Mama Told Me Not To Come
In this Amy Winehouse, post Kurt Cobain era it may be hard to imagine a day when doing drugs was not yet de rigueur. Back in the mid to late 1960’s, however, hallucinogens were just beginning their tiptoe march towards the broader youth culture. While many kids-and more than a few older initiates-slapped on a cooler than thou front, it often masked an understandable fear of the unknown.
Leave it to Randy Newman to roll all of it-the excitement, apprehension, the un-shucked need for parental approval-into one giant spliff of a pop song. But Newman, whose quirky performance style would eventually bring the talented writer hits of his own, was unable to make a dent with “Mama Told Me Not To Come,” and The Animals rendition fared no better. For another group, however, the song became a vehicle to superstardom. With Cory Wells handling the lead vocal, “Mama” was the first number #1 hit for Three Dog Night.
“Mama” (from the 1970 It Ain’t Easy ABC-Dunhill/MCA Records LP) begins with a post-boogie woogie piano figure, played by keyboardist Jimmy Greenspoon on a Wurlitzer electric piano that was miked directly into the console by producer Richie Podolor and engineer Bill Cooper. Its shifting meter-highly unusual for a main stream pop record-immediately establishes the unsettled nature of the song. Danny Hutton, who along with Wells and Chuck Negron formed the power house trio whose cut-through-a-canyon vocals stamped the Three Dog Night sound, says that Cory Wells fought hard for the song.
“I talked to the guys about this,” says Hutton. “I don’t remember when I first heard “Mama,” but Cory says that he tried to get us to record it for three albums before he was able to wear us down! Randy’s publishing company used to send us lots of demos, but to tell you the truth, I wasn’t bowled over when I heard the song for the first time. When we fleshed it out in rehearsal it started to come together, but besides Cory, the rest of us remained luke warm until we actually got down to tracking it. By the time we’d finished making the record, though, we knew we had something special.”
Richie Podolor says that prior to recording their first album, which was produced by Gabriel Mekler, neither he or his partner Bill Cooper had heard of Three Dog Night. “We cut that initial record (Three Dog Night) in just a few days. It was essentially a live album.” The group’s version of Harry Nillson’s, “One” leapt off the album and put Three Dog Night on the map.
After returning to Podolor’s American Recording Company to cut a second album, Three Dog Night asked him to produce their third album. “One of the most important decisions we made was to sonically treat the four instruments as equals to the voices. It would have been easy, given the hugeness of their sound, to make everything subservient to the vocals, but we thought that would be a mistake.
“The players-Jimmy Greenspoon, guitarist Mike Allsup, drummer Floyd Sneed and bassist Joe Shermi-are sometimes overlooked. That’s a pity, because they contributed mightily to the sound and success of Three Dog Night. We spent a lot of time on the parts. I remember working for about an hour with Floyd on the bass drum part he played on “Mama,” making sure that it kept the track moving.”
Bill Cooper’s memories of the session are vivid.“The interaction of the bass and drums was unique on many Three Dog records, and that was certainly the case with “Mama.” Joe had a Latin influence, and he liked to push the down beat slightly. Floyd was one of the slyest drummers I ever heard. He listened to a lot of tribal drum recordings, and would incorporate elements of that style into his playing...tom fills starting on an up beat, for example. Together, they took a groove that could have been ordinary, and turned it into something infectious, with a feel that pushed the song forward constantly.”
Prior to hooking up with Wells and Negron, Danny Hutton was a studio rat who loved the record making process. “Nick Venet, from Mercury records, introduced me to the record business,” says Hutton. “I sang and arranged a single for Mercury early in my career. When it came out Nick had taken production credit and there was an instrumental on the back side I’d never heard. That was how the record business worked back then!
“I ended up producing for Hanna-Barbara Records. I’d make a record and they’d conjure up a group, The Bats, let’s say, and put it out the next week. Remember The Flintstones? When a plot line turned Bam Bam into a rock star, I was the voice behind his animated performance!”
Through his manager, Hutton was introduced to Brian Wilson. Forgive the sidebar, but Hutton’s memory of being the only person besides Wilson and the musicians in the studio during the legendary “God Only Knows”and “Surf’s Up” sessions are worth a mention. “Brian taught me so much about making records. The importance of pushing and pushing until a track, whether a lead vocal or tambourine part, is perfect, has stayed with me throughout my career.”
The character Cory Wells created-a confused but excited party down initiate, delivering his thoughts in sing speak with a hard to pinpoint accent-perfectly matched Newman’s ironic lines. Although Podolor and Cooper say that Three Dog Night routinely entered the studio well rehearsed, they nonetheless recall spending hours recording Wells’ vocal and creating a comp track from multiple performances. “Today, of course, vocal comping is a breeze,” says Cooper. “Back in 1967, Richie was way ahead of the game. On the “Mama” lead there’s a take change every three or four words.
“Cory talked, or acted, every word of that song. We got maybe three great complete takes from him and then comped them together. Three or four years ago we re-recorded all of Three Dog Night’s hits in the studio using Pro Tools. I looked at wave forms of the guys’ vocal lines, and it was very interesting. Most professional singers produce a smooth wave form, but the wave forms from all of the singers in Three Dog Night-Danny and Cory in particular-were fat and fuzzy! That’s why they have that huge sound!”
