Three Dog Night founder Chuck Negron, 83, died on Feb. 2. The native New Yorker was a street singer when Danny Hutton invited Negron and Cory Wells to found Three Dog Night in 1967. Through the’70s, Negron was the lead singer on such hits as "One,” "Easy to Be Hard,” "Joy to the World,” "An Old Fashioned Love Song,” "Pieces of April,” "The Show Must Go On,” and "Til the World Ends.” After the band broke up in 1976, Negron suffered through a drug phase, finally getting clean and going on as a solo act. Negron told interviewer Ivor Levine that “When I went solo, the promoters told me that if I didn’t sing more Three Dog Night songs, they weren’t going to book me. I was taken aback, but something changed my opinion. I went to see David Bowie in concert, and he wasn’t playing any of his older hits, and I thought ‘what a fool, he should do the old stuff.’ So after that, I started playing the old songs. The more I did them the more successful my shows were.”
