-
The Song That Almost Wasn’t: How a Piano Riff Heard Through a Door Became \”What a Fool Believes\
The Song That Almost Wasn’t: How a Piano Riff Heard Through a Door Became “What a Fool Believes” “What a fool believes he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.” It is one of the strangest and most beautiful opening ideas in all of soft rock: a song about a man who…
-
The Doobie Brothers: The Heart Behind the Harmonies
They weren’t brothers. Nobody was named Doobie. The name was a stoned joke told over breakfast in San Jose. But for more than fifty years, the Doobie Brothers have been something rarer than a band: a brotherhood. Through illness and death, breakups and reunions, bankruptcies of the body and triumphs of the spirit, they kept…
-
How the Doobie Brothers Made “Takin’ It to the Streets”: The Album That Reinvented a Band
In the summer of 1975, the Doobie Brothers were in serious trouble. Their leader, Tom Johnston — the voice behind “Listen to the Music,” “China Grove,” and “Long Train Runnin’” — was in the hospital with a bleeding ulcer and couldn’t tour. The band, one of the biggest concert draws in America, was suddenly without…
-
The Untold Story of the Doobie Brothers: The Joke Name That Sold 40 Million Records
No band in rock history has done more with a worse name. The Doobie Brothers weren’t brothers, and nobody in the original lineup was named Doobie. The name was a stoned joke, meant to last one gig, suggested by a housemate who thought they smoked too much pot. Half a century later, it is stitched…