Three Dog Night - Never Been to Spain

For the Daydreaming Believers

They tell me Three Dog Night’s Never Been to Spain is about staying home and just dreaming about the places you could have visited, if only you had the gumption. I had never considered that before. I only ever got a huge laugh from the lyric “I’ve never been to Heaven, but I’ve been to Oklahoma,” because it’s equally funny and ridiculous.

But now that I’m thinking about it, maybe that’s the whole point: the ridiculousness is the point. The lyric is less a punchline than a thesis statement, a kind of Midwestern koan. It’s the confession of a person who has never been to Spain, never been to England, never been to Heaven, but somehow feels like he knows what those places are like anyway. He’s been to Oklahoma, and that’s close enough. Or maybe it isn’t. Maybe it’s all he’s got, so he has to make it enough.

The Geography of Nowhere (and Everywhere)

Let’s start with the facts, because facts are comforting. Never Been to Spain was written by Hoyt Axton, a man who was actually born in Oklahoma, which is probably why he felt entitled to compare it to Heaven, or at least to use it as a punchline. Three Dog Night took the song to number five on the charts in 1971, just after their other Axton-penned hit, Joy to the World, which is about a bullfrog named Jeremiah who likes wine - a detail that, in retrospect, feels like it should have been a clue that Axton was not a man overly concerned with literalism.

The song’s narrator is a daydreaming drifter, someone who’s “headed for Las Vegas, only made it out to Needles.” He’s not a world traveler; he’s a guy who gets stuck somewhere between where he wants to go and where he actually ends up. But he still has opinions about Spain (“I kinda like the music”) and England (“I kinda like the Beatles”), as if proximity to culture is the same as actually being there.

The Proxy Experience

I admit that the literal meaning of the song is the least interesting thing about it. I care less about what a song “means” so much as what it does - how it becomes a vessel for the listener’s own projections, anxieties, and half-remembered dreams. Never Been to Spain isn’t about Spain at all. It’s about the way Americans (or anyone, really) build their identities out of things they’ve never actually experienced, but feel like they have, thanks to music, television, and the ambient cultural noise of the 20th century.

In other words, you don’t have to go to Spain to know what Spain is like, because you’ve heard Spanish music, eaten Spanish food, maybe watched a bullfight on TV. You know the Beatles, so you know England. You’ve never been to Heaven, but you’ve been to Oklahoma, which is basically the same thing if you squint hard enough and ignore the humidity.

The Comedy of Disappointment

But there’s another layer, and it’s the one that makes the song funny. The line “I’ve never been to Heaven, but I’ve been to Oklahoma” is hilarious because it’s so earnest and so absurd at the same time. It’s like saying, “I’ve never met the President, but I did see his motorcade once.” It’s both a boast and a confession of limitation.

This is the essence of American optimism: the belief that not having something is almost as good as having it, as long as you can talk about it in the right way. It’s the logic of people who watch cooking shows but never cook, who read travel blogs but never leave their hometown, who know everything about Paris except how to get there.

Musically, Three Dog Night’s version of the song mirrors this emotional arc. It starts quiet and sparse, then builds to a gospel-tinged rave-up, as if the narrator’s daydreams are swelling into something almost real, almost transcendent. But then the song ends, and you’re still in Oklahoma, or wherever you happen to be. The crescendo leads to nowhere, which is both disappointing and kind of perfect.

Dreaming as a Form of Travel

So maybe Never Been to Spain is about staying home and dreaming, but it’s also about the weird satisfaction that comes from those dreams. Maybe it’s enough to imagine Spain, to like Spanish music, to know the Beatles, to laugh at the idea that Oklahoma is Heaven. Maybe the real message is that you don’t have to go everywhere to feel like you’ve been somewhere. Maybe the places you haven’t been are just as important as the ones you have, because they give you something to long for, something to joke about, something to build your identity around.

Or maybe it’s just a funny song with a great groove and a killer vocal by Cory Wells. Maybe that’s all it ever needed to be. I’ve been to England, and Spain, and I’ve been to Oklahoma.

And yeah, I kinda like the music.