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The legendary band Three Dog Night will perform at Misericordia University on Saturday night.

Danny Hutton sat outside his house in California’s Laurel Canyon last month, admiring the garden he created for his granddaughter, Maeve, who is a year and a half old.

“It has pallets of Scottish moss and Irish moss and wildflowers,” he said. “It’s like something out of a Walt Disney movie, like a carpet.”

His idyllic yard also holds a koi pond, which is home to fish Hutton, 67, and his wife, Laurie, have named Flipper, Tinkerbell, Betty, Gordo and Pretty Boy Koi.

“They’ll eat out of your hand, but they have to be trained to do that,” Hutton said. “They’re really bottom feeders.”

This retreat on the outskirts of Los Angeles sounds so peaceful, you wouldn’t blame Hutton if he never wanted to leave it.

Yet on Saturday the veteran vocalist of Three Dog Night will be at Misericordia University in Dallas Township. It’s the fifth stop on a 27-city tour for the legendary band, which includes founding members Hutton and Cory Wells as well as original keyboardist Jimmy Greenspoon.

While the group may offer its audience a few surprises, Hutton said, it will be sure to play lots of hits from the era of “Joy to the World” (surely you remember opening line “Jeremiah was a Bullfrog”), “One Man Band,” “Try a Little Tenderness” and “An Old-Fashioned Love Song.”

“That’s why we’re there,” Hutton said in a telephone interview. “Every group has its own style, and some say, ‘We’re not gonna play any of our hits.’

“But, I know when I go to see groups, I want to hear what I like.”

From 1969 to 1974, its official website boasts, Three Dog Night had 21 consecutive Top 40 hits and 12 straight Gold LPs. Many observers considered the band the most popular rock group in the United States.

“We try to project a happy vibe,” Hutton said, describing Three Dog Night’s decades-spanning recordings. “We’re not full of angst and drama.”

Actually, Hutton may have had enough drama during his early, off-stage years to last a lifetime.

Born in Ireland in 1942, he didn’t have time to develop a relationship with his father, who “left for the second World War and didn’t come back.

“He was in the Army,” Hutton said. “Who knows what really went on between him and my mother?”

He would later encounter his father again when he was a teenager. But first, Hutton would move to Boston at age 4 or so with his mother and a brother and sister who “were 10 years older and almost like parents to me.”

The family ended up living in the same building as a freelance hit man named “Trigger” Burke, who allegedly had connections to the gang that orchestrated the “The Great Brinks Robbery” of 1950.

“He lived on the top floor,” Hutton said, launching into a tale that sounds like a movie script. “My mother had to finger him in a police lineup, and later he escaped from jail dressed as a woman. Our family had police protection and I got to know all the Irish cops. I’d be out pedaling my bike, and they’d all say hello to me.”

Despite the police presence, his mother apparently didn’t feel safe in Boston.

When Hutton was about 13, he remembers, “I came home from a movie, and she said, ‘We’re moving to California.’ We sat up in a train the whole way.”

Living in Los Angles gave Hutton a chance to “load and unload records at Disney Studios” until he graduated to a budding career as a solo singer.

Eventually he formed a band called Redwood with Wells and Jimmy Negron. But “Redwood” just wasn’t ear-grabbing enough.

“Our manager on a Friday said, ‘You’ve gotta have a new name by Monday,’ ” Hutton said.

The trio came up with “Three Dog Night,” based on an aboriginal saying about how many animals you need to stay warm in the cold outback.

As Hilton recalled, the manager “was horrified. He said, ‘Why would you choose a name with the word “dog” in it?’ ”

Nevertheless, the name stuck, and Three Dog Night sold tens of millions of records.

By the late 1970s, the group had faded from the music scene, but by the early 1980s it was back.

More than four decades since its founding, the group keeps busy, performing some 2,000 shows since 1986. In 2009 Three Dog Night released its first double-A-sided single in nearly 25 years, with “Heart of Blues” and the a capella ballad “Prayer of the Children.” It’s available through digital retailers and the band’s website.

When he’s not busy singing or relaxing in his garden, Hutton occasionally jams with friend Brian Wilson of The Beach Boys, works with wood, listens to talk-radio shows — “I listen to both sides,” he said diplomatically — and concentrates on living a healthful lifestyle.

“I try to eat very healthy,” he said, “although I did finally have a steak the other day. First time in about a year.”

IF YOU GO

Who: Three Dog Night

When: 8 p.m. Saturday

Where: Wachovia Amphitheater, Misericordia University, 301 Lake St., Dallas Township

Tickets: $30, $20 lawn

More info: 674-6719