April 29, 1972: Three Dog Night at the Aud

 



The other big concert in April 1972 was Three Dog Night on the 28th. One of those dogs, the one on the left, was a Buffalo guy. 

Never a Hard Day’s ‘Night’ 

        About the time everybody was feeling good Friday night, Danny Hutton gazed proudly around the ice-rink vastness of Memorial Auditorium. “This is the first time we’ve ever been in here,” he said, “except for Cory.”

        Cory Wells, of course, grew up in Buffalo, and the last time he and the rest of Three Dog Night were here, they played Kleinhans Music Hall.

        That was a year ago. They’ve sold 5 million singles since then and now they’re playing the biggest halls and touring only on weekends.

        All this success has come on Top 40 AM radio, which they generally make a little better with glad-sad songs they cop from underground songwriters like Paul Williams (“Just an Old-Fashioned Love Song”) and Hoyt Axton.

* * *

AND THEY gave the enthusiastic, mostly high school crowd of 11,500 (minus the guy whose car burned in the parking lot and those three other car owners the police wanted to see) a confident show full of hits.

        It’s a well-constructed vocal show. An opening “One Man Band” to slip those powerglide harmonies into gear, then once around the group.

        The four instrumentalists forge a muscular backdrop which is just right in form, so much that you almost ignore how ordinary it is in content.

        The threads of Michael Allsup’s guitar lines whisk by like assembly-line embroidery.

* * *

AND FLOYD Sneed’s drum solo, with bassist Joe Schermie slipping in to relieve him when he slid out to play tympani, has got to feel like a long refreshment break for the others in the band.

        The finale brought a stage rush by about 200 kids. Cory shook their outstretched hands as they waved like octopus tentacles.

        Girls who climbed on stage were quickly shunted out the rear, except the one who zeroed in on Danny Hutton’s red cowboy-style shirt and bear-hugged him. 

FOOTNOTE: Seems to me this review ran into a shortage of space and got chopped from the bottom. 

Setlist.fm does not provide a rundown of what was played at this show or the one the next night in Nassau Coliseum on Long Island, but a list from March 10 at Louisiana State University should be pretty close. It’s almost all of their hit singles up to that point. Seems like there should’ve been more than a dozen of them, though. 

“One Man Band”

Traffic’s “Feelin’ Alright?”

Marvin Gaye’s “You”

“Liar”

Floyd Sneed’s drum solo

“Easy to Be Hard”

“Mama Told Me Not to Come”

“An Old Fashioned Love Song”

“Eli’s Coming”

“Joy to the World”

“Celebrate”

And for the encore – “One” 

Meanwhile, over the years I learned that Cory Wells took his stage name from items he saw at a diner after a gig late one night – Cory being a brand of coffee maker. Born Emil Lewandowski, he was lead singer on “Mama Told Me Not to Come,” their first No. 1 hit.

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