Three Dog Night
American Pastime

The youthful, intense, and fruitful era of this Californian group comes to an end with the album in question. They began at just the right moment, in 1969, when the "expropriation" of African American music (blues, rhythm & blues, rock ’n’ roll, gospel, even jazz) by white musicians had reached the point of no return, overturning the original parameters with all sorts of variations and infiltrations from other genres, breaking definitively into the global record market.

The underlying idea of the Three Dog Night project was distinctive and appealing: three talented white soul voices—very white indeed—dedicated to creatively interpreting or covering songs written by others, some from white musicians already “derived” in their own way from black masters (Newman, Elton, Sayer, Axton, Winwood…) or directly from the primary source (Cooke, Gaye, Wonder, Robinson…).

The present album, released in 1976 and their tenth studio effort, was recorded without one of the three singers, Danny Hutton, who was hospitalized in a clinic for detox. In fact, he appears as lead vocals on one song (“Mellow Down”), but only because it had been recorded and finished some time before, being an outtake from the previous album. In his place, Jay Gruska stepped in—previously used only as a composer on the prior year’s record. Chuck Negron, on the other hand, at one point even ended up in jail for a while, caught by the police with a hefty stash of illegal substances in the dressing room at the first concert of the promotional tour for this album.

During the recording sessions, a couple of the band’s historic instrumentalists also left, so hired session men were brought in to finish the work—including the late Jeff Porcaro, future drummer of Toto, who really played on the albums of EVERYONE recording in Los Angeles during the seventies and eighties.

The emerging disco music trend manages to influence, albeit episodically, the predominant rhythm and blues atmosphere of the album, but it is a diversification that serves little purpose. In fact, there is a sense of winding down, of satisfaction. The voices are as splendid and powerful as ever, the song selection is varied (this time featuring compositions by George Clinton, Alan O’Day, Andy Fairweather-Low, Bob Carpenter, and others), but all in all, the album sells very little. TDN is quickly going out of fashion, which leads to discouragement, distractions, and tensions.

So they stop here, at least in terms of producing new albums. Concerts, however, continue, even as members leave or struggle with health problems, new replacements are found, and the group somehow moves forward. Years go by, musicians and singers come and go, disappear for years and sometimes return after a decade.

In the eighties, only an EP (Extended Playing) is released with five new tracks—unmemorable and negligible, without success. In the middle of the decade, one of the band’s pillars, singer Chuck Negron, is kicked out for being constantly wasted, and he never returns. His colleague Danny Hutton, who once seemed in worse health, instead pulls himself together and resumes his central role (he was the founder of TDN). The years pass quickly, and the group carries on with occasional tours, generally with Negron’s vocal role taken by the new bassist/guitarist, who can also sing.

And so we reach the year 2002… (to be continued).