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Hm. Researching it more, it appears that I'm simply wiring the thing up wrong. I've just got a knobby thingy that I want to alter the volume of a line-level circuit. I'm only using two of the terminals and I think I'm supposed to be using all three terminals to make it work right.

If that is what you actually want to do, then you want to use it as a voltage divider circuit, not as a variable resistance. So ground pin 1, connect the output of the previous stage to pin 3, and take the signal to the following stages from pin 2. But this assumes the first stage can drive a resistance/impedance of the total of your pot.