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In the early 1970s, the pop-rock group Three Dog Night were selling more records and concert tickets than any other artists in America, and scored 21 consecutive US Top 40 hits, including three No 1s. Chuck Negron, who has died aged 83 after suffering from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and heart failure, was a founder member of the group, and his powerful voice and four-octave range made him a crucial component of their sound. His luxuriant moustache also became an unmistakable visual trademark.
The group divided up their songs between three lead vocalists, with Danny Hutton and Cory Wells alongside Negron, but it was Negron’s voice to the fore on such hits as One, Easy to Be Hard, Old Fashioned Love Song, The Show Must Go On and Joy to the World.
The last of these, written by Hoyt Axton, was an exuberant expression of the group’s strengths. Built on a thunderous R&B beat, and coloured with pounding electric piano and raging guitar, it sounded exactly like its title, with Negron singing the lead with gleeful abandon. The baffling opening lines – “Jeremiah was a bullfrog / Was a good friend of mine” – merely served to boost the song’s mystique. It topped the US chart in 1971, and would later feature on the soundtracks of the films The Big Chill and Forrest Gump.
It was one of only two Top 30 hits the group enjoyed in Britain, reaching No 24. The other was their version of Randy Newman’s Mama Told Me Not to Come, a UK No 3 in 1970 (as well as a US No 1). The eight albums they released between 1968 and 1974 all went Top 30 in the States, three of them entering the Top 10.
But behind their steady cascade of hits, trouble was brewing. Even while Three Dog Night were outselling other top acts such as the Rolling Stones or Creedence Clearwater Revival, Negron’s worsening drug habit was driving the band apart. He had already been into drugs when the band began, but the pressures of their touring and recording schedule exacerbated the problem. He recalled how “we were doing cocaine, then downers to sleep”.
In 1976 the group split up, largely because Negron had developed a crippling heroin addiction. He later described how he had spent “my entire fortune, millions of dollars” on drugs, with his habit costing him up to $3,000 a day. For a time he was homeless and living in Los Angeles’ notorious Skid Row district. He managed to recover sufficiently to join a band reunion in 1982, but a drugs relapse three years later prompted his departure, this time for good.
He was born in New York, to Charles Negron, a Puerto Rican nightclub performer, and his wife, Elizabeth (nee Rooke). His parents divorced when Chuck was five, after which he and his twin sister, Nancy, were raised by their mother. Elizabeth struggled to keep working while also raising her children, and placed them in the Woodycrest orphanage for two years. The family subsequently lived together in an apartment in the Bronx.
Chuck suffered from dyslexia and attended the Yoder reading school in Manhattan to improve his reading abilities, before enrolling in junior high school. He went on to William Howard Taft high school in the Bronx, and while also singing in doo-wop groups in his spare time, the 6ft 1in youth displayed precocious ability as a basketball player. This won him an athletic scholarship to Allan Hancock College in Santa Maria, California, from where he transferred to California State College, in LA (now California State University, Los Angeles). There he was coached by Bill Sharman, who would later enjoy great renown as coach of the Los Angeles Lakers basketball team.
Negron had also been dipping a toe into music, and after releasing a couple of singles locally, signed a deal with Columbia Records under the name Chuck Rondell. He first met Hutton at a party for the folk-pop singer Donovan, and recalled how “at this party there were models and actors, it was very hip … I went from being a guy who never did anything to getting high with them, and then I just liked it so much I never stopped.”
He subsequently formed Redwood, later renamed Three Dog Night, with Hutton and Wells. The band name was suggested by Hutton’s girlfriend, the actor June Fairchild (a regular on the TV music show Hollywood a Go Go), and referred to the Indigenous Australians’ habit of judging temperature by how many dogs they needed to sleep with to keep warm. A “three dog night” was a really cold one.
They were still Redwood when they recorded demos of two Brian Wilson songs, Time to Get Alone and Darlin’, produced by the Beach Boy himself, but the project never went any further. They were then signed to Dunhill Records and recorded their debut album, Three Dog Night (1968). The opening track was One, a song by Harry Nilsson sung with anguished expressiveness by Negron, which would give them a No 5 hit and was their first million-selling single. They also reached the Top 30 with Try a Little Tenderness, while the album climbed to No 11 on the US chart.
The band now comprised the three singers, augmented by a four-piece backing band – the guitarist Michael Allsup, Floyd Sneed on drums, the bassist Joe Schermie and Jimmy Greenspoon on keyboards. The concept, devised by Hutton, was that the singers would share lead vocals between them, concentrating on the musical quality of the performances rather than the ego-boosting of individual performers. They also focused on finding quality material from the best songwriters, rather than relying on their own writing, which would lead to them showcasing work by Laura Nyro, the then-little known Elton John, and Joni Mitchell, as well as Lennon & McCartney, Stevie Wonder and Sam Cooke.
In 1991, after countless visits to rehab, Negron was finally free from his addiction. With his bandmates unsympathetic to a further reunion, he launched a solo career, releasing seven studio and live albums between 1995 and 2017. In 1999 he published an autobiography, Three Dog Nightmare. He continued to perform live, including shows with the Happy Together package tour of 60s veterans, but was forced to quit touring by the Covid pandemic, potentially fatal for him given his chronic COPD condition. This had already prompted him to use a special pair of glasses that fed him oxygen through tubes to help him perform onstage.
Three marriages ended in divorce.
Negron is survived by his fourth wife, Ami Albea, whom he married in 2020; by a daughter, Shaunti, from his first marriage, to Paula Goetten, a son, Charles, from his second, to Julia Densmore, a daughter, Charlotte, from his third, to Robin Silna, and a daughter, Annabelle, from a relationship with the actor Kate Vernon; and by nine grandchildren.
