Because of a family issue, I took the easiest of my 3 concert choices from my last post, and went to see Three Dog Night (hereafter known in this post as 3 Dog Night for brevity, although I realize that I wasted a lot of words explaing this) in concert this weekend. I purposely went late, but unfortunately, I still arrived too early and had to sit through Asia featuring John Payne. You remember Asia, right? They were a supergroup featuring members of Yes, ELP, and King Crimson that hit it big with “Heat of the Moment” and a couple other tunes. Well, that’s not the Asia I saw. When original members started to leave Asia, John Payne came aboard. Eventually, the final original Asia member left to … reform the original Asia with all the founding members, but they gave John Payne the right to continue on with his band as Asia featuring John Payne. And so, the original Asia continues to perform, although they are down to one original member, as well as Asia featuring John Payne. Kudos to you if you can follow that. And by the way, Asia featuring John Payne is bad.
But 3 Dog Night had to be better with a setlist like this from a recent show:
Talk about rolling out the hits. But I was a bit put off when I saw they didn’t write most of the hits. That doesn’t make them a bad group or their hits bad songs. I really like “Out in the Country,” and that sounded pretty good, even from across the river.
But it does make 3 Dog Night more of a prefab group than even The Monkees, who wrested creative control for themselves toward the end. And it made me sad to read that out of the 7 original members, 4 Dogs are dead, and only 1 Dog is left in the band, Danny Hutton.
But I was successful with finding a place to put my kayak in on the river (from no less than a sand beach) and paddle over to a great river seat to listen to the joyful sound of a Poi Dog Pondering concert later this year. Everybody’s Trying to get those “seats,” and I was thrilled to discover it’s not that Complicated.
Jim Flanigan Looks at the World 