for a PR service outside their record label's will go to Gibson & Stromberg. James Taylor, Leon Russell, Jethro Tull, Jackson 5, the Doors, Cheech & Chong, Black Sabbath, Procol Harum, Bill Withers, and T. Rex are among the forty current clients. Jefferson Airplane just signed up. The Stones hired Gibson & Stromberg to handle their tour.

  The style at Gibson & Stromberg is cool flash: holes in their jeans, say, beneath the most elaborate rock and roll colored leather coats; they are scenemakers, party-givers, bar-hoppers, inkeepers. They sail along on a reputation of knowing the right people and somehow getting things done.

  In contrast, there is Bob Levinson, a public relations man from the old school. When Three Dog Night had to change publicity firms last year, management went to Levinson & Ross (Al Ross, in New York). It was a good move, into what might fairly be called a shelter for the maligned. Levinson & Ross had been nursing, among others, Elton John, Grand Funk Railroad, Bread, Steppenwolf, and the Osmonds, all of them suffering from media-fatigue at one time or another in the recent past. L&R had done well by several of the acts, and, in the past year or so, have gained a status as comers, second now to only Gibson & Stromberg.

  Levinson's the man who got Elton John invited by NASA to visit astronauts in Houston, just in time to get press for "Rocket Man." He called up Sam Yorty and got Mayor Sam to proclaim "Steppenwolf Day" in Los Angeles, February 14th, and that's how Steppenwolf's retirement was announced to the press-a full three months after Steppenwolf had in fact decided to split up. Since then Yorty has also declared a "Three Dog Day," as have several other mayors along the route of The Tour of Tours. "It's valid," he said. "Cities like to acknowledge their own, or special events. You just pickup a phone. My attitude is, don't presume no for an answer."

  THREE DOG NIGHT FIRST ROCK GROUP IN ROSE BOWL PARADE

  "They liked the idea," said Levinson, "because there's something `little boy' in everyone, and I think everyone has wanted to ride in a parade. I was telling Bobby Colomby why I put them in a parade, and he was saying, `You'll never catch Blood, Sweat & Tears in a parade; what kind of crazy thing is that to do?' And it came up a couple nights later in Dobbs Ferry, and he's saying, `Can you imagine that crazy Levinson, putting Three Dog in the Rose Bowl parade.' And Steve Katz said, 'Man. Do you know how many people watch the Rose Bowl parade every year?' I couldn't buy that time; that parade has the biggest audience of the year on television!"

  Three Dog Night Inc. has plenty of hired help. As yet another part of the machine, the band has business management separate from Reb Foster Associates. "We found when we started that handling money is not our business," said Burt Jacobs. "So we decided we'd rather take 5 percent less commission and have business managers paid from us. It's so important and we insist on it."

  Utley, Jacobs and Foster and the immediate Beverly Hills staff of ten, then, might best be considered personal management.

  "I feel that I am helping make dreams come true," says Utley, "helping people realize ambitions. People come in and they have a goal established, fine, but the means of getting there they haven't. So my job is to lay out those means and make sure that once that goal is realized, nobody looks over their shoulder and says, `Hey
, I got screwed."'

  Mike Allsup can understand Three Dog Night incorporating and setting up a pension plan.

  "The music business is so weird, there's a lot of money to be made, but groups only last a short time. And when you make a lot of money in a short period of time, b-room, your tax rate is about 50 percent. If you can incorporate, there are ways to shelter the money. You put it in a pension plan where you can't touch it, the government says OK. Fifty cents of each dollar is in the plan, and they won't tax it. But I can use that money circulating for investments. So we have cattle.. .a couple of apartment buildings. It's a group investment."

  Three Dog Night Incorporated holds all the funds.

  "It's unreal, man, the amount of money that circulates in this thing. You've got to be a businessman in order for your head to be right to be a musician."

  Cory Wells was talking about that root of all good:

  "It's funny, over at Chuck's house, he told me this, it was a party, and one of the fellows-it was his birthday-and somebody was doing a trick and they needed a dollar bill. Chuck only had a $100 bill on him. He gave it to them and they did their little trick and everything, and the guy kept the $100 in his pocket. And Chuck didn't say anything. He was embarrassed over it...the guy was putting his coat on and he was leaving. Then he decided ...no...so then he said..."

  Negron: "Well, I just reminded his friend, and his friend said, `Why-you're really cheap, man."'

  Wells: "He said, 'Could I have my $100 back, man?' The guy went, 'You really want that $100? All the money you make, man, and you want this $100?'

  "What an attitude, man."

  -September 14, 1972

  Rolling Stone

  Un June 1972, my brother, Barry, was shot to death at his apartment in San Francisco. He'd been working in Chinatown for a year as head of the Youth Services and Coordinating Center, where he dealt with problem kids, including those in various gangs. I tell his story in detail in my book, The Rice Room. Although, all these years, the murder has remained unsolved, Barry, who'd been a probation officer across the bay, where he won praise for his work with black youth, apparently got caught between rival gangs.