A couple of guys from college and I attended one of the Doobie Brothers’ shows back in the early ‘70s, and we couldn’t help but be fixated on this huge banner which stretched from one end of the stage to the other with the words “Legalize It” emblazoned across its length. By “it” well, even the illiterate students graduating from high schools across the US these days know that means pot, weed, herb, grass, ganja, bud (not to be confused with beer), joint, tea, reefer, wacky tobbacy and marijuana. Tom Petty wrote a song about the stuff called ‘Mary Jane’s Last Dance’ (“I hit my last number and walked to the road”). Tom was not talking about hitting on a girl or the lottery.
Another way of referring to marijuana is a doobie. So, you can understand what was possibly the band’s favourite form of recreation. Legend has it one unnamed member of the band took over driving the tour bus and made a wrong turn on the way to Denver, Colorado and wound up 18 hours later in China Grove, Texas. They said it was due to a faulty GPS (General Proximity Suggestion), but we can guess the true story by reports of the pungent odor emitted from the vehicle’s exhaust pipes. The good news is they wound up writing a killer song called ‘China Grove’. The bad news is the audience in Denver never got to see the band, but concertgoers were so high they failed to notice the music was piped in over the P.A.
Can’t Live With It: “Brotherhood” (Capitol, 1991)
One of the dangers of writing about a Doobie Brothers album you can’t live with is that there are more than one of them, mainly but not exclusively due to the presence of Michael McDonald in the band. McDonald is the poster boy for yacht rock, and he singlehandedly managed to turn a very good band into one that may cause you to use a vinyl LP for a frisbee. Sure, he was partially responsible for the 1978 platinum-selling “Minute by Minute” with its hugely-popular ‘What A Fool Believes’, although the best song on it was Patrick Simmons’ ‘Black Water’. Tastes were changing to Kenny Loggins, Earth Wind & Fire and the Buckingham-Nicks version of Fleetwood Mac. One person I know lost her job because she couldn’t get McDonald’s voice out of her head during office hours. When her boss asked for the sales report, she blurted out: “What seems to be, Is always better than nothing, And nothing at all keeps sending him, Somewhere back in her long ago”.
“Brotherhood” was so bad Capitol Records dropped the band from the label shortly after its release. Original drummer John Hartman and bassist Tiran Porter, who had been with the Doobies since their second album, both left the band. Hartman quit music altogether though he hasn’t said if it was entirely because of that album. Four of the ten tracks were written by Jerry Lynn Williams and Jim Peterik of the horrid band Survivor, whose claim to fame was ‘Eye of the Tiger”, a song that would make you want to smash your car radio with a hammer before hearing it one more time.
In the wake of this disaster, the band went on hiatus or witness protection, I’m not sure which one. The only track Simmons wrote is probably the best on the album. ‘Dangerous’ is about a biker riding around avoiding, well …. dangerous situations, and would have been ideal for a “Sons of Anarchy” soundtrack. Co-leader Tom Johnston wrote three songs, including ‘The Train I’m On’, which was okay but would have been only an afterthought on the Doobies’ best efforts.
After five strong albums with Johnston and Simmons at the helm, McDonald nearly killed the band. When he left in 1989, they had one foot in the grave and “Brotherhood” provided the shovel.
Can’t Live Without It: “Toulouse Street” (Warner Brothers, 1972)
This record was a mixture of biker-bar boogie – the specialty of Johnston – and country-inflected roots music, the strong suit of Simmons. For their sophomore effort, the Doobies hired ace producer Ted Templeman and added a second drummer, Michael Hossack, who also played steel drums on the one reggae tune, ‘Mamaloi’. This was as solid a set of songs as could be found on any of their other albums, including the stellar “What Once Were Vices Are Now Habits”. There were the two swampy, Creedence -like roots rockers, ‘Cotton Mouth’ and ‘Rockin’ Down the Highway,’ which Johnston wrote with chord changes he developed with an earlier band. “Everybody was out enjoying themselves, whatever vehicle you had — motorcycle, car, whatever. I just got out of college in ’71. I didn’t have a lot of money but I sure had a lot of fun.” Too much, as it turned out years later.
You had the extended, 7-minute guitar showcase of ‘Disciple’ and the Sonny Boy Williamson blues cover, ‘Don’t Start Me Talkin’’. ‘Toulouse Street’ and ‘White Sun’ were drenched in the country-folk hybrid of the Deep South and California. And then you had the two mega hit tracks – ‘Listen to the Music’ and ‘Jesus Is Just Alright’, an infectious come-to-Jesus stomper that doesn’t pander. You have to hear them in the context of the album instead of their edited for radio versions. The group dynamics are solid and the vocal harmonies are every bit as strong as those of CSNY.
The title track is an acoustic paean to love, New Orleans, and the spell of a fading summer’s evening when something slightly mystical is in the air. Simmons plays an enticing flute solo between verses. You can imagine the French Quarter of New Orleans, where you can walk down Toulouse Street, emotions simmering in the sultry night air – “The night she is hot, Creole girls they sing, My heart, it is pounding, my ears they ring, The spell has been cast down in New Orleans, again”.
The closer on the album is ‘Snake Man’, a track that seemed as if it should have been developed beyond its brief (1:35) run time. This is a blues in a weird tuning that reminds you of CSNY’s ‘Guinevere’. Johnston stated: “I started fooling around with the tuning, writing other stuff. That’s why it sounds a little different. It has a little of a Robert Johnson ‘Hellhound on Your Trail’ thing going on”.
‘Jesus Is Just Alright’ was the one song the band did with evangelical lyrics. Simmons said: “All the guys in the band liked this song (originally recorded by The Art Reynolds Singers in 1966), and Teddy Templeman helped with the arrangement as far as ideas about where it was gonna go. We brought in (Little Feat keyboardist) Bill Payne to do the Hammond B-3 stuff. Then when we went on the road, and all of a sudden we had this huge following of Christians. They were throwing little bits of scripture up on the stage and were very enthusiastic.”
The Doobie Brothers recorded three more strong albums after “Toulouse Street,” many critics lauding “The Captain and Me” as their best. In my opinion, it’s a toss-up, but only one could be selected for the purposes of this article. I flipped a two-headed coin and it landed on the memories of denim and leather, three vocalists harmonizing, three guitars, a bass player and two drummers playing their brand of 1970s idealism, emblematic of the era.
