Chuck Negron, R.I.P.

If you grew up in the late sixties/early seventies, you heard a lot of Three Dog Night - especially if you listened to music in the car or on an AM-only transistor radio.  TDN were one of the great AM radio bands of their day, and from around 1969 through 1974 there was rarely a time when one of their songs wasn't on its way up the charts, usually to the Top Ten and sometimes all the way to #1.  I'll be doing a deep dive on AM radio bands sometime later this year, so for now any discussion about the band's music can wait.

The subject for today is Chuck Negron, one of the band's three lead singers.  Negron died last week at the age of 83.  

I was a big TDN fan; and as far as I was concerned Negron with THE MAN.   Just look at that photo - that's Negron in the middle, with Cory Wells on the left and Danny Hutton on the right.  The two of them look OK, sure.  But Negron?  That is absolutely the coolest looking dude in the world.  We should all aspired to Negron-level coolness at some point in our lives.

It wasn't until I bought their Greatest Hits album in 1974 that I discovered that Negron sang lead on fewer songs than either Wells or Hutton.  That was disappointing, but Chuck did sing "One," a great Harry Nilsson cover, and of course the band's most famous song, Hoyt Axton's "Joy to the World."  When you hear "Jeremiah was a bullfrog," you're hearing Chuck Negron.  And something tells me we'll be hearing that song forever, so in a way Chuck Negron is immortal.

R.I.P.