The Vinyl Dialogues Blog

Stories behind memorable albums of the 1970s as told by the artists

Tag: Michael McDonald

Doobie Brothers still rockin’ down the highway

By

On July 23, 2017

In The Vinyl Dialogues Book

Pat Simmons, left, and Tom Johnston of the Doobie Brothers rock the BB&T Pavilion in Camden, N.J., on July 21, 2017. (Photo by Mike Morsch)

Pat Simmons, left, and Tom Johnston of the Doobie Brothers rock the BB&T Pavilion in Camden, N.J., on July 21, 2017.
(Photo by Mike Morsch)

First things first: Let’s just put the Doobie Brothers into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame right now. It’s long overdue. Waive whatever rules there all and just pencil the band in to accept the designation and perform at the next induction ceremony.

This is not a new thought, but it certainly was reinforced Saturday, July 21, when the Doobies shared the bill with Chicago (2016 R&RHOF inductees).

Simply put, the Doobie Brothers rocked the roof off the BB&T Pavilion in Camden, New Jersey. They’re just that good. The 15-song set was heavy on the early Doobies, with 13 of the songs coming from albums recorded between 1972 and 1975 – Toulouse Street, The Captain and Me, What Were Once Vices Are Now Habits and Stampede.

That was fine with me. Those were the years that I listened to a lot of Doobie Brothers. I was a sophomore in high school in 1975 in central Illinois and every day during lunch period, I’d pop a quarter in the school’s juke box and play two songs: “My Maria” by B.W. Stevenson, the title cut from his 1973 album; and “China Grove” by the Doobie Brothers, off the 1973 album The Captain and Me, the making of which was featured in the first volume of The Vinyl Dialogues based on interviews with the Doobies’ Tom Johnston and Pat Simmons.

Pat Simmons (Photo by Mike Morsch)

Pat Simmons
(Photo by Mike Morsch)

Johnston famously had to leave the Doobie Brothers at the end of 1974 because of health issues associated with the rigors of a band that was on the road quite a bit. Because of that, Johnston was unable to join the tour in the spring of 1975 to promote the Stampede album. Steely Dan guitarist Jeff “Skunk” Baxter, who had joined the Doobie Brothers after Donald Fagen and Walter Becker of Steely Dan retired from the road in 1974, proposed that songwriter and vocalist Michael McDonald, a fellow Steely Dan alum, fill in for Johnston on the tour.

“When I joined, I thought it was going be like a two to six-month gig,” said McDonald in a recent interview. “I thought I’d better save my money because I wasn’t going to make this much money for a while. That’s how I lived as a musician back then. If I was making a good payday for a while, I didn’t spend it all. I was living pretty much hand-to-mouth. I had no idea what was next and I don’t think any of us did.”

What was next was that the Doobie Brothers had come to a crossroads. To that point, Johnston had been the band’s primary songwriter and now he was unavailable. So the band turned to McDonald for material to supplement what Simmons was writing. The result was the 1976 album, Takin’ It to the Streets.

Tom Johnston and John McFee (Photo by Mike Morsch)

Tom Johnston and John McFee
(Photo by Mike Morsch)

And it marked a radical change in sound for the Doobie Brothers.

“A door opened rather suddenly with the Doobies. Those guys were so open to anything I had to offer and it caught me by surprise, really,” said McDonald. “I did not expect that having come from another situation with Steely Dan, where Don (Fagen) and Walter (Becker) were the sole source of all the material. I had learned a great deal from them, however. That was probably my whole songwriting education in a way. I grew up writing songs, but it was a real crash course to learn a different approach to arrangement, chords, melody, that I got from working with Donald and Walter.

“So when I came to the Doobies, it was very fortuitous for me to have come from that gig, with all these kind of fresh ideas on how to write a song, what a song’s structure could be,” said McDonald. “And then all of a sudden to be surprised at how open – everybody from the producer (Ted Templeman) to the band members – and generous they were in allowing me to participate in the writing.”

Tom Johnston (Photo By Mike Morsch)

Tom Johnston
(Photo By Mike Morsch)

There are some factions of the listening public – real or perceived – that are divided about the different versions of the band. There is the Tom Johnston Doobies and the Michael McDonald Doobies. What we saw Saturday night in Camden was definitely the Johnston Doobies, as they have been for a while now, with a nod to the McDonald years. McDonald’s “Takin’ it to The Streets” was included in the setlist.

