- Included among the Record Descriptions of Favorite Albums (Part 1).
- Three Dog Night had a succession of hit songs in the 1970’s, including 11 that made the Top Ten, along with 12 consecutive Gold albums in six years.
Three Dog Night – Three Dog Night (1969): In 1969, I was in a record store somewhere and saw two debut albums with similar front and back covers, Three Dog Night by Three Dog Night and Kick out the Jams by MC5, both having a swirl of images of the bandmembers, mostly in concert. They are actually quite different bands. Three Dog Night, renowned for their harmony vocals and excellent material and for having three lead vocalists, had a succession of hit songs in the 1970’s, including 11 that made the Top Ten, along with 12 consecutive Gold albums in a six-year period. While Three Dog Night bandmembers wrote none of the songs on Three Dog Night, top-notch songwriters are represented, such as Randy Newman, Tim Hardin, and Johnny “Guitar” Watson; plus Jim Capaldi, Stevie Winwood, and Chris Wood of Traffic.
The band name is taken from the sleeping habits of Indigenous Australians on cold nights, typically bedding down with one or two dingoes (a type of wild dog) – if the weather were freezing, that would be a “three dog night”. Not long after the release of Three Dog Night, the Nilsson song “One” became their first big hit song, and “ONE” was added to the album cover. I searched for decades to find their album as I had originally seen it, without the song name on it. I finally found one, just in time for Hurricane Katrina to wash it away. “One” wasn’t even on the earliest pressings of Three Dog Night, although the song is on my copy. Another of their early hits, Otis Redding’s “Try a Little Tenderness” is also on Three Dog Night, together with their first single “Nobody” that fell short of the Billboard Hot 100; other songs include “Chest Fever”, “Heaven is in Your Mind”, “The Loner” (Neil Young’s first solo single), the Beatles song “It’s for You”, and “Don’t Make Promises”.