“The guys didn’t have a classic blend,” says Podolor, “not the kind that you’d want from a choir, or a perfectly blended pop group like The Association. That sound lets you stack harmonies forever. But Cory, Chuck and Danny each have distinct vibratos, and different textures to their voices. We had to pay a lot of attention to their use of vibrato in particular, and tame it when it became problematic. We had the guys sing together around a single mic whenever we could, particular on choruses. It gives a much better sound than using separate mics on different tracks,” says Cooper. “Visuals are important. When the guys are close around a mic they can see and communicate with each other easily. Phrasing and balance improves naturally, and the guys can mimimise vibrato issues on their own.”
“Let me underscore that point,” adds Polodor. “The importance of the visualization element can’t be overstated with respect to Three Dog Night recordings. “We cut the band and the singers together, in one room, as if they were on stage, with no headphones. Drummers should never be forced to use headphones unless it’s absolutely necessary. Floyd could hear nuances in his snare sound within the overall timbre of a track. But the moment you put headphones on him (or any other drummer) his dynamic tends to become unvarying, and the color of his sound deteriorates.”
Podolor and Cooper used the Scully 8 track recorder they described in an earlier Classic Track article on the “Mama” session. “It’s the same one we used when we recorded “Born To Be Wild,” says Podolor. “We’re always ready to modify any piece of equipment to get the sound we’re looking for. But it’s important to know when to leave things alone. Jimmy had an old Wurlitzer electric piano. Most Wurlitzers sounded like the one Ray Charles used, nice and clean. This one had a nasty tone. It was perfect for the character of “Mama,” so we didn’t touch it. We just directed its mono output right onto a track, adding maybe a touch of eq on the way in.”
Mike Allsup’s “violin” lines add an important texture to the record. “Mike played a Les Paul,” says Richie Podolor. “We tried Strats and other popular guitars, but the Les Paul give the biggest finished sound to his playing. At the time the group was endorsed by Bruce, a company that made big, solid state amplifiers. Mike went through a Bruce and a Fender Blender, which was a combo device that had fuzz and other effects. Next to it was a scaled down, revolving Leslie speaker. We’d Y the output of Mike’s guitar and record him direct, and through the effects as well. That was his signature sound, the one he always used, unless he was playing a rhythm part.”
“Those records were a true collaborative effort,” says Danny Hutton. We were all looking for places to introduce different sounds. Mike’s weepy guitar part added a lot, or course. I contributed a little whistling part with my hands in the middle. At the start of the third verse we recorded an extra bass part using the pedals on the studio’s B3. A friend of mine from grammar school was at the session, and he and I doubled tracked the choruses twice, changing positions the second time to help fatten the sound.”
“Some of the biggest sounding records ever made were released in mono,” says Cooper. “We mixed “Mama” on a six inch Jensen car speaker that we laid on top of the console. For fidelity we’d refer to an Altec 604-E. But relative balances were all built on the tiny Jensen. False modesty aside, we were way ahead of the industry, which eventually caught up when Auratones become popular. By the way, the new Auratones are great, better than the original.”
“As clever as “Mama” was,” says Podolor, “it lacked a bridge, and that was a problem. We had to find a way to keep building up the energy throughout the record. We always avoided repeating choruses exactly. We’d add an instrument, change the balance, double the vocals in the second chorus, whatever it took to keep the listener interested. Today, choruses are often just copied and pasted to different locations, to the detriment of track, in my judgment.” “We thought of choruses as chapters in a book,” says Cooper. “Chapter four isn’t the same as chapter two. Why should each chorus sound exactly like the others?”
“When we just about through laying down tracks we felt that we needed something special on the ride out,” says Podolor. “Bill handed out individual mics to the singers and they went out in the room and ad libbed their closing lines.”
At the end of the mix, Danny Hutton was pretty sure the collective effort had paid off. “Yeah, I think we knew we had something special with “Mama Told Me Not To Come.” Jay Lasker, an executive at our label, happened to pop into the studio as we were wrapping up the mix. He smiled after listening and asked us what we wanted for a present!”
Over the course of about five years, Three Dog Night was, by the numbers, the most popular band in America. The group racked up 21 consecutive Top 40 hits, twelve straight Gold LP’s, and a whopping total on almost 50 million records sold. Is Danny Hutton pleased with Three Dog Night’s place in the pantheon? “We’ve never been given much credit for anything!” he says with a laugh. “The critics certainly didn’t like us. We were on the cover of Rolling Stone once, standing in front of our jet plane. At that point we had more hits than Creedence, more gold than the Stones, and took in larger purses than Elvis, but the only angle that the article explored was how huge a money making machine we’d become. Nothing about how we made records. But we were involved in everything; working with Richie and Bill to create effects we’d never heard before, like the pre-Frampton creation of a vocoder effect, running a vocal through a Leslie to make it shimmer, Mike’s creative guitar sounds. In the age of the singer songwriter, though, I think the fact that we didn’t write our own material worked against us. What critics failed to appreciate was our ability to take songs other people wrote and arrange them in ways that were fresh and ear catching.”
True, but the critics loved Linda Ronstadt, Richie Havens, and Joe Cocker, and they weren’t writers either. Back in the 1960’s, keepers of the culture expected pop stars to be avatars, special beings sent down to usher the masses into the garden. Bands like Three Dog Night, who avoided politicizing their art, were banished from the kingdom, reviled by reviewers, and forced to wallow in their fortunes. Not bad! Three Dog Night continues to play 85 shows a year to enthusiastic audiences. Their catalog has secured them a place in the firmament. Danny Hutton is currently working on a round of new material with Richie Podolor and Bill Cooper.
