Three Dog Night- Joy to the World

Album Year: 1982
Age: 0
Track Number: 3



Like Blood, Sweat & Tears, Three Dog Night are not a band who survived the turmoil of history well. Like BS&T, they too had a miraculous streak. The band had 21 top 20 hits, 18 of which were consecutive singles from the group. With a string of gold records under their belt, the band was nothing short of a hit factory, and it was easy to see them as exactly that, churning out records for the charts at the dreck-end of the 1970s.

The pop charts of the early 1970s are commonly seen as the detritus of the 1960s, a deadening hangover in the wake of a surge of quality of the preceding decade. After the dissolution of The Beatles (and their “return to roots” finale act), innovation in pop was sidelined, mostly to genres generally thought to be more puerile and soul-less in nature (heavy metal, glam, funk, disco). Critics loathed Three Dog Night, considering them to be symptomatic of the nascent decade’s rate of decline, but then again there was just a lot of hate by grumpy music critics of the 1970s, who alternately hated Led Zeppelin, Miles Davis’s fusion albums, and Electric Light Orchestra’s post-Beatles prog pop in equal measure. In fact, the perception of the 1970s has been so fundamentally altered over the past 30 to 40 years that it’s hard to fathom that the decade was ever viewed as a kind of dead zone of musical history. Still, while many genres and artists received ample reconsideration in the decades that followed, Three Dog Night remain a bit untouchable as an artifact, linger as a pockmark in critical consciousness, proof of what Jerry Casale would soon after dub the “devolution” of cultural standards.

It was the “hit factory” side of the group that irked many critics. Robert Christgau, in a mostly positive review, called them “slick as Wesson Oil” and assumedly just as manufactured. Even well into the 1970s, it was not rare for a band to pack their album with covers (1973’s These Foolish Things by Bryan Ferry even used the concept of a covers album to postmodern ends, reducing “serious” rock to cabaret and dignifying bubblegum pop with all-too-earnest interpretations). However, Three Dog Night didn’t even really have songs of their own to write off. Their albums largely consisted of a strategic selection of un-originals shopped around from the local record store. In a spirit that would prefigure the ‘naughts by three decades, Three Dog Night was a curatorial band, a playlist band, one who condensed libraries into pub rock renditions of their top selections.

Unlike a curatorial band like, say, Sonic Youth, for whom taste is king, Three Dog Night flirted in high, low, and middlebrow, from poetry on through bluster. They gave equal footing to revered singer-songwriter types like Randy Newman and Harry Nilsson as they did to showbiz folk like Elton John and Paul Williams. This probably provided the band with a broader appeal to listeners like my parents, who were immune to music’s internal dialectics. Though my parents were very much a product of the 1960s, I never got the impression that they felt music and art were crucial to the social transformations of the age, at least not to the extent of other college-aged kids their age who would rush home with albums, read the lyrics obsessively, get stoned or trip out to unlock the mysteries of the fetishized commodities, and run off to the concerts to get closer to the experience. Music for them was a social experience (which is more than you can say of today's earbud-trapped listeners), but the ties that bonded the personal the political ended for them at the body (skin color, X chromosomes, the corpses of friends in Indochina).

People like to forget that the radical voices at the forefront of the 1960s were just the center stage, supported by myriad faceless voices in the audience who were alternately just there for the party, eager to be in on the craze, or anxious to be on the right side of history. For all those who believed in revolution, there were dozens more who believed only in a partial revolution, a 45 degree revolution (which was not captured in 45 RPM). Folks like my parents didn’t want to levitate the Pentagon or militarize the ghettos, they wanted to end the Vietnam War, stop the oppression of blacks and women, and get nice jobs to support their well-structured nuclear families. They went to a few protests, but ultimately did not renege on the American dream, of which I’m a successful byproduct. For this crowd, there was Sha Na Na, Blood, Sweat & Tears, and Three Dog Night in the aftermath of Nixon. As their politics mellowed in self-sustaining detachment from Kent State and the Weather Underground, former hippies turned to James Taylor, Carole King, and Don McLean to ease the transition back to the status quo.

“Joy To The World”, from Three Dog Night’s fifth album Naturally, went to number 1 for six weeks, going on to become Billboard’s number one song of 1971. Written by country/folk singer of little note Hoyt Axton (his mother Mae wrote “Heartbreak Hotel” for Elvis) for a 90 minute children’s show called The Happy Song (which never aired), “Joy to the World” was a song nobody expected to be a hit. Perhaps it was that 1960s hangover that called out for a celebratory anthem to lift the country out of the Nixon years. Maybe the record’s family-friendly content allowed the group to appeal to a broader core. As a boy, I certainly remember Jeremiah the bullfrog with as much fondness as Bob the Giraffe, Eddie the Elephant, or other characters my father would invent for storytelling purposes. “Joy to the World” was a joy to sing along to, a tune that could easily pass into the folk lexicon alongside “Old MacDonald” or “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star”.

The drunkard amphibian of “Joy to the World” seems to be just as impulsive a construct as some of my dad’s improv subjects. Axton’s original lyrics was “Jeremiah was a prophet”, but apparently “No one liked that”. The original lines give a little bit of a blasphemous tinge to the opening verse though, where the singer appears to be indulging in religious ritual just for no other purpose than getting shitfaced off the holy wine. Interestingly enough, the singer’s perspective on drink alters in the second verse where he promises to “throw away the cars and the bars and the war” if he were “king of the world” (after having already declared his love of wine). Perhaps, bars were too provincial, too insular, and segregated, whereas the drinks of concerts and churches were communal and open. But the jibberish of the third verse, where the narrator boasts of being a “high life flier”, a “rainbow rider”, and a “straight shootin’ son of a gun”, shows that the lyrics suffer from an overall lack of coherence and foresight, making them little more than silly nursery rhymes.

Still, musically, it’s a pretty fun song. The gritty distorted organs that kick off the song alternate in the verses with acapella shoutouts. Those opening riffs are probably more influential than they're given credit for. I can hear echoes in rave-era tunes like Pizzaman's "Happiness", for example. Later on in the track, there’s some raucous drum breaks which could have reached “Amen Brother” levels of ubiquity were they not bonded to the vocals. Those vocals themselves, in all their gruff machismo, were sung by Chuck Negron, one of the three (!) vocalists in Three Dog Night. Despite the numerical significance of this triad, the band name has nothing to do with the three top dogs on vocal duties, but was apparently named after a magazine article about native Australians sleeping amongst dingoes to avoid freezing temperatures, making the group even more postmodern in that this is evocative and yet seems to have no real resonance on the group's music.

"Joy to the World" exalts to a singalong by the tune’s end, further cementing its place in the annals of children’s song. And truly, the chorus is the thing- a more sincere, perhaps even less humble version of Ray Stevens’s “Everything is Beautiful” that includes all the fishes in the deep blue sea in its blessings (amidst all the boys and girls, you and me, and the world) and evokes a Christmas carol in attempt to spread the joy of the season all year round. It’s utterly shameless, but it’s also harmless, undeniably chaste merriment. It seems that Three Dog Night’s biggest crime was arriving at a moment that was culturally inappropriate and financially advantageous. I’m pretty sure they didn’t lose much sleep over what the critics said.

Years after the song’s release, “Joy to the World” would be featured in The Big Chill a film about former hippies reuniting to reflect on the loss of their idealism. The opening scene (see clip below before it gets taken down) involves one of the 60s radicals' kids singing the song in the bathtub as his wife comes in to announce that his friend (who represents the bygone 1960s) has died. I guess nothing sums it up better than that.