The Harder They Fall (21 page)
Read The Harder They Fall Online
Authors: Gary Stromberg
There is a rhinoceros / in this poem. It is stamping / around trampling things. In / this poem, it is crazed. These / things happen only in / poetry, you know. No / such beast exists / in reality
.
—Richard Morris, “The Rhinoceros”
(musician)
C
HUCK
N
EGRON WAS
the long-haired, mustached lead singer on the Three Dog Night superhits “Joy to the World,” “Old Fashioned Love Song,” “Easy to Be Hard,” “Pieces of April,” and many others. His band had twenty-one consecutive
Billboard
Top 40 hits between 1969 and 1975. The song “Joy to the World” alone sold 12 million copies. In 1972,
Rolling Stone
magazine’s cover story called Three Dog Night “the top of the rock & roll heap,” with “more gold,” “bigger crowds,” and “fatter purses” than any other rock band. Other people may have dreamed about a life of sex, drugs, and rock and roll; Chuck Negron lived it.
Chuck was a multimillionaire by age thirty—talented, rich, and famous. A few years later, he was living in a corrugated cardboard box on Fifth Street on L.A.’s raunchy skid row. I thought I was the king of reckless drug use who could handle more drugs than anybody. Then Chuck became my client.
Handling public relations for Three Dog Night was a dream gig. I was getting paid big money to hang with one of the hottest groups in the world. Almost every kid in America had a TDN record, and almost every publication wanted to tell the group’s story. TDN was the first rock-and-roll band in America to play large stadiums, with the exception of The Beatles, who had appeared at Shea Stadium in New York and Candlestick Park in San Francisco on their U.S. tour
in 1966. Promoters had been afraid that a rock-and-roll act wouldn’t fill the seats. TDN’s management promised that if a promoter took a loss, the band would make up for it with another concert.
During the summer of 1970, a series of twenty-two summer concerts were booked at outdoor stadiums across the country, where TDN performed in front of audiences numbering in the tens of thousands each night. The massive undertaking included large video screens behind the stage that projected images of the band members as they performed. This technology, new at the time, is still prevalent at large rock concerts. Deals were negotiated whereby the promoter had to pay for limousines, food, and other perks. This too was a new concept, and it blazed the trail for other rock acts.
At home and off the road, the members of TDN needed a place to feel like regular people. So to relax, Chuck hung out at the infamous Rainbow Bar & Grill on the famed Sunset Strip. The Rainbow was built to accommodate people like us. I was one of the original owners. There was a sense of a new rock community brewing. Musicians could feel isolated and separate in the outside world, but here they hung out with other rock stars. It wasn’t about the food, which was mediocre at best. The booze poured freely. The sweet odor of marijuana filled the air, and cocaine was snorted at semiprivate booths. People got high and weren’t bothered. The waitresses wore jeans and funky tops. Wall Street guys, movie moguls, and bankers had their special restaurants—this was our place.
The six-block-long Sunset Strip is located in West Hollywood, a separate incorporated city within Los Angeles. It has its own sheriff’s department. In the old days, unlike the Los Angeles police force, which was known to be among the strongest in the nation—a no-nonsense, incorruptible, hit-first-ask-questions-later outfit—the West Hollywood sheriff’s department at that time was a more “reasonable” group. Thanks to good relationships, no one would complain of fights or if the sex and drugs got out of hand. We could pour after hours and indulge in our pleasures.
The place was homey, paneled in dark wood with lots of big, leafy
plants and large, stained-glass windows. Rock music pulsed throughout. Upstairs was Over the Rainbow, a private club where we continued the party after hours. An office the size of a phone booth had holes drilled in a wall separating it from the ladies’ room. A piranha swam in a large tank over the bar. We fed it 250 goldfish a month. You could flip them into the water from your seat at the bar.
Just about every touring rock star came to the Rainbow. If the Rolling Stones, Elton John, or The Who were in L.A., they would go to the Rainbow. It was also the haunt for hip stars like Jack Nicholson and Dennis Hopper. They could be themselves, undisturbed by the “squares” or reporters. The Rainbow’s character combined sophistication with silliness. And it gave us seven owners great cachet. I could get you a table at the Rainbow or entertain you at my table. I eventually got tired of the business—being called by everyone I knew with requests for tables or other considerations—so I sold my interest. The scene has changed, but the Rainbow is presumably still a gold mine. This was one of the places where I often saw Chuck. As TDN’s PR guy, I sometimes traveled on their private jet as they went from city and arena to city and arena and gave concerts to audiences of phenomenal and unprecedented size. The tours were completely hedonistic. One of their managers would hire groupies, contracted as one-day flight stewardesses, for the entertainment of the stars and their entourage. Chuck and I also shared drug dealers and sometimes saw each other at various dens of iniquity and party palaces.
A year or so after I got sober, I started seeing Chuck on the edges of recovery, making halfhearted tries in what seemed like a record number of rehabs until he got a grasp on his life. We decided on the Rainbow for a meeting place, and based on our conversations, here are some of Chuck’s reflections and memories.