“A lot of people have thrown credit to me for the evolution of the band and changing the complexion of the Doobies’ music. Although I had a part in that, it wasn’t totally me,” said McDonald. “It was really a lot of things that happened. One, Jeff Baxter was a big part of the music changing and bringing me into the band even. The arrangements of our songs and his guitar style and jazz influences brought a lot to the band and to my songs.

“Pat and all the other guys were on board. And one of the biggest components in all this was really the absence of Tommy because Tommy was such a huge influence in the direction of the the band up to that point,” said McDonald. “Just by the virtue of him taking a hiatus and being gone from the next recording, that left a huge hole, for better or for worse. But it was the collective effort to try fill that void that was responsible for the band changing.”

I actually like both sounds that the Doobie Brothers have employed. I like the early Doobies because of my fondness for the songs “China Grove,” “Listen to the Music,” “South City Midnight Lady” and “Take Me in Your Arms”; and I like the late-1970s Doobies songs – written or co-written by McDonald – including “Minute by Minute,” “It Keeps You Runnin’” and “What A Fool Believes,” which was the second No. 1 single for the band on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 singles chart. (The first was “Black Water,” written by Simmons and released in 1974.)

The contributions of Pat Simmons to the band also have been significant and shouldn’t be overlooked or downplayed in the least. He’s been the only constant from the band’s inception through the transition and back again. He and longtime bandmate John McFee co-wrote another of my favorite Doobies’ songs, “Far From Home” from the 2010 World Gone Crazy album.

Through it all, the Doobie Brothers are still rockin’ down the highway. And it’s time they get the proper recognition. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame should take note.

‘Takin’ It to the Streets’ with Michael McDonald on the Atlantic City Boardwalk

By

On July 9, 2017

In The Vinyl Dialogues Book

Michael McDonald performed July 8, 2017, at the Tropicana Showroom in Atlantic City. (Photo by Mike Morsch)

Michael McDonald performed July 8, 2017, at the Tropicana Showroom in Atlantic City.
(Photo by Mike Morsch)

Michael McDonald closed his show Saturday night at the Tropicana in Atlantic City with “Takin’ It to the Streets,” which made sense.

The song, from a 1976 Doobie Brothers album by the same name, was the first single written by McDonald released from the first album on which he appeared as a member of the Doobie Brothers. The song made it to No. 13 on the U.S. Billboard Pop Singles chart. It’s a great tune and likely holds a special spot for McDonald among his vast library of songs.

McDonald had replaced Tom Johnston, who was sidelined in 1975 with health issues, in the Doobie Brothers, and “Takin’ It to the Streets” – both the song and album itself – was a signal that the band was going in a completely different direction.

The intro to “Takin’ It to the Streets” came to McDonald in his car while driving through Southern California on his way to a gig.

“I just heard that intro in my head and I knew that it had something to do with a gospel kind of feeling track. I couldn’t wait to get to the gig so I could figure out on piano what it was,” said McDonald in a interview in advance of the Atlantic City show. “I set up my piano as fast as I could, plugged everything in and sat there for a moment, looking for the chord that I was hearing my head. I just picked at it long to enough to where the guitar player looked over at me and said, ‘Hey, we gotta start.’ I was lost in looking for this elusive melodic rhythmic thing.”

According to McDonald, the basic song was written in those couple of minutes. He would fine tune it after the gig when he got back to his apartment later that night.

“The rest of the song was pretty simple. It was just trying to figure out what that intro meant and where it was going musically,” he said. “It seemed like kind of a natural social subject at the time because it felt like gospel music and gospel music always has a message. I had been talking to my sister, who was in college at the time, and she was in a social economics class or something. She was a typical college student and thought the weight of the world’s problems were solvable by those as smart as college students. We talked about how in the inner city, the bottom was dropping out for people and they were falling through the cracks. It seemed like it was a natural marriage of ideas and melody.”

The Atlantic City show saw McDonald mix some old with some new. Casino shows are generally short, in the neighborhood of 75 minutes plus an encore. I’ve been told by several artists that’s because the casinos want people back out into the gambling areas spending money rather than sitting in the theater for two or two and a half hours.

