Chuck Negron (1942 - 2026)

Chuck Negron has passed away from heart failure and COPD at age 83. He was one of Three Dog Night's talented trio of lead singers. I was a big fan of the band and Negron in particular. He's in the foreground on the album cover pictured here.

Negron sang lead on many of the septet's big hits including "One," "Easy to Be Hard," "Joy to the World," "An Old Fashioned Love Song," "Pieces of April," "The Show Must Go On," and a spectacular deep track - a melodramatic cover of Stevie Wonder's "Never Dreamed You'd Leave in Summer" that most music writers ridiculed. Is it because it's almost a power ballad? It's always been one of my go-to Three Dog Night songs.

The band was a hit singles machine that placed twenty-one songs in the top 40. They seldom wrote their own material, but they had a knack for recording songs by many of the more talented composers of the era - often before they became established themselves. Among them are Elton John, Harry Nilsson, Randy Newman, Laura Nyro, Hoyt Axton, Paul Williams and more, turning them into hits when those writers could not.

Negron's heroin and cocaine addiction has been well documented, and it eventually cost him his place in Three Dog Night's lineup. He spent $2,000 a day to feed his habit and even lived for a time on Los Angeles's skid row before finally cleaning up his act in 1991. He wrote a memoir, Three Dog Nightmare about those sad years after he finally took control of his life. Negron's problems caused his estrangement from his bandmates decades ago, but he finally reconciled with Danny Hutton last year.

Five of the original seven members of Three Dog Night have left us. Cory Wells died in 2015.

Singer Hutton still takes a version of the band out on the road.