Jan. 27, 1978 Gusto feature story: Cory Wells on a break from Three Dog Night

 

A chat with one of Buffalo’s biggest rock stars during a moment of eclipse. 

Jan. 27, 1978 

Cory Wells

           “I was going to get out of the business a year ago,” Cory Wells says by phone from California. “I was really grossed out by what happened. I figured I’d get into another end of things, like management or production. But with the encouragement of my manager, I finally decided to do it as a solo. I wanted to do it without Three Dog Night.”

          After getting caught in the collapse of one of the biggest pop acts of the early ‘70s, Buffalo-born Wells has bounced back with the first album he can call his own, the newly-released “Touch Me” (A&M SP-4673), an agreeable collection of romantic songs that should endear him to dreamers and disco dancers alike.

          Though Wells tries to avoid the old Three Dog Night pop mold, his distinctive rough-edged baritone betrays the old relationship. Even in a setting like this one – somewhere between Boz Scaggs and Gino Vannelli – it has a familiar ring. To break with the past completely, Wells will need a solo hit from his solo album – perhaps the warmly upbeat “You’re My Day” or the peppy, insistent “Starlight.”

          Whatever happens, he sees the album as a fresh start. Recording it speculatively at first and co-producing with David Anderle, he ultimately rejected the tunes he himself had written. Instead, he opted for the lovers’ theme in material penned primarily by his sidemen. Two of they are carry-overs from Three Dog Night – bassist Dennis Belfield and singer Jay Greska, who took Danny Hutton’s place in 1974.

          Next for Wells is a month of rehearsals with the new band and then a stint on the road, playing small halls. Though this is the year he’ll have to start proving himself individually, it won’t be a one-shot effort. His contract with A&M runs four years and calls for eight albums.

          Wells was one of the first Buffalo musicians to seek fame and fortune in Los Angeles in the mid ‘60s. After bouncing around small clubs for a couple years with the Cory Wells Blues Band, he and his bassist were recruited to form a supergroup geared to churn out Top 40 hits.

          The formula started clicking in 1969. Three Dog Night quickly became known for its rich three-part harmonies and its enthusiastic introduction of highly commercial tunes from then-unknown songwriters like Randy Newman (“Mama Told Me Not to Come”), Paul Williams (“Just an Old-Fashioned Love Song”), Laura Nyro (“Eli’s Coming”), Harry Nilsson (“One”) and Hoyt Axton (“Joy to the World”). They racked up 14 gold albums and nine gold singles by 1974.

          But life at the top was far from heavenly. For one thing, individual creative urges in the group tended to cancel one another out. The pressure to keep producing hits stifled their adventurous impulses.

          Wells, for example, had been fascinated by Black music in storefront churches as a child and used to linger and listen while on his way to roller skate at St. Ann’s Church. The only way he got to incorporate that interest into the group was his reworking of Otis Redding’s “Try a Little Tenderness.”

          “It seemed like there was always a compromise in the music, in the material and in the ideas,” he says. “No one could totally express themselves without getting flack from the others. There wasn’t a free hand. No one could blossom and move onward. Personally, I think Three Dog Night became a little stale. It became every mom and pop’s idea of what rock ‘n roll should be.”

          After Hutton bailed out, Wells and singer Chuck Negron carried on for another year before they disbanded. In the end, they found that the management of their affairs had run away from them.

          “It was too frantic,” Wells says. “It became so bizarre after a while that I didn’t know what was around me any more. People were sucking us dry. They were keeping us so busy we didn’t know what was going on.”

          Life is calmer now for Wells, who’s 30ish (actually almost 37 at this time), married and the father of two. The people around him are ones who stuck with him through the dark days that followed the break-up. People like his manager, Joel Cohen, who managed Steely Dan before taking on Three Dog Night near the end of their tenure. Cohen talked the singer into going back to the studio and making another try.

          “What I want to do now is the thing I do best,” Wells says. “I sing and perform – that’s what I really love. I can’t think of a thing I’d rather do, except be a hunting guide up in Canada. This time around, though, I don’t want it to be crazy. I want to enjoy it.”

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IN THE PHOTO: The cover of Cory Wells’ “Touch Me” album.

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FOOTNOTE: Cory Wells’ Wikipedia page has a lot of detail about his life before Three Dog Night – growing up in Buffalo, playing in the house band at the Whiskey a Go Go in L.A., touring with Sonny and Cher – but not much afterward. “Touch Me” was the only album he did for A&M. Instead, he helped restart Three Dog Night with the original trio of singers in 1981 and continued to tour with Danny Hutton after Chuck Negron was tossed out in 1985 because of drug abuse.

It’s frequently noted that Wells never succumbed to the bad habits of rock stars. He lived modestly, married just once (his wife Mary was a Buffalo girl) and had two daughters. Mary Kunz Goldman, writing for The Buffalo News in advance of a Three Dog Night appearance with the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra in October 2012, noted that Wells had a cottage in Dunkirk, spent summers and part of the spring there, and loved to fish. He was in Dunkirk, in Brooks Memorial Hospital, when he died from multiple myeloma in October 2015.