I’ve got no beef with that. Everybody – the artists, the venue, the fans – have their own best interests at heart. But in this instance, that may have worked against McDonald a bit.

His set included a handful of songs from his new album, “Wide Open,” which is due out in September. In a short set, though, that may have rubbed some of the diehard Doobie Brothers fans the wrong way. In a totally unscientific poll from a portion of the crowd sitting within earshot, it appeared some of them would have preferred more Doobie Brothers-era material from McDonald.

In fact, McDonald closed the main part of the show with “What A Fool Believes” – a personal Doobie Brothers favorite – after which a portion of crowd left, missing the entire encore and the spirited version of “Takin’ It to the Streets.”

None of that bothered me, though, because this was the first time I had seen McDonald perform live and I wasn’t going anywhere, including out to the slot machines. I like the Tom Johnston Doobie Brothers, I like the Michael McDonald Doobie Brothers and I like the McDonald solo stuff. From what I heard in the new songs, I’ll buy the album when it comes out.

Boz Scaggs joined Michal McDonald on the bill for the Atlantic City show. (Photo by Mike Morsch)

Boz Scaggs joined Michal McDonald on the bill for the Atlantic City show.
(Photo by Mike Morsch)

Also on the bill with McDonald for this show was Boz Scaggs. And although they didn’t actually perform any songs together during the evening, it’s not breaking news that a show featuring Boz Scaggs and Michael McDonald is going to be a great evening of music. How can it not be?

It’s the second time I’ve seen Scaggs in concert, and he didn’t disappoint. He tends to lean toward more bluesy stuff in his live performances, but he’s well aware that those of us of a certain age are there to hear the hits, particularly from his 1976 album “Silk Degrees,” like “Lowdown” and “Lido Shuffle.”

My personal favorite during the set though was a brilliant version of “Georgia,” also from the “Silk Degrees” album but not one of the four songs released as singles (the other two being “What Can I Say” and “It’s Over”) that charted.

One last note from this show. You’ll notice that I included a photo of McDonald playing the guitar with this piece. McDonald is a piano player by trade, and I would have preferred to use a photo of him at the piano. I use a little point-and-shoot camera with a telephoto lens at concerts that allow non-flash photography. It usually serves its purpose from the vantage point of my seat.

But the camera does struggle with concert lighting at times, and the way McDonald was lit while at the piano located at stage left made those photographs washed out and unusable. When McDonald moved away from the piano for a few songs at the center stage mic, the angle and lighting were a bit better. So what you see is the best shot I could get.

Still, that didn’t take away from an enjoyable evening of music by two of my favorite artists.

Reelin’ in the Steely Dan experience, with an assist from Steve Winwood

By

On July 4, 2016

In The Vinyl Dialogues Book

Steely Dan, with Walter Becker, left, and Donald Fagen, performed "The Dan Who Knew Too Much Tour 2016" July 3 at the BB&T Pavilion in Camden, N.J. (Photo by Mike Morsch)

Steely Dan, with Walter Becker, left, and Donald Fagen, performed “The Dan Who Knew Too Much Tour 2016” July 3 at the BB&T Pavilion in Camden, N.J.
(Photo by Mike Morsch)

Here the thing: If you’re a Steely Dan fan and you’ve paid to see the band in concert, then you cannot get up and go to the restroom just as the artists are breaking into “Reelin’ in the Years.”

I understand that those of us who grew up with Steely Dan over the past 40-plus years may be at an age where the frequency of using the facilities may be more challenging to us at this age than it was in our younger days.

But c’mon, it’s “Reelin’ in the Years,” one of Steely Dan’s most enduring hits. The song, written by Dan founders Donald Fagen and Walter Becker, reached No. 11 on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 chart and No. 7 on the U.S. Cashbox Top 100 chart in 1973. It appeared on the band’s debut album “Can’t Buy A Thrill,” released in November 1972.

Surely one can reel in the bladder for the 4:37 of the song while its being played live.

Apparently not, as evidenced by the two women sitting in front of me at the July 3 Steely Dan show at the BB&T Pavilion in Camden, N.J., who missed the entire song.

It was, however, only a minor distraction from what was otherwise another outstanding show by Steely Dan, which featured Steve Winwood as the opener (more on him later).

You know that old saying – made popular by those of us who grew up in the 1960s and 1970s – that “we got to see all the good bands.” Well, let the record show that we were right. And we’re fortunate that one of the good bands is still around for us to see today.

Walter Becker, right, grooves with the Steely Dan band. (Photo by Mike Morsch)

Walter Becker, right, grooves with the Steely Dan band.
(Photo by Mike Morsch)

For nearly two hours, Steely Dan did what it does, perform the music that it has made for nearly five decades – that great jazz rock, smooth groove, with a some funk and R&B thrown in. The Dan only toured for a few years in the early 1970s, then became mostly a studio-only band until hitting the road again in 1993. And it has been touring fairly regularly ever since.

The core members – Fagen and Becker – have remained the constants, and have surrounded themselves with a revolving cast of talented musicians and backing vocalists. “The Dan Who Knew Too Much Tour 2016” features a stellar lineup, what Becker called “the best Steely Dan band we’ve had in our careers.”

The setlist included all the hits and then some: “Black Cow,” “Hey Nineteen,” “Kid Charlemagne,” “Bodhisattva,” “Do it Again,” “Deacon Blues,” Josie” and “Peg” to name a few. The encore was “Pretzel Logic,” the title track from the 1974 album. Noticeably absent from the set was the band’s highest charting single, “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number,” which reached No. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in 1974.

It was the first time I had seen Steely Dan live and the band did not disappoint. And it has been a particular pleasure to go back searching for the Dan’s vintage vinyl at record stores in an effort to revisit its early efforts and gain a further appreciation for what the band brought to that rich music scene of the 1970s.

I got exactly what I hoped for from my first Steely Dan concert. If there was a surprise during the evening – and surprise may not be the correct word given his career accomplishments – it was that the Steely Dan crowd was very much into Steve Winwood as well.

Steve Wijnrood, left, and his band take a bow after their set opening for Steely Dan. (Photo by Mike Morsch)

Steve Wijnrood, left, and his band take a bow after their set opening for Steely Dan.
(Photo by Mike Morsch)

Winwood, also surrounded by a group of stellar musicians, presented a nine-song set and received five standing ovations from the appreciative crowd.

Consider that for a moment. Nine songs, five standing ovations. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen an opening act get that amount of love and respect. Winwood has scheduled 22 dates with Steely Dan this summer.

His set included two songs from his days with the Spencer Davis Group – “I’m the Man” and “Gimme Some Lovin’”; three songs from his time with Traffic – “Pearly Queen,” “Low Spark of High Heeled Boys” and “Dear Mr. Fantasy”; and his No. 1 hit single, “Higher Love,” which topped the charts in 1986 and earned two Grammys for Record of the Year and Best Male Pop Vocal Performance.

“You’re in for a treat when Steely Dan comes out later on,” Winwood said to the adoring throng three songs into his set. “Until then, we’ve got some music for you.”

Boy did he ever.

What wasn’t a surprise, of course, was that an evening with Steve Winwood and Steely Dan was a few hours of high quality entertainment, musicianship and great music. It was a bucket-list kind of a night.

As an aside, I’m always hopeful for an unbilled walk-on at the shows I attend. Every once in a while, Bruce Springsteen will walk on to a Southside Johnny Show. Just recently, Billy Joel did a walk-on with the band Big Shot, which just happens to include several members of his touring band.

The night after the Steely Dan show, right next door to the BB&T Pavilion in Camden, N.J., the town’s Fourth of July celebration was to be headlined by Michael McDonald. In addition to a successful stint with the Doobie Brothers starting in 1976 and a subsequent and equally successful solo career throughout the 1980s and 1990s, McDonald was a member of Steely Dan’s touring group in 1974.

McDonald provided backing vocals on the Dan’s 1975 album “Katy Lied,” the 1976 album “The Royal Scam” and the 1977 album “Aja” (along with Timothy B. Schmit of Poco and the Eagles).

It would not have been out of the question – at least in my mind – that since McDonald was performing the next night 100 yards from the BB&T Pavilion, that maybe he might already be in town, make a guest appearance and lend his voice to some of the Steely Dan hits on which he contributed in the 1970s.

But it didn’t happen, which was OK. Steely Dan and Steve Winwood didn’t need any help giving us our money’s worth.

Powered by WordPress & Theme by Anders Norén