Three Dog Night singer Danny Hutton noted to the audience at Arcadia Performing Arts Center Saturday that in the mid-1960s he and co-founder Cory Wells began their rock band career by playing at high schools. And here they were, nearly half-a-century later, back at a high school campus again on Jan. 10, 2015.
Scott Hettrick
The L.A.-based band was playing to an enthusiastic and appreciative crowd of more than 1,000 mostly baby boomers, many of whom recalled attending Three Dog Night concerts in the halcyon days of the late 1960s and early 1970s, when they performed hits such as One, Mama Told Me (Not to Come), Black and White, and Joy to the World, all of which, and many more, were revived Saturday to great applause.
<Review continues following the 50-sec video/audio highlights below from Saturday night’s concert where video and photography was discouraged, so Arcadia’s Best kept highlights to under a minute…>
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Get the Flash Player to see this content.One of the group’s most notable concerts was recorded and released in 1969 as their popular third album, “Three Dog Night Captured Live at the Forum,” in front of 18,000 fans at the iconic arena in Inglewood that has recently enjoyed its own renaissance as a concert venue. If the members of Three Dog Night have come full circle in returning to concerts at high schools, ticket prices are not on that same trend line. On the “Live at the Forum” album, one of the band members is heard retorting to someone complaining from the back of the auditorium, “See, you should have bought the five-fifty seats down in front.” Forty-five years later, $5.50 didn’t even cover the processing fee on tickets priced at more than $100 for “seats down in front” at the 1,200-seat APAC. (Tickets of about $30 were available and the sight lines are good throughout the auditorium, even if many of the seats in the balcony require turning partially sideways to see the stage.)
Photo courtesy Three Dog Night drum cam
On this night there were no such hecklers in the audience that mostly remained seated throughout the evening except during the rousing pre-encore finale performance of “Celebrate.” And the first of two encore songs, the stunningly beautiful 2009 a cappella harmony “Prayer of the Children,” had the audience mezmerized and drew an ovation — partial standing. After struggling with the range of the hit songs of yore much of the night (Wells was said to have been hospitalized with a bad flu up until a few days before the show and gave himself the “choke” motion with his hands on his neck after particular difficulty in hitting many of the notes of “One,” originally sung by former band member Chuck Negron), it seemed as if a different band suddenly took the stage — vocally and stylistically — when all five band members stood, including a stand-in for ailing keyboardist Jimmy Greenspoon, and could not have sounded more pitch perfect on Prayer. It was a surprising departure to many in the audience, most of whom probably haven’t heard a Three Dog Night song in the decades since they listened to the group on 8-track tapes in high school and college, certainly nothing original. Clearly, many who later expressed getting goosebumps during the performance were completely unfamilar with the anthem that Three Dog Night later published on YouTube in December 2012 as a tribute to the victims of the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary…
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This was another big night for Arcadia and the mostly volunteer non-profit Arcadia Performing Arts Foundation (except for hard-working executive director Sue Cook). In its second full season the theater is once again bringing name-brand acts to Arcadia. Arcadians who had yet to set foot in the theater that opened more than two years ago were in attendance to see Three Dog Night, as well as many non-Arcadians. The PAC now joins Santa Anita Park horse race track, L.A. County’s Arboretum and Santa Anita Golf Course, and Westfield Santa Anita mall as yet another venue in town drawing people from all over San Gabriel Valley and even further around L.A. who are driving to Arcadia just as Arcadians drive to concert venues in other cities.
Sure, many of the PAC groups haven’t had a hit for decades and their members — even when there are original members remaining in the band (original Three Dog Night guitarist Michael Allsup joined Hutton and Wells Saturday) — are usually in their 60s and 70s and cannot come close to matching the voice quality of their youth. And there remains the issue of less-than-optimal acoustics or sound mixes that slightly muffled the vocals and lead guitar, at least for those seated in the middle of the theater and in the side balconies. Also, once again the bare-bones stage seemed low-budget — five musicians and their instruments and nothing more — absent any kind of backdrop or design, not even so much as an inexpensively projected band name in light on the rear wall (there seemed to be enough technology available to project the name of an advertiser on the west wall above the balcony prior to the start of the show).
But most in the audience don’t care much about any of that — it’s an eager, highly tolerant and easily-satisfied audience that seems content to enjoy a rare revisiting of their youth, recognizing and giving allowances that the band members must surely have aged as much as they have. The opening number of “Family of Man” was perhaps not the best choice to get the crowd going, but the band quickly moved through more upbeat and familar hits, some of which are very short songs. For instance, “It’s For You,” written but never recorded by John Lennon and Paul McCartney, runs only 1-minute and 40-seconds. Other classic pop rock hits were instantly recognizable and greatly enjoyed by the crowd, including Shambala, An Old-Fashioned Love Song, Never Been to Spain, Out in the Country, Liar, and the aforementioned One, Mama Told Me (Not to Come), and Black and White. There were also lesser-known older songs and another little-known but pleasant surprise newer tune outside the pop rock genre, the blues-y Heart of Blues, also recorded for the first time in 2009.
With no real audience interaction and little small-talk (no references whatsoever to Arcadia or anything local), combined with short and average-length songs for which there were no extended riffs or featured solos common to most live concerts, the program was noticeably short — about an hour from its late 8:15 p.m. start until the first encore of only two songs, ending after the crowd-pleasing “Joy to the World.” While some might have enjoyed another half-hour from Three Dog Night’s enormous catalogue, such as Eli’s Coming, Heaven is in your Mind, Chest Fever, One Man Band, Try a Little Tenderness, and/or Easy to Be Hard, such is always the case with a band of this caliber no matter how long they play.
As it was, most of the crowd seemed perfectly content to call it a relatively early evening by 9:30 p.m. and many enjoyed sharing their good feelings about the concert with each other in the lobby and parking lot on the way out. All-in-all, a very fun evening that most Arcadia residents could never have imagined experiencing in their small town all those years ago.
— By Scott Hettrick Other reviews: