Three Dog Night
Hard Labor

Recording and releasing an album is sometimes almost like giving birth. In 1974, Three Dog Night really went over the top with this theme; the cover shot of their record that year captures its... birth, the mother being an odd doll/puppet with rather alien lower limbs. The close-up of the instrument cart is striking, with a whole array of forceps, tongs, basins, and other surgical tools, mixed in with condenser microphones (one is being tightly held by the nurse) and dynamic mics, including a Shure SM57—certainly more at home in front of a guitar amp than there, in the delivery room. Such pranksters!

Would you believe it? In puritanical America, the record label was soon forced to place a band over the “birth” area—at first a removable cardboard strip, then actually printed right onto the cover: collector’s fodder for the compulsive... Luckily, in the nineties, the original artwork was restored.

Something changes this time in the sound and musical impact of Three Dog Night, previously quite homogeneous in all their past studio works. That’s because the producer shifts, after so many albums overseen by Richard Polodor, plus a second keyboard player joins the capable Jimmy Greenspoon, who now chooses to focus solely on piano parts. Lastly, the backing vocals are notably trimmed down... The three frontmen, however, still more or less evenly share the spotlight as always, including the usual song sung by all three, with chasing lines: “On the Way Back Home” by their trusty Daniel Moore, the man behind last year’s mega-hit “Shambala.”

The album opens with a spectacular circus-style intro, featuring a catchy little tune that gets stuck in your head right away. Then comes the usual pillaging of outside songwriters... This time the menu features tracks by John Hiatt (this cover of “Sure As I’m Sitting Here” even includes multiple toilet flushes! Worth a listen...), Larry Weiss the actor/musician, the ever-present Daniel Moore, Jamaican Jimmy Cliff, the Canadian multi-instrumentalist Skip Prokop leader of Lighthouse, frequent collaborator Allen Toussaint, and finally, English singer-songwriter Leo Sayer, then at the height of his fame.

TDN founder Danny Hutton starts to “misfire” here... He’s rarely seen in the studio, grappling with alcohol and cocaine and their resulting stints in rehab. He sings on just one track (the Jimmy Cliff song), and his gritty voice is barely audible even in the harmonies.

The best cuts to my ear are “I’d Be So Happy” by Lighthouse, deliciously sixties-tinged and sung by Negron; then the rhythm & blues “Play Something Sweet” by Toussaint, belted out brilliantly by Cory Wells; next the already mentioned, lush, choral “On the Way Back Home” — a regular little song transformed into something sublime by the three’s intricate, almost gospel-like vocal work; and finally “The Show Must Go On” by Sayer, the album’s obvious and unforgettable masterpiece, with all that merry circus before, during, and after, and that killer slow-down in the theme, followed by the definitive slam of a creaking door. Negron, with a clenched throat and shredded tonsils, treats us to a virtuoso bray worthy of the best James Brown—with plenty of irony to spare.

Good record, four stars.