With three lead singers (Cory Wells, Chuck Negron and Danny Hutton) who took distinctive solos and whose voices blended in stunning harmony, the seven-piece group was ubiquitous in the era.
“Joy to the World.” “Easy to Be Hard.” “Mama Told Me Not to Come.” “Celebrate.” “Black and White.” “Eli’s Coming.” “One.” “Shambala.” And on and on. They championed Harry Nilsson, Randy Newman, Hoyt Axton and Laura Nyro, and were the first American act to record Elton John’s songs.
Hutton, who put the group together in California in 1968, remains the only original member of Three Dog Night, which is still a touring and recording entity (a new album is in the works for 2026).
Those hit songs mean a whole lot to a whole lot of people, Hutton, 83, acknowledges. And that, along with his longstanding drive to create, is what motivates him.
We begin our conversation with Hutton talking about the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Danny Hutton: I went down a rabbit hole one night and asked AI why we weren’t in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. I know the cliché: “They didn’t write their own songs. They were a cover band.” Then I looked up whether Linda Ronstadt or Joe Cocker wrote any of their own songs – and it said they were “creative artists.” We had more hits than either one of them, and they didn’t write any of their songs.
My theory is that you were in the Top Ten so much, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame doesn’t think that’s cool. Anybody who’s ubiquitous on the radio just wasn’t “hip.”
Oh, of course. Ben Fong-Torres did a hit piece on us in Rolling Stone. They put us on the cover. He said in his book “They were so big, we wanted to chop ‘em down to size.” After the Beatles, we were the first group to play stadiums. We were the first to use big video screens.
With three lead singers, how was it decided who would sing what?
I was a producing, arranging studio rat guy. I formed the group; I was good at getting better people around me than myself, in my head. I didn’t come from being in a band, out doing three sets a night and all that stuff. So I didn’t consider myself as entertainer as much a guy that could go in and record a song and put on all the harmony parts myself.
They would fight, in a fairly subtle way, over who was going to do the song. I’d leave myself out and say, “I’d think you’d be better at it.” And usually our producer would go along with what I thought too. So I didn’t care. As far as the perception with the public is concerned, the song is all about who’s singing – but the arranging and production, that’s what really makes the song. Cutting the fat out of the song and moving parts around. That’s what I loved.
Cory was probably one of the best blues voices around. Underrated. He was very clean, didn’t get high, and he loved to fish … so he’d do his parts and he’d just leave. And Chuck was a ballad singer, he wasn’t a musician.
Later on, I could have done certain songs, and I’d just go “No, you do it. I’m fine on the board.”
After you’ve had so many consecutive monster hits, does that make it hard to decide what comes next? Were you doing a lot of second-guessing about the next hit?
Whatever album “Joy to the World” was on, we had released two other songs first. Then that one came out and sold ten million. Actually, if you listen to most of our albums, the first song on the first side was the one we thought would be the single. And it usually never was.
“Old-Fashioned Love Song,” the real soft stuff, ended up being hits and we were just shocked. So you never know.
Tell me about your version of the Leo Sayer song “The Show Must Go On.” I always thought that was a strange choice.
I used to spend Christmas, a couple of weeks, in England. I heard that song on TV, and I could tell it was going to be a big hit song. I came back to the States with it, and gave it to the guys. Who said “Let’s do it!” But I was kinda horrified after I created this song. It was a big hit for us in the States, but I was always very uncomfortable with it.
Chuck had the lead on that one. You didn’t do a lot of the leads yourself, did you? You sang “Black and White.”
And “Liar.” We were all over the place. But on a lot of songs, we’d each take a verse. We’ve got a song called “Freedom for the Stallion,” and during a verse, all of us sing a line, and you almost can’t tell the difference in the voices. It sounds like one person.
Midway through the 1970s, the hits stopped coming. Could you feel, by then, the air was going out of the tires?
Well, I felt the air going out of my tires. I was just a mess. I had no interest at all in the sessions; I really stopped participating.
To get up in the morning, I would have to drink a large glass of gin. One or two Seconals. And a couple of big snorts of coke. Just to get up and not be normal, or high, but kind of be sideways. That’s what I used to call it.
You left the band in 1975, and it officially broke up soon after …
One morning I went to the mirror. I had been unconscious, without moving, for probably 20 hours. So it paralyzed the left side of my body. I just said “That’s it, I’m done. I’m done with drugs.” I didn’t go to AA or any of that stuff. No cigarettes, no coffee, no stimulants, no anything. Sometimes I would run 10 miles a day.
One day I walked into the Troubadour, in Los Angeles, and I saw a band called Fear. I just thought they were the best punk band I’d ever seen, that whole scene, and I ended managing them through that whole punk scene, for two years.
Then I started getting calls. There was some bogus band that was going to go over to the Far East and be Three Dog Night. So the three of us had to do business, talking to each other again. We decided “Let’s go rehearse and see if the magic is still there.” And it was, except we didn’t know that Chuck was still really way deep into heroin.
I’m not talking out of school, because he said he had to go through 31 rehabs during the ‘80s. We went on tour, and at the start of the tour he said “My teeth are really hurting; I gotta go back and see my doctor.” We said “You can’t – we’ve got a month or two of touring.” And that was it. That put a stop to that, and it put us in a deep hole because we’d committed to all these gigs.
Then we just carried on. You just move on.
After Cory passed in 2015, was it a tough decision for you to keep doing it?
No, because in my head, Three Dog Night’s always been my baby. The songs are great, and I felt a big part of creating these songs.
Do you and Chuck have any kind of relationship these days?
They’re making a documentary on us now, and the producer asked me that – would you and Chuck ever get back together again? I just looked at her and said, absolutely not. No way. She said, he would love to talk to you, and I said look, I don’t want to talk to him. A lot of hurt, all of that stuff.
And then I finally said, all right, you know what? I’ll talk to him. So we went to his place – she had a whole crew there – and we hugged. And made up. It was wonderful. It was a great relief to get that burden … it’s not healthy to keep that anger. Anger always comes from hurt, I think.
