The Story Behind The Song: ‘Shambala’ by Three Dog Night
At the moment, the value of music is almost inherently tied up in whether it’s authentically the product of its performer. There’s the occasional megastar like Rihanna, an artist who has that sheer, unimpeachable charisma where the force of her personality can make any song her own, no matter if she had a hand in its creation. However, that’s a rare phenomenon these days. A band like Three Dog Night could probably exist today, but they’d have to keep their aversion to songwriting deep under wraps.
To be clear, I mean this as no disrespect to Danny Hutton’s blue-eyed soul titans. Just as we don’t tut at actors who don’t write their own scripts, we shouldn’t tut at musicians who proudly take on the work of others and bring it to life. This was the stock in trade of Three Dog Night, whose harmonies were so stellar that it got them their first big break as a three-piece.
Hutton, along with fellow singers Cory Wells and Chuck Negron, were tapped up by Brian Wilson when they were just starting out, performing under the name Redwood. They were all set to sign to Wilson’s record label, Brother Records, with an album of material promised to them by Brian himself. Unfortunately, commitments to The Beach Boys caused both the album and the record deal as a whole to be shelved.
However, the band knew they had a good thing going. So, they hired a backing band, changed their name to Three Dog Night and began a residency as part of the house band roster of the LA club, Whiskey A-Go-Go. This residency went down so well that they signed a record deal of their own. Thus, they began working with a murderer’s row of the best behind-the-scenes songwriters of the age, along with some of the front-of-the-scenes songwriters, too!
Who else did Three Dog Night work with?
They took songs by the likes of Hoyt Axton, Laura Nyro, Paul Williams and a then up-and-coming Randy Newman and turned them into the chart-dominating hits they richly deserved. One of the songwriters most associated with the work of the band was Daniel Moore, who had already written a number of Joe Cocker’s early hits and The Everly Brothers’ classic, ‘Deliver Me.’
In working on a follow-up to this song, he wrote another called ‘Shambala’, a ditty taking its name and concept from the Shambhala, a kingdom mentioned in the mythology of Tibetan Buddhism. Rather than any actual similarity to the myth, though, the song uses the name to describe a common-or-garden hippy utopia. The kind that got old in 1967 but could still make a buck on the charts in the rough days of the early 1970s.
Moore cut a demo of the song and began shipping it around his contacts in the LA music industry. This is where something fairly complicated happened. Three Dog Night were first to bite. Shortly afterwards, a couple of suits working on the label of country singer BW Stevenson began sensing that the song could be a hit for him too,
Moore detailed what happened next in an interview with Songfacts: “A couple of months after Three Dog Night recorded ‘Shambala’, the same publisher that showed it to Three Dog showed it to BW’s producer. Three had not released their single yet, so this producer, David Kershenbaum, decided to record it and release it before Three Dog.”
As shitty a move as this was, it worked like gangbusters. Moore recalled that the BW Stevenson version released by “RCA Victor sold 125,000 45″ singles. When Three Dog’s folks heard it on the radio, they rushed their version out on the market with a big promotional push and took over, selling 1,250,000 45″ singles.”
The suits and the radio stations well and truly snaked Stevenson. Moore could have laughed all the way to the bank out of it, having two versions of his song on opposite ends of the Billboard charts. However, when Stevenson’s label called Moore up to see if he had any more songs that could hit the way ‘Shambala’ did, he decided to throw him a bone. There was a track in his notebooks, an unfinished effort with the title ‘My Maria’, but no lyrics.
Knowing that the song had potential and aware of the raw hand dealt to Stevenson, he gave it to him to finish. The song was finished and recorded within a fortnight. As Stevenson put it, “I think that radio felt sorry for BW because Three Dog had run over him with ‘Shambala’. So [the] radio played the heck out of ‘My Maria’. One month after ‘My Maria’ was written, it was a hit.”
Thus, we have ‘Shambala’, a hit so colossal that it spawned another hit off the back of it being recorded. Can’t say the same for many other records, eh?
