Straight-Shootin' Sons of a Gun: Three Dog Night vs. the Guess Who

(Obviously, CCR goes into that critics-fussed-over-them group.)

I'm going to have listen to a Guess Who comp, because I can only think of maybe 3 songs off the top of my head, and I don't particularly like them (American Woman, These Eyes).

I know lots of 3DN and I'm enamored of a bunch, maybe because they had an LA and NY's worth of songwriters to pick from.

I am weak & went with coin flip — they both have so many songs I love I can’t choose!!

I like Joy to the World way more than any GW song I’ve heard, so this was easy.

Both utterly great, so coin flip. It takes some doing to match the Guess Who, but I think 3DN's singles run does.

3DN were sort of the Monkees of the following period.

I was 10 when "Joy to the World" came out, it seemed like it was always on the radio and was also sung incessantly on the playground

voted for the Guess Who

I'm much less familiar with Three Dog Night, but they'd be coming from so far behind the Guess Who that they'd have to be miraculously good, especially since I don't even like any of their radio standards. I do have their first album, and I don't begrudge them doing covers, but the seven songs on this record where I know the originals are so substandard yet overblown I really have to wrack my mind to figure what the appeal could be. None of the singers are as terrible as David Clayton-Thomas but they're working in the same fake soul garbage dump.
Yes, the Guess Who are sometimes deeply awkward, but they're usually funny and even charming in the process. It's funny that I usually think of them as 100% Cummings' group, I have to remind myself of the Bachman era which is conventionally "better" but I regard the later-era weirdnesses with a lot of fondness.

The Guess Who for Shambala

Ugh i meant tdn

I'm close to a coin-flip, but I have a strong personal connection to the Guess Who--saw them play Exhibition Stadium three or four times as a teenager--so will give them the edge. Three favourites squared off: "Rain Dance," "Do You Miss Me Darlin'," and "Albert Flasher" for the Guess Who vs. "Shambala," "Liar," and "Out in the Country" for Three Dog Night.

Guess Who

guess who for "no time" and bonus points for spawning BTO

Voted neither. Grand Funk Railroad and Rare Earth are my lunkhead prole-rock of choice from this era. I did like the Butthole Surfers’ version of “American Woman” a lot in high school, though.

Grand Funk's Live: The 1971 Tour didn't get released until 2002, but it's a solid, rough-around-the-edges, hour of midwest buttrock that'll get your kegger started. Make fun of them if you dare, but everyone in that 1971 stadium is having a goddamn great time. I think it was in the Rush documentary, where Geddy & co. talk about the insane Grand Funk crowds.

Voted for neither. Hell I lived through this era and don't really connect with either one. BTO yes.

I like GFR, and as a Top 40 band in the middle of the decade I can see where they're somewhat comparable, but they took a very different route to get there. I do love "Bad Time." Ditto the Butthole Surfers' "American Woman," but think Lenny Kravitz's is just about the worst cover ever (no exaggeration).

Yeah, the Guess (as we Canadians refer to them amongst ourselves) maybe averaged one-and-a-half songs of "lunkhead prole-rock" per album, even on Rockin'; the rest was lunkhead eclecticism.

Do you also say "The Buffalo"?

By the way, and not that it matters: if you want to use the always specious HOF argument where you say that y is in and x was better than y so they should be in too (baseball HOF arguments routinely veer off in that direction), both these bands were absolutely better than Chicago and therefore belong in the Rock and Roll HOF. They were better than Chicago when Chicago was actually good, up to and including "Feeling Stronger Every Day"; after that Chicago's terrible, and it's not even close (luckily, reunions aside, the Guess Who and Three Dog Night didn't last as long).

But if you set the bar at Chicago, there's no end to people who should be in.

>> Grand Funk's Live: The 1971 Tour didn't get released until 2002, but it's a solid, rough-around-the-edges, hour of midwest buttrock that'll get your kegger started.

I think it's the best of their three(!) live albums from their classic era.

Three Dog Night was my first arena rock show so I can’t not vote for them.

voted Guess Who because Randy Bachman was a big hero to Neil Young

Would vote the Guess Who for “Undun” alone, but cool thing is they have at least a half dozen other songs that are almost as great.

coin flip for me. love them both, and they both exit in that radio no-man's-land between kitsch and classic rock. shout out to the decision to begin "american woman" with a bluesy fake and then start the actual song faster and in a higher key.

exist, rather

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Pretty close all around...Heard a Top 10 countdown from 1971 on the radio today, "Joy to the World" was #1 (surrounded by the likes of the Buoys, Lobo, and Daddy Dewdrop). I bet if you went through the Top 100s from '70 through to '74, one or both of these bands would be found on at least half of them.

missed this one and not exactly sure which way I’d have gone. both very overplayed on our local oldies station growing up. even so, was always happy to hear them mix it up with Shambala or Out in the Country. so prob TDN. tho tbf to the Guess Who These Eyes is a pretty great song that I didn’t really appreciate until much later.

