According to an ever-increasing pile of Levinson-Ross press releases at my right elbow, this has been quite a summer for Three Dog Night. Their heralded Tour of Tours is nearing the five million gross mark, with an unofficial $125,000 record set at the Pocono Speedway Festival for roughly an hour's work. The group's recorded material, of course, continues to sell like there's no tomorrow (all seven of their previous LPs were certified gold), and Seven Separate Fools is likely to ease into that exalted company with merely the slightest effort. It is all capped, as if the foregoing hasn't been enough to glitter every band's eye from here to Reno, by a late August television special, in
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honor of which a higher-up in the Dogs' management firm has said "It's pleasant to find that patience is still rewarded."
But patience notwithstanding, rewards have to work both ways, and it's apparently become a longstanding principle with Three Dog Night that as much as they've reaped, so have they sown. Their live performances are to-the-point professional, entertaining, and if they happen to have a fixation on ball park attendance, at least they make sure that nobody leaves without fully getting their money's worth. The same might be said of their records. There is never the sense that the group is biting off more than they can chew, or trying to impress with an ill-fitting masterwork. They simply pick their songs well, arrange sharply and competently (with a good ear for AM hooks), deliver the package to your local record store and wait–patiently–for those bullets to roll in. If it's a formula, then it's one honed by confidence and good sense, worthy virtues no matter what you might have thought of Jeremiah and his bullfrog.
Seven Separate Fools continues this tradition in excellent fashion. It's an album of incredible variety, partly due to each cut being the product of a different songwriter, partly because when you have three lead voices of such dissimilar shape as those possessed by the Dogs, there's no way you can overlap except perhaps metaphysically. The band here, as on the rest of the group's output, is generally content to work in the background, though every once in a while they manage a flashy lick which lets you know just how good they could be if they wanted. Richard Podolor's production, at this point probably not consisting of much more than plugging in the basic Three Dog Night sound, is uniformly attractive, though the mixing problems that this album reputedly suffered before final release still appear to crop up now and again.
The songs, however, are what provide the meat of Seven Separate Fools, much as they have throughout Three Dog Night's long career. Not being writers themselves (or so it would seem), they've been set free to pick and choose from the vast expanse of material that usually lies fallow in these times of self-contained artists. In the past, they've helped bring Laura Ny
