By Mike Morsch
From the Princeton Packet
One isn’t necessarily the loneliest number that Danny Hutton has ever had to do.
Mr. Hutton, one of the three lead singers for Three Dog Night, has had to carry on the band’s legacy after the death last year of co-founding member Cory Wells. Along with Chuck Negron, the three had shared lead singing duties for the band during its heyday from 1968 through 1976.
In that span, Three Dog Night produced 21 Billboard Top 40 hits — including three No. 1 songs — and helped introduce mainstream audiences to the music of some of the greatest songwriters of that era, including Randy Newman, Paul Williams, Laura Nyro, Harry Nilsson, Hoyt Axton and Leo Sayer.
Among those hits were “One,” “Mama Told Me Not To Come,” “Joy to the World,” “Black and White,” “An Old Fashioned Long Song,” “Eli’s Coming,” “Celebrate” and “Never Been to Spain.”
Mr. Negron left the group in the mid-1980s, but Mr. Hutton and Mr. Wells carried on until 2015. Now, it’s just Mr. Hutton, and although he misses the presence of Mr. Wells, he has made adjustments to the Three Dog Night concert experience that he believes have given the band a renewed energy and that in turn has appealed to fans.
That will be on display at upcoming Three Dog Night shows, Oct. 20 at the Mayo Performing Arts Center in Morristown, and Oct. 22 at the Count Basie Theatre in Red Bank.
“Cory visited me in my dreams the other night,” Mr. Hutton says. “We were all kind of walking to a train, with a bunch of guys in a group, and there he was. I went ‘Oh my God!’ and just grabbed him and gave him a big hug. And we just walked along. I thought, ‘Oh, he doesn’t know he’s dead.’ I was trying to break it to him. I thought, How are we going to do the set tonight? And a little while later, I realized it was just a dream.”
One of the changes Mr. Hutton made after Mr. Wells’ death was to the show setlist, including some editing of songs and eliminating of double choruses, what Mr. Hutton calls “cutting away some of the fat” in the show.
“Over the years we’d drift into doing things that sometimes were bad habits. Especially, with Cory,” Mr. Hutton says. “He started getting bored and he wanted to throw in blues songs while we were sitting on stools. And the whole set would go, boom, into a big hole. Now the set is like a rocket ship. It starts and just kicks butt, it just screams all the way through. It’s the first time in maybe 15 years that we just do Top 40 hits by Three Dog Night. Before we’d get bored and throw in this and throw in that.”
And it’s just Mr. Hutton making the decisions now, proving to him that being No. 1 isn’t the loneliest number.
“Cory and I were two different personalities and we looked at things a different way,” he says. “So it’s more unified now. There are no factions anymore. Not that anybody was bad. Sometimes the lead guitar player and the lead singer are fighting and not together. It was just like brothers. There are no bad guys. It’s the happiest I’ve been in years.”
As for Mr. Negron rejoining the band, that’s unlikely at this point, according to Mr. Hutton.
“The only perspective I can give on it is that it’s like somebody that you knew in 1986 and it’s your wife that you divorced,” Mr. Hutton says. “But 1986 and now, that’s a whole different lifetime. Chuck is doing his own thing. It’s just a whole different group now.”
Not entirely, though. In addition to Mr. Hutton, today’s lineup includes the band’s original guitarist, Michael Allsup, who first joined Three Dog Night in 1968 as a backing musician.
“I’m loving it. Because of what happened with the group in the last two years, it’s like a new group, a new vibe,” he says. “It’s just wonderful. We had to right the ship and I didn’t know if we were gonna be accepted and didn’t know what was going to happen. But we get off the stage now and everybody high-fives and hugs each other. We’re kicking ass. And the reception has been incredible.”
Three Dog Night will perform at the Mayo Performing Arts Center, 100 South St. Morristown, Oct. 20, 8 p.m. For tickets and information, go to mayoarts.org or call 973-539-8008.
Three Dog Night also will perform at the Count Basie Theatre, 99 Monmouth St., Red Bank, Oct. 22, 8 p.m. For more information, go to countbasietheatre.org or call 732-842-9000.
The Princeton Packet and Greater Media Newspapers are part of the Newspaper Media Group.