This is an interesting comparison! I know very little about the Guess Who and wouldn't have thought to pair them together, but it does kinda make sense.

As one of ILM's noted Dogheads, my vote would of course go to them, though I can relate to the complaints about intermittent David Clayton-Thomas syndrome. They just have so many great singles and maybe a little more range in the kind of material they can pull off. Of the GW's big hits, I only *really* like No Sugar Tonight/New Mother Nature and No Time (though that one is pushing it on milking a couple of good ideas a little too much). I can't hear American Woman and not hear the exhausting Kravitz version on the one side, and the chopless attempt at Whole Lotta Love on the other. The clearest Guess/Dog overlap is in the area of hippie-tinged, slightly fuzzed-out pop-rock: Out in the Country and Family of Man vs. New Mother Nature and Share the Land. All pretty good! Still, I favor TDN's entries, especially Family of Man which goes a lot harder.

The Guess Who have a more convincing "coolness" on record, for whatever that's worth... less of a try-hard variety-show entertainer vibe. The doomy opening seconds of No Time are worthy of Steppenwolf or the Jefferson Airplane. And yeah, they do feel closer to CCR, between the rasp on Burton Cummings's voice, the choogling and licks on "Bus Rider" (which I'm just now discovering and is great).

Hmmm on second listen the lyrics to Bus Rider are inane and obnoxious, so that's unfortunate.

I was originally going to title this thread "Waiting for Doctor Casino."

lol

I was going to say that every time I hear "Bus Rider" on the radio, I imagine the band driving alongside public transport in the convertible from the cover of So Long, Bannatyne, Kurt Winter driving while Burton and the others gesticulate and holler at the passengers. However, careful attention reveals that the car on the album cover is not actually a convertible, ruining my Guess Who fan fiction.
It's a funny song, considering that the average fan in 1970 wasn't exactly travelling by limousine. Also the activities of the antagonist in the song are a weird mix of blue-collar and white-collar signifiers (lunch pail and riding the bus itself versus meeting important people and checking for mail).
Devoting entirely too much mental energy to this song, I have wondered if any Guess Who fans had a change of heart about the lyrics; laughing at the bus rider as adolescents, then growing up, starting to work and regretting their mockery.

I'm guessing in their minds, they thought they were just adding to the "Ballad of a Thin Man"/"Nowhere Man"/"Well Respected Man" ("Pleasant Valley Sunday," even) lineage of songs, the counter-culture looking at the middle class with dismay and maybe a touch of sympathy. But it's such a condescending song, especially from what is kind of supposed to be a blue-collar band.

lol clemenza, thank you, I'm touched

And agreed, the condescension of "Bus Rider" is unappealing, and also incoherent. A candidate for Songs where the singer/protagonist comes off as a serious dick without meaning to , which is loaded with "Thin Man" derivatives.

Here's the setlist from tonight's show in Toronto, with two or three deep tracks. I don't know whether five post-Bachman Guess Who tracks are a lot or a little in this context.

969 (The Oldest Man)
Proper Stranger
Hand Me Down World
These Eyes
Albert Flasher
Let It Ride (Bachman–Turner Overdrive cover)
Clap for the Wolfman
Laughing
Guns Guns Guns
Undun
Star Baby
You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet (Bachman–Turner Overdrive cover)
My Own Way to Rock (Burton Cummings song)
A Wednesday in Your Garden
American Woman
No Sugar Tonight / New Mother Nature
No Time
Encore:
Share the Land
Takin' Care of Business (Bachman–Turner Overdrive cover)

You were there? Did you shout out "You beat Three Dog Night in an ILM poll!"

"Proper Stranger" and "Wednesday in Your Garden" are both decent.

I wasn't, but I did attend a choir performance at the local bandshell yesterday, where they opened with "Hand Me Down World".

A friend who was there posted about it on FB: "Burton’s not reaching for the high notes so often anymore, and both of them are seated on stools, but to hear them sing and play so many three-minute masterpieces so fondly remembered from their — and my own — youth was pleasure."

Photo he snapped afterwards:

https://i.postimg.cc/kgq9jpdg/guess-who.jpg

I'm old enough myself that I'm allowed to say they look old.

https://i.postimg.cc/kgq9jpdg/guess-who.jpg