Singing Farewell : 100 Friends, Relatives Memorialize Hoyt Axton at Santa Ana Jam Session

Singer-songwriter-actor Hoyt Axton was memorialized Sunday in Santa Ana as a man whose musical gift and bear-like stature were overshadowed only by the enormity of his heart.

Best known as the composer of “Joy to the World,” which gave rock group Three Dog Night the biggest hit of its career in 1971, Axton died at 61 on Oct. 26 at his ranch in Victor, Mont.

“He didn’t just hire a band, he created a big family,” said Sadaaki Sugii, who said he gave up a job offer in his native Japan working for Monsanto to join Axton’s entourage. Sugii stayed with Axton for 19 1/2 years as his road manager and business manager.

Sugii was among about 100 friends, family members and musicians who attended the service at the Crazy Horse Steak House, where Axton had performed almost annually since the early 1980s, until a stroke left him unable to play in public. He suffered the stroke during his last performance at the Crazy Horse, in July 1995, club spokeswoman Rhonda Reed said.

Others echoed Sugii’s sentiment in eulogizing Axton, whose first big success in his 40-year career as a folk-country singer came with the Kingston Trio’s 1963 recording of his song “Greenback Dollar.”

That was one of several Axton songs the assembled musicians sang during a free-flowing jam session that followed spoken remembrances from two of Axton’s five children, two of his three former wives, several band members and professional associates. All three of Axton’s former wives attended, but not his widow, Deborah Axton, who his daughter, April Ruggiero, said was still too distraught to join.

Three Dog Night drummer Floyd Sneed recalled that his band initially didn’t want to record “Joy to the World,” with its signature opening “Jeremiah was a bullfrog.”

“We thought it was too bubble gum for us,” Sneed said. Nevertheless, the group’s single went to No. 1 and stayed there six weeks. Axton provided a second hit for the group when he wrote “Never Been to Spain,” which Axton’s son, Michael Axton, used to lead off the musical tribute portion of the private, three-hour event.

Keyboard player David Jackson and guitarist-singer Dennis Brooks remember encountering Axton during his frequent performances in and around Orange County in the early 1960s, when he was a regular on the folk club-coffeehouse circuit.

“I first went to see him at a place called Mon Amie in Tustin,” said Jackson, who as a teenager became a member of Axton’s band. “Man, after that I ran off and joined the Hoyt--not the circus. I joined the Hoyt, because he was the trapeze act and the elephant all in one.”

Axton gave up his ambition of writing books and turned to songwriting in the 1950s after Elvis Presley charted his first national hit with a song his mother, Mae Axton, had co-written: “Heartbreak Hotel.” The now-defunct Golden Bear nightclub in Huntington Beach was one of the key Southland clubs, along with the Troubadour in West Hollywood, in which Axton developed a reputation for catchy songs usually reflecting his wry sense of humor.

“At one point I think I did about 30 weekends straight [at the Golden Bear],” Axton told The Times in a 1982 interview. “It was literally my home away from home.”

Brooks, who became a frequent opening act for Axton, noted that he was quick to share the spotlight.

Even though he never achieved widespread fame as a performer, Axton didn’t seem to mind.

“Sometimes I think songwriters are a little too sensitive about not getting more press,” he said in 1982. “When you consider there are about a million songs out there, it does nothing but make the inside of my brain shine when somebody records one of my songs.”

And Axton wasn’t one to grouse about a musician’s life on the road.

“I like everything about touring,” Axton told The Times in 1988. “I like the traveling, the cheeseburgers and the French fries, the starry nights and rolling out of town in the dark.

“After all, I can’t complain. I’ve always been treated very well. I think what it comes down to is that I’m no big deal. I don’t sell gold records and I don’t pack concert halls. I’m a guy who can fill clubs, and that’s OK.”

Several times during Sunday’s memorial, friends noted that Axton’s career embodied the lyrics he wrote in “Greenback Dollar”: “I don’t give a damn about a greenback dollar/I spend it as fast as I can.”

In a 1988 Times interview, Axton explained: “The freedom of [songwriting] and the spontaneity is wonderful. . . . There’s a certain blending of melody and lyric, there’s a harmony to it that just strikes a chord, and that’s what I really like--that contact with heaven.”