R.I.P. Chuck Negron (Three Dog Night)

Chuck Negron, the lead singer and a founding member of the classic 1970’s rock band Three Dog Night, died on Monday at his home in Studio City CA of heart failure and COPD, at the age of 83.

A statement from his publicist was shared on his official social media accounts, detailed that he had been suffering from chronic cognitive obstructive pulmonary disease, and that he had been diagnosed with heart failure in his final months.

The tenor singing Negron formed Three Dog Night, a musical partnership of three singers along with Cory Wells and Danny Hutton in 1967 and would go on to have hits like “Joy to the World,” written by Hoyt Axton and “One,” by Harry Nilsson. The band and Negron would evolve, then devolve into the almost stereotypical highs and lows of being in a rock band in the late ‘60s and ‘70s, with Negron eventually rising again to find redemption.

Charles Negron II was born on June 8, 1942, in Manhattan NYC to a Puerto Rican nightclub performer father and his mother, Elizabeth Rooke. He spent much of his childhood in a Bronx orphanage after a divorce when he was five, and his mother could no longer care for he and his twin sister.

Negron would musically dabble in local doo-wop groups as well as excel at basketball, being recruited to play at California State University, and would meet future bandmate Hutton at a Los Angeles party to eventually form what would be Three Dog Night in 1967 (they were first named Redwood, then for an Aboriginal term of sleeping with dingoes to stay warm, on cold outback evenings).

Succumbing to the rock lifestyle of the ‘70s, he officially left the group by 1985, and his drug abuse pervaded into the early ‘90s when he finally overcame his addictions (after over thirty drug treatment facility attempts) and found God and direction again. Negron released numerous solo albums beginning in 1995 through over the next couple decades and was again regularly touring. We saw him live, as a regular touring member of Flo and Eddie’s Happy Together Tour, that would annually feature numerous acts of that era.

Married four times (including once to Doors’ drummer John Densmore’s ex-wife), Negron is survived by his wife and manager, Ami Albea Negron, and his five children and nine grandchildren.