Doobie Brothers take to the streets — again
‘50-ish anniversary’ tour resumes for band on victory lap
When it finally happened last summer, the Doobie Brothers’ long-anticipated reunion with Michael McDonald took just more than a week to run into trouble.
Nine days after they kicked off a tour marking the California group’s 50th anniversary — a year late due to a pandemicforced delay in 2020 — McDonald tested positive for the coronavirus and had to pull out of a performance at the Minnesota State Fair with just hours until showtime.
“The mistake I made was thinking I could go out to eat once in a while,” recalled the white-haired crooner, whose bandmates went ahead without him that night before calling off a handful of subsequent gigs while they waited for McDonald to recover.
So you could understand why the once-freewheeling Doobies, all vaxxed and boosted and in their early 70s, are running a pretty tight ship as they hit the road again — first for a two-week Las Vegas residency that opened May 13, then for the remaining 42 dates of the anniversary tour, the group’s first official outing with McDonald since the mid-1990s. Any non-Doobie has to wear a mask at all times, and no guests will be allowed backstage.
Even with a COVID-19 compliance officer on staff, the Vegas gig and the tour will serve as something of a victory lap for the Doobie Brothers two years after they were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. The band, which guitarist Pat Simmons and vocalist Tom Johnston formed in San Jose, California, in
1970 — and which went on to score era-defining hits such as “Listen to the Music,” “China Grove,” “Black Water,” “Takin’ It to the Streets” and “What a Fool Believes” — had been eligible for induction for decades to no avail.
But if the Doobies were once viewed as lightweights by rock critics, their perception has warmed more recently thanks to the embrace of admirers as varied as Luke Bryan, who toasted the band during the Rock Hall ceremony, and Solange, who has covered “What a Fool Believes” in concert.
The Gen X and millennial fascination with yacht rock — the genre coinage used to describe the cohort of acts spinning out mellow yet sophisticated soft-rock vibes in the late ’70s and early ’80s — helped the band’s chances, as did the fact that another of the hall’s 2020 inductees was veteran music manager Irving Azoff, whose Full Stop firm took over the Doobies’ affairs in 2015.
Said Karim Karmi, who manages the group with Azoff: “You have to have champions on the committee (that handles nominations),
and you have to tell a story besides ‘They have hit songs, and they tour a lot.’ ”
Now that they’re in the Rock Hall, the members are taking full advantage of the recognition. In October, the band released a new studio album, “Liberte,” and Johnston and Simmons recently published a memoir, “Long Train Runnin’: Our Story of the Doobie Brothers,” which includes input from former bassist Tiran Porter, one of the relatively few Black men in the mostly white ’70s rock business, and the band’s longtime producer, Ted Templeman. With McDonald on board, the group is using its current live set — which also features guitarist John McFee, a Doobie since the late ’70s — to showcase the breadth of its catalog.
And what a crazily broad catalog it is, with hard-riffing biker-bar rock alongside fingerpicked acoustic blues and swank, jazzinflected R&B. The easy way to look at the band’s initial run, which yielded 16 Top 40 hits, is to split it into halves: the early years when the growly voiced Johnston was fronting the band and the later years when the smoothly soulful
McDonald had the job.
But the truth is that the Doobie Brothers — whose multiracial lineup reflected — and fueled — the diversity of their deeply American music — were always evolving, even when the singer stayed the same.
“We just kept trying things,” Johnston said. “… Went from the first album, which didn’t sell (expletive), to the second album, which had a song that got on the radio — couple of them, actually. Then the third album, we started trying synthesizer stuff. Album after that, we had the Memphis Horns.
“We’ve had a lot of players too. I mean this in the most respectful way, but we’ve had an exploding drummer problem,” Johnston said, referring to the “Spinal Tap” gag. “And bass players, we’ve had a few of those. They all brought something of their own to the music.”
The Doobies’ self-titled debut came out in 1971 and was quickly followed by 1972’s “Toulouse Street,” which went platinum, and 1973’s “The Captain and Me,” which went double-platinum. In 1975, the group topped Billboard’s
Hot 100 with the folky “Black Water.” But as the band’s success grew, Johnston’s health was deteriorating as a result of a bleeding ulcer; forced to bail mid-tour, the singer was replaced on the road by McDonald on the recommendation of guitarist Jeff “Skunk” Baxter, who’d played with McDonald in Steely Dan before Baxter joined the Doobies.
McDonald stuck around and began contributing to the band’s albums beginning with “Takin’ It to the Streets” in 1976; by the next year’s “Livin’ on the Fault Line,” the Doobies’ sound had changed dramatically to suit his nimble keyboard playing and quiet-storm vocal approach. Johnston insists today that he didn’t resent the shift. “But I didn’t feel like I was adding enough to the band at that point,” he said. “I wasn’t comfortable.” So he quit.
For the band’s next LP, 1978’s yacht-rock touchstone “Minute by Minute,” McDonald and Kenny Loggins co-wrote the silky and syncopated “What a Fool Believes,” which went on to hit No. 1 and won Grammy Awards for record of the year and song of the year. Over the years, “Fool” has been covered by Aretha Franklin, George Michael and even Kanye West’s Sunday Service choir.
“Wasn’t it used recently on — whatever the hell it is — ‘Euphoria’?” Johnston asked his bandmates, and indeed the HBO teensploitation drama licensed the song for a scene in a season two episode.
In spite of “Fool’s” commercial gains, the Doobies lasted only one more album before breaking up in 1982. They got back together sporadically over the next decade for charity gigs; Johnston and Simmons later organized a more formal reunion (minus McDonald, who had started a successful solo career) and have been touring steadily since. Still, playing with McDonald again, Johnston said, “lifts it up a little bit — makes it more special.”
As for their residency, nobody in the Doobie Brothers would describe himself as a huge Vegas fan. But after two years mostly spent sitting around — “We’re now calling it the 50-ish anniversary,” McFee said — they’re just happy to be performing again.