Through the early 1970s, Three Dog Night was a fixture on the pop charts, a non-‎threatening alternative to the Stones and Zeppelin, yet hipper and harder-rocking ‎than Bread or The Carpenters. The band filled this niche for nearly five years, ‎racking up 21 consecutive Top 40 hits and selling over 80 million albums. They ‎were unusual, not only in their three-lead-vocalist format, but also in the degree ‎of control they had over choosing their material, using their own band in the ‎studio, and acting as co-producers of many of their records. The group’s ‎phenomenal success, and broad appeal, afforded them uncommon freedom from ‎Dunhill, their record label through 1973.

By 1975, though, they were on their third label in three years and the hits had ‎dried up. And by the time Elvis’ walking pharmacy, Dr. Nick, confided to the ‎world the King’s prodigious appetite for prescription drugs, Three Dog Night’s ‎Chuck Negron was selling his gold records to subsidize a $2,000 a day heroin ‎habit.‎

In case the title isn’t sufficient, Negron sets the tone for his autobiography with ‎the book’s first sentence — “I should be dead” — and an opening chapter that ‎catalogs overdoses, car crashes, gun play, suicide attempts, and nearly becoming a ‎victim in the notorious Wonderland murders. By the book’s end, it does seem ‎miraculous that he survived the dissolute life he depicts in Three Dog Nightmare. ‎Negron is merciless, even relentless, in portraying himself as a reckless, ‎impulsive, and selfish junkie who thinks no further than his next score.

His focus throughout the book, an update of the 2000 edition, is his drug use, his ‎repeated attempts at rehabilitation, and his eventual recovery; his musical career ‎is almost incidental to his addiction story. In fact, it becomes obvious that Negron ‎was already dealing with a propensity for substance abuse even before he became ‎a rock star. A few musically-related Three Dog Night anecdotes — like Danny ‎Hutton singing the lead vocal for “Liar” with “his head a few inches above the ‎water line . . . of this scummy toilet” — tease the story of the band that remains ‎largely untold (the only other autobiography out of the band to date, Jimmy ‎Greenspoon’s One Is the Loneliest Number, offers a disturbingly similar, ‎addiction-oriented approach to the Three Dog Night story, and is long out of ‎print.)