I arrived at IIMC with my music education far from complete. I blame some of that on not being exposed to Joka Bandstand v1986.1.0 – though having to go through CAT to listen to them play seems like a pretty high entrance ticket🧐. Anyway, I remember Joka Bandstand practising for either Inter-IIMs or the IIM-XLRI (can anyone from C22 remind me who was on stage please)…….. I vaguely remember that a tambourine was involved as well. And, the song they played that day was “China Grove”. Being a rock fan, you can imagine the effect of being hit between the ears by that guitar riff for the first time ever. Oh, my God!! It’s one of those riffs, like Smoke On The Water for example, that when you hear the first chord the entire song starts playing in your head!!

Of course, I had no idea what the song was or which band it was by. I remember I stood there watching them rehearse and letting the song soak in, somehow embarrassed to ask the band, so I quietly slunk away. A few days later, as I walking by OH – to or from class I’m not quite sure (the fact that going to class was involved is a big deal by itself 😂) – I heard the OH stereo blasting away China Grove. I rushed in, just as the next track, Listen To The Music started and found the “Best Of The Doobies” sleeve lying there. That image of a juke box on the cover and the pure guitar riff and vocals of Tom Johnston have stayed as an evergreen memory for me, even 35 years later. For weeks after that I would hear the song as I passed by and, somehow, unknowingly fell in love with the song, enough for the song to be on my Classic Rock playlist ever since. However, the Doobies became a distant memory for a long time, till years later, I actually found a CD of the Best Of The Doobies at a record shop in Singapore. Playing it that night back in my hotel room I heard the rest of the tracks for first time – wow! What an underrated band they are!!

Oh, and the lyrics to China Grove are just a bunch of nonsense. Tom Johnston always came up with the music before any lyrics were written and then retrofitted words to the music. With China Grove, he came into the studio one day with the guitar riff and the rest of the music ready to record. While recording the the piano player played a lick which to Tom sounded vaguely oriental. That led to a set of lyrics about a town called China Grove – and – one of the most famous choruses in Rock. It was only years later Tim realised that there actually is a place called China Grove down in Texas that they must have passed through while touring and the name must have stuck in his mind!

The Doobie brothers – Tom Johnston, John Hartman, Patrick Simmons, Tiran Porter and Michael Hossack – came together as a two-drums ensemble in San Jose pretty early in their life. While their music came easy, they had a lot of trouble finding a name for the band. Finally, a friend suggested that, since they smoked a lot of “doobies” – street name for a marijuana joint – they might as well call themselves The Doobie Brothers. The band decided to adopt it as a placeholder till they found a proper name, but the name stuck forever!  

“Listen To The Music” should really adopted as the anthem of the United Nations. One of those rare occasions when Tom Johnston came up with lyrics before the music, he wrote the song back in the days of “peace, man ☮️ ” in the 60s as the Vietnam War was raging. One day he attended a lecture by philosopher Alan Watts and started thinking about how great it would be if all the world leaders got together and hung out on a sunny day on a grassy knoll and listened to music – they just might stop wars and find a way to cooperate for world peace and prosperity. Crazy, right?! Worth trying – absolutely!! Anyway, he wrote some lyrics and sometime later found a guitar lick at 3am one morning and all of a sudden – boom – had a full born song ready to record.

Long Train Running is one of those songs we all know from it’s chorus but never really know what it’s really called – I always thought it was called “Without Love (where would you be now)” 😎.  Which, in this case, to be fair, is not a big deal. After all, the Doobies played this live in bars around San Jose in for over three years without any real lyrics at all or even a real name to the song. It was just a jam that the band played for 30 minutes at a time, with solos by all the band members and some nonsensical lyrics, vaguely mumbled to make it seem like a proper song. Finally, one day their producer insisted that they should record it as a single and Tom was forced into the loo at the studio to come up with some lyrics to the tune. Since it had a vaguely “train on the tracks” beat to it, her wrote the lyrics, called it Long Train Running , and threw in that that one, punch-in-the-guts line “Without love, where would you be right now?”

The Doobie Brothers are one of those rare bands who’s #1 songs – Black Water & What a Fool Believes are perhaps less known today than their popular hits. Black Water is actually one of my favourites. Written and sung by Pat Simmons rather than Tom Johnston, this became the first #1 for the Doobie Brothers. Black Water is a gorgeous song about laid-back life on the Mississippi, sort of channelling Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. Its all about cat fish jumping under a bright moon and the feeling of “ I ain’t got no worries / ‘Cause I ain’t in no hurry at all.”  The best part of the sing is the “a capella” breakdown half way through – I just love it ! Whenever I listen to it I get this really “Peaceful Easy Feeling” if you know what I mean ☺️.