The 100 Best Live Recordings - No. 90: Captured Live at the Forum
No. 90 - Three Dog Night - Captured Live at the Forum (Dunhill Records, 1969)
“Now she drinks from a bitter cup / I'm trying to get her to give it up…”1
Retrospective considerations like “The 100 Best Live Recordings” often arrive at the corner of melancholy and nostalgia. There is a residence on this corner where questionable inclusions on this list live, and one tenant is Three Dog Night’s Captured Live at the Forum. Today, one could classify TDN as a boy band on steroids. Founded by a trio of singers, Chuck Negron, Danny Hutton, and Cory Wells, they were one step beyond the Monkees and the Partridge Family, affectations invented by the recording and television industries to capitalize on the 1960s becoming the 1970s, when AM radio still reigned supreme with FM AOR emerging on the horizon.
Rock critic Robert Christgau remarked about Three Dog Night,
“…was a brilliant revamping of the produced groups of rock's early days, applied to serious songs instead of honest schlock.”2
“Produced groups” being the meringue of the recording industry, e.g., the Monkees, the Archies, the Partridge Family, and more recently New Kids on the Block, Backstreet Boys, NSYNC, and One Direction. Studio talent like LA’s Wrecking Crew, Detroit’s Funk Brothers, and Muscle Shoals supported these bands, but no one ever intended them to tour in the traditional sense (though many did). The three principals of TDN assembled their own band and became a touring entity. And between 1969 and 1975, they were radio darlings.
TDN was a cover band. As such, they helped to introduce mainstream audiences to writers such as Harry Nilsson ("One"), Randy Newman ("Mama Told Me Not to Come"), Paul Williams ("An Old Fashioned Love Song"), Laura Nyro ("Eli's Comin'") and Hoyt Axton ("Joy to the World", "Never Been to Spain")3, as well as Elton John and Bernie Taupin (“Lady Samantha”), Traffic (“Feelin’ Alright,” “Heaven is in your mind”), and The Band (“Chest Fever”). For this pimply-faced Southern Catholic boy, this music was an exciting revelation, paving the way for the more serious “Mississippi Queen” and “Honky Tonk Women.”
Against the industry norm, Dunhill released Captured Live at the Forum after TDN released only two albums, Three Dog Night (Dunhill Records, 1968) and Suitable for Framing (Dunhill Records, 1969). Despite having only two prior albums, the band’s record company recorded the band during their 1969 performance at The Forum in Los Angeles, where Dunhill’s production team was already there to record headliner Steppenwolf (also a Dunhill client) for their future Steppenwolf Live (Dunhill Records, 1970). The resulting live album proved a commercial success, peaking at #6 on the Billboard album chart.
My first introduction to live recordings, Captured Live at the Forum, was an exciting and somewhat dangerous recording (by my then parochial standards). The album opens with two Traffic songs, “Heaven is in Your Mind” and “Feelin’ Alright” (the same year Joe Cocker made it a household song on With a Little Help from My Friends (A&M Records, 1969). The band highlights its hit single, Harry Nilsson’s “One,”
The Band’s “Chest Fever” and Laura Nyro’s “Eli’s Coming” anchor the concert with an edgy (at least for the late ‘60s) flavor, opening up the coda for the quintessential TDN song, “Easy to be Hard” and the closing showcase for the best of the three vocalists, Cory Wells, covering “Try a little Tenderness.” It was as exciting as it was a myth.
Illustrating the cynical attitude of the recording industry of the time, the original pressings of the album allowed the headline "In front of an audience over 18,000 on September 12, 1969, in Los Angeles, Three Dog Night was Captured Live at the Forum." This date would eventually be removed, and lead singer Chuck Negron's autobiography, Three Dog Nightmare4 would subsequently list the concert's performance date as July 14, 1969. The date, September 12, 1969, was actually the date of employment on the AFM contract filed for the event. So much for copyediting. Dunhill was more interested in making money and not telling the truth.
Did this recording age well? Not by any standards but in the aging mind of a Baby Boomer looking into the beyond.
“Chest Fever.” Robbie Robertson. From Music From Big Pink (Capitol Records, 1968.
“Robert Christgau: A Man as Good as Janis: Jose Feliciano, Three Dog Night, Joe Cocker.” Robertchristgau.com, 2025, www.robertchristgau.com/xg/news/cocker-69.php. Accessed 23 Aug. 2025.
Wikipedia. 2004. “Three Dog Night.” August 23, 2025. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Dog_Night.
Negron, Chuck (1999). Three Dog Nightmare: The Chuck Negron Story, Renaissance, ISBN 1-58063-040-5, p. 101.