Three Dog Night is a band I appreciate a lot more now than back when they were popular, because when they were popular they were also deeply uncool. Listening to them these days it’s hard to understand why. Granted, they didn’t write their own music at a time when singers weren’t considered “artists” unless they did. They were also deeply show-biz in a Hollywood-Las Vegas way at a time when the counterculture had rejected all that.
That hardly explains their lack of respect since. Despite chalking up 21 Billboard Top 40 hits, including three No. 1s, between 1969 and 1975, they’ve never even been nominated for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. “Shambala” made it to No. 3 in 1973.
Like most of the band’s hits, “Shambala” came from a relatively unknown songwriter. Daniel Moore came up with the song after his brother related his experience with a spiritualist whom he had consulted to ask about his past lives. After she told him, she concluded, “My messenger tells me to tell you, ‘Let your light shine in the halls of Shambala.'” His brother had no idea what it meant, but Moore did some research and learned that Tibetan Buddhists considered Shambhala a mythical land that lay beyond the Himalayas.
Moore explained, “In Alice Bailey’s Treatise On White Magic. It basically said that there was a gigantic cavern under the Gobi Desert that has a replica of every evolving human being. And when that replica begins to light up or glow (meaning you are cleaning up your act and becoming more spiritual minded or raising your consciousness to a higher level), there is point where your replica gets bright enough to warrant a spiritual teacher being sent to you.”
Moore released his own version of the tune on his 1998 album “Riding a Horse & Holding Up the World.” Moore used the demo tape he made when he first wrote the tune, adding only an overdubbed electric guitar for the album version. Perhaps because he only read the word without ever hearing it, Moore pronounced it with the first syllable rhyming with “ham” rather than “mom.”
Three Dog Night’s was actually the second cover of the song released in 1973. Two weeks before their single dropped, country singer B.W. Stevenson released his own version, which also charted, though it stalled out at No. 66. He responded by recording another of Moore’s tunes, “My Maria,” which sounds quite similar. It reached No. 9 on the Hot 100.
Curiously, considering that both of those covers made the charts, virtually nobody has covered it since. The notable exception: A cappella group Rockapella has recorded it twice.
