Never Been to Spain

Zoo Freaks, settle in and let the needle ride a little while, because the record spinning over at THE ZOO is one of those deep cuts that still feels like a road story told across a bar. Never Been to Spain comes off Three Dog Night's 1971 album Harmony, with Cory Wells out front on the lead vocal and Richard Podolor producing. Dunhill put it out as a single, number 4299, with Peace of Mind on the flip, and the thing climbed to number five on the Billboard Hot 100. Folks still argue about who owns a song once a band puts their stamp on it, and this one is a clean case. The band did not write it. Hoyt Axton did, and he cut his own version the same year on an album he called Joy to the World, the same title as the bullfrog smash he had already handed these three singers.

Axton had a habit of writing tunes that sounded older than they were, the kind of lines you could swear you heard on a front porch before you ever heard them on the radio. He also wrote The Pusher, which Steppenwolf turned into a dark classic, so the man could go from a drug-running boat to a dancing bullfrog without blinking. Never Been to Spain sits in between those poles. The narrator has never set foot in Spain, but he kind of likes the music and has heard the ladies there are something else. He has never been to England, but he kind of likes the Beatles. He has never been to heaven, but he has been to Oklahoma, and they tell him he was born there, though he does not really remember. That last turn is the one that sticks. Axton was born in Oklahoma, and he has said the original line ran closer to born in a coma. Somebody decided that was a little rough for the airwaves, so it got swapped for the not Arizona line you hear on the record. The joke lands either way. Heaven and Oklahoma end up in the same sentence, and the singer sounds perfectly fine with the trade.

Wells sang it like a man leaning on a counter, not like a preacher selling a trip. The arrangement starts low and tight, organ and guitar keeping the room small, then the harmonies from Danny Hutton and Chuck Negron open the ceiling. By the time the Oklahoma verse arrives, the band is pushing. That slow build was part of the house style. These guys knew how to wait for the volume instead of slamming the door on the first bar. Elvis Presley heard the same song and folded it into the 1972 live shows, cutting it at Madison Square Garden on June 10 of that year for the album Elvis as Recorded at Madison Square Garden. He kept it in the set more than fifty times. The family thread under that cover is the part most folks miss. Hoyt's mother, Mae Boren Axton, co-wrote Heartbreak Hotel, the record that put Elvis on top for the first time. There is no solid report that Elvis ever connected the two Axtons out loud, but he liked the tune enough to keep singing it. Years later, when Austin Butler was working on the Elvis film, he told an interviewer the song fires him up, that he likes it loud in the car, and that singing it once on set took out the middle of his voice for a couple of days. That is a tough sing, even for a man playing the King.

The band that carried the song into living rooms did not start as a writing factory. They started as three voices looking for a room. Danny Hutton had already cut sides for Hanna-Barbera Records and scored a small hit in 1965 with Roses and Rainbows. Cory Wells was a friend of Hutton's who played in the house band at the Whisky a Go Go and backed Sonny and Cher out on the road. Chuck Negron came out of the Bronx, sang doo-wop as a kid, played some college basketball, and after the move west picked up a Columbia contract and a little local airplay. Hutton got tired of session work and wanted a rock group built around three lead singers who could trade the spotlight. He pulled in Wells, Wells pulled in Negron, and in 1967 the three of them were working in Los Angeles under the name Redwood. They even cut some tracks with Brian Wilson while the Beach Boys were deep in Wild Honey. Wilson, in one of his harder stretches, decided they were not ready and stepped away. The singers later called that a break in disguise.

They dropped the Redwood name, hired a band behind the voices, and went looking for something that would stick. Hutton has told the story more than once. A manager wanted a name by Monday. They scribbled down dozens. Hutton's girlfriend at the time, the actress June Fairchild, was reading a magazine piece on Aboriginal hunters in Australia. On a cold night out there, the saying went, you took three dogs to bed to stay warm. She showed him the line, and Three Dog Night was born. Some accounts put the magazine as Mankind. Van Dyke Parks has also claimed a hand in the name, which is the sort of tangle you get when a good story has been told in green rooms for decades. Either way, the phrase fit a band that was about warmth and blend more than about one frontman. Guitarist Michael Allsup, bassist Joe Schermie, drummer Floyd Sneed, and keyboardist Jimmy Greenspoon filled out the first classic lineup, and the live debut landed at the Whisky in 1968, right in the room where Wells already knew the floor.

Because none of the three singers came in as songwriters, they became curators. Harmony sits in the middle of a run where they kept handing the microphone to outside tunes and making them sound like house songs. Harry Nilsson's One, Randy Newman's Mama Told Me Not to Come, Laura Nyro's Eli's Coming, Paul Williams and the old fashioned love songs, and two from Axton, Joy to the World and this one. Wells took Spain. Different leads on the biggest singles was almost a rule with them. The three number ones each belonged to a different voice. That is why a Zoo Freak can drop the needle on Harmony and hear a band that sounds like a conversation, not a solo with hired help. Axton brought them the song the way he brought them the bullfrog, and they answered with Los Angeles muscle on a country-folk skeleton. Cher cut it. Ike and Tina Turner cut it. The original still belongs to the man from Oklahoma who had not been to Spain, and the hit still belongs to the three singers who knew how to make a bar story fill a room.

If you want the long trail of the band that cut Harmony, the official home is Three Dog Night, where the live book and the old photos still turn up beside notes on the catalog. Their official Facebook page lives at Three Dog Night on Facebook, and the official Instagram is @threedognightofficial. The official X account is @threedognight. Fans of Chuck Negron, the voice that shared those Harmony harmonies, keep a long-running group at Chuck Negron's Official Facebook Fan Page. Spin the side again if you want. Oklahoma still rhymes with heaven, and the Beatles line still gets a grin out of anybody who remembers when that was the whole map of England.