Unlike The Doors and the Rolling Stones, who had bad-boy images, Three Dog Night was perceived as All-American boys. It was ironic because we messed with every drug known to mankind.
I started singing in the fifties when rock and roll started. I made my first record in 1958 and then made another in 1959 with a group I formed called The Rondells, and it got some airplay in L.A. and New York. We got to play the Apollo, which was a big deal back then.
My life was beginning to work itself out. I got an athletic scholarship in 1961, and at this time, I still didn’t drink or use. I went to college on a basketball scholarship. It was one of the best times of my life. I made records my first, second, and third year in college. Columbia Records then signed me, and one thing led to another, and I ended up leaving college to give this music thing a shot. The record company wanted me to be involved in the L.A. scene, so they took me to premieres and things. One of their producers took me to a party, and I walked in, and it was like being in another world. I had short hair and was very well groomed—I’m sure all these people thought I was a narc. They were all hippies—beautiful young people—women, guys. It was wonderful. Frank Zappa and The Mothers of Invention were playing. There were all sorts of drugs around, which I noticed, but it wasn’t my thing.
It was such an exciting, glamorous setting that when the drugs came around—stuff I’d turned down for years ’cause it was not like me, I was a world-class athlete and so forth, the kids in the neighborhood in New York City did it—I didn’t want any part of it.
The interesting thing was I had been talking about the stuff I had heard my friends talk about. They were doing Romilar cough syrup, so I boasted it was really a good high, although I never did it. Even if my friends had asked me, I’d think, “Why would I do that? I don’t have a cold.” It wasn’t actually the Romilar cough syrup that they sold over-the-counter. It was a behind-the-counter pharmaceutical they had to special order.
I made a decision in a heartbeat that I was going to do something with total naiveté, with no sense that this could be a problem, because these new people were so cool and they seemed to know what was going on. I was at a table upstairs in the Rainbow one night, and two tall, gorgeous girls were
selling Quaaludes and I bought them all. They invited me to a party in the Hollywood Hills. So I got loaded. I started fooling around, and a girl came over and kissed me and dropped something in my mouth, and it ended up being a combination of peyote and LSD. Apparently I was standing near a glass-topped table in the living room, and passed out, and fell face-first onto the table, because the next morning I woke up with my face ripped up and blood all over the couch. I became the guest from hell, and I was on my way.
From that time on, I got high just about every day, unless I was sleeping or arrested. Boom! I was just an accident waiting to happen. I started with Romilar and had done most of the other stuff, but heroin became my love. It had been offered to me countless times and I had refused, but one time I said yes. I loved it! I’d never felt anything comparable to that first heroin rush. All the emptiness and fear inside vanished. Everything seemed fine. Even throwing up felt good. Soon I was devoting my life to heroin. I stayed faithful to it for ten years, seven months, and two weeks. I didn’t care about anything or anybody. I just wanted my dope.
Soon we were touring, and life was unbelievable. I remember that sex at this time was wild, and so were the women. Our first real orgy came on tour in Tulsa in 1969. B.J. Thomas was in the Top 10 with his song “Hooked on a Feeling.” He was our opening act. After the concert, we went to a club filled with guys with crew cuts and cowboy hats. We got drunk and were carrying on. Eventually B.J. Thomas, guys from Vanilla Fudge, and Three Dog Night got up on stage to jam with the house band. The girls were staring at us, and those country guys were mad as hell to have us take over their territory. The evening progressed to our wing at the Holiday Inn. There was sex going on in the hallway, in the bathtubs, and on the floor, everybody switching partners. It was gruesome and unreal. It was rock and roll!
I started out as a shy kid. Now I’d have sex several times a day with different women. It seemed like every time I looked around, they were there. I even worked out a system to handle the overflow. I would book a suite with a couple of bedrooms. I’d have sex with a girl in one bedroom, then another. By the time I finished with her, a third one would be waiting in the first bedroom. Sex became a meaningless game, but it was all incredible fun.
Often I’d leave the stage after our encore while the audience was still chanting our names. Shortly I’d be back in the hotel with nothing but dead silence. It was spooky. Sometimes I promised myself I wouldn’t go out and party. I’d stay in the room, eat, maybe watch a little TV, and go to sleep by myself. Soon I’d hear women in the hallway, and I’d inevitably check it out—more good-looking girls who’d pour into my hotel room, take off their clothes, and be ready to party.
I see my addiction as a forest fire that burned through everything in its path and left only charred remains. That’s a curious thing about addiction and the consequences. Some people get to walk away; they’re just not predisposed. Most of the people who were in our group were using drugs, although several moved on and didn’t have a problem. But it just filled me up with a wonderful feeling of warmth that I knew I was going to do this. This was having a youth, a childhood that I never had. As a child, I spent time in an orphanage and it was tough. That drugs filled me up and was wonderful was an experience that little by little consumed more of my day and my time. And the next thing you know, by a casual progression, that was all our focus for the day: getting high, going to a party, getting high, going to a party, getting high, getting high …