The long comeback

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NICK EICHER, HOST: Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. 

I’m Nick Eicher.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: And I’m Myrna Brown. 

Well finally today: the enduring music and tumultuous life of Three Dog Night singer, Chuck Negron.

EICHER: In the late 1960s and early 70s, Three Dog Night was one of the most popular rock-and-roll groups in the country. It had three lead vocalists, but Negron was the voice of the majority of its hits.

BROWN: Negron passed away last month at the age of 83. 

WORLD’s music critic Arsenio Orteza says by the time of his death, Negron had become as well-known for overcoming addiction as he had for his contributions to the soundtrack of a generation.

ARSENIO ORTEZA: Chuck Negron had an unhappy childhood. 

In 1946, when he was just four, his father walked out on him, his mom, and his sister, leaving Negron with a “feeling of abandonment” that “haunted him most of his life.” 

A year later, his mother found work as an oil-company secretary, and Negron and his sister became the “original latchkey kids.” He skipped a lot of school and fell behind academically. Eventually, his mother placed him full-time in a Bronx daycare. He called it a “child’s hell” and prayed to God for help, but no help seemed to come. 

He wrote that that moment was when he lost his faith.

When someone loses faith in something, he often places it in something else. For Negron, that “something else” was basketball, which he played well enough in high school to receive offers of college scholarships. 

While playing at a junior college in California, he discovered his second “something else”: music.

MUSIC: [“I Dream of an Angel” by Chuck Rondell with the Sorensen Brothers]

“I Dream of an Angel” was one of three songs that Negron, using the name “Chuck Rondell,” recorded with a combo called the Sorensen Brothers in 1963. A year later, he accepted a solo offer from Columbia Records.

MUSIC: [“All’s Fair in Love and War” by Chuck Rondell]

Columbia intended to groom him to be the next Johnny Mathis, a role Negron rejected. For a while, he vacillated between basketball and music. 

Then, at a Hollywood Hills party in 1965, he met another fledgling singer, Danny Hutton. Two years later, Hutton and Negron, joined by a third vocalist, Cory Wells, began recording under the name Redwood with none other than the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson producing.

MUSIC: [“Time to Get Alone” by Redwood]

“Time to Get Alone” was one of two songs that Wilson recorded with Redwood, a group he intended to sign to the Beach Boys’ Brother Records. The Beach Boys, however, wanted Wilson’s Redwood material for themselves. So, instead of signing with Brother Records, the trio signed with ABC’s Dunhill Records and became Three Dog Night. 

The group’s first single, “Nobody,” featured Wells on lead vocals and failed to break the Hot 100. Its second single, “Try a Little Tenderness,” cracked the top 30. But it was their third single, which featured Negron’s voice, that became a top-five hit and the group’s first million seller.

MUSIC: [“One” by Three Dog Night]

The group’s next single also went top five. Negron sang that one too.

MUSIC: [“Easy to Be Hard” by Three Dog Night]

The image of Negron as the lead singer of a group that was supposed to have three was beginning to form. Wells would eventually sing lead on eight of the band’s hits, one more than Negron. And a number of the hits found Wells, Negron, and Hutton sharing leads. But Negron sang lead on five of the band’s top 10s. And he sang lead on what became the group’s biggest and best-known hit of all.

MUSIC: [“Joy to the World” by Three Dog Night]

Billboard named “Joy to the World” the number-one record of 1971. But the no-holds-barred rock-and-roll lifestyle was taking a heavy toll on the band in general and Negron in particular. He’d already developed a fondness for cocaine and alcohol. And, at the band’s early-’70s peak, he started using heroin. In typical heroin-user fashion, he became a full-blown addict.

In his autobiography Three Dog Nightmare, he recounts in excruciating detail the years and the almost unimaginable amounts of money that he wasted nearly destroying himself. 

“At the peak of my addiction,” he wrote, “I spent $2,000 a day on heroin and bought other drugs too.” He was in and out of over 30 rehab facilities, and at one point lived in a shack with a fellow addict with whom he shared needles.

It took nearly two decades for Negron to get the help he needed. In 2017, he told Mike Huckabee that what made that rehab experience different was a visit from a fellow musician, who told him that he had no choice but to pray.

NEGRON: I went in later that day—because I was kicking my drugs—and I got down on my knees and I prayed to die. “Please, just let me die. Or give me one minute's peace from this relentless withdrawal and sickness.” 

And I sat on a bed, and I woke up four hours later. I fell asleep—when there is no sleep, you do not sleep when your body is screaming, you know, for something to calm it down. And when I woke up, I knew that God had done for me what I could not do for myself, and the obsession was gone.

Negron had begun finding the faith that he’d lost as a child decades earlier in the daycare.

He spent the next 34 years rebuilding his life, his relationships, and his career. 

F. Scott Fitzgerald famously wrote that “[t]here are no second acts in American lives.” Chuck Negron proved that, with prayer, sometimes there are.

MUSIC: [“The Show Must Go On” by Three Dog Night]

I’m Arsenio Orteza.

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