ROLLING STONE: Yacht Rock Babylon
In a spacious suite high above the Las Vegas Strip, Michael McDonald extends his left arm, wiggles his fingers, and glides his arm to his right side. If you didn’t know any better, you’d think he was getting ready for some air piano. But no — he’s actually recalling the day of the floating vomit.
The Seventies were winding down, but no one had told the Doobie Brothers. By 1978, they’d had enough big songs to fill one greatest-hits album already, from choogling rockers like “Long Train Runnin’” and “China Grove” to soul-rooted, McDonald-sung hits like “Takin’ It to the Streets.” Along with gold and platinum records, keys to a city, and the usual on-the-road indulgences, they were also rewarded with their own private plane.
The DoobieLiner wasn’t quite the type of luxurious jet used to fly around Led Zeppelin and Elton John to their shows, but the Martin 404, once used by Eastern Airlines, had coffee tables, reclining chairs, and random copies of Newsweek and Sixteen magazines strewn about; the Doobie logo was painted on its tail. (The Doobie stagehands flew on their own, separate plane, dubbed the CrewbieLiner.) Even better, no one bothered the band members when they were boarding or on board. “You could smoke weed on the plane,” says singer, guitarist, and co-founder Patrick Simmons. “Nobody cared. We had a full bar and drinks and chicks. It was a party in the air, pretty much continuously.” One day, one of the band members even got to fly the DoobieLiner while the pilot watched, and somehow everyone survived.
For their eighth studio album, Minute by Minute, someone had the idea of shooting the band aboard the DoobieLiner — in simulated zero-gravity conditions. Their regular pilot, Sam Stewart, took the plane to 12,000 feet, then nosedived straight down and pulled up again. Even though they’d practiced the process a bunch of times, the Doobies started getting nauseous as they began floating, and McDonald found himself staring at someone’s puke as it wafted by. “There’s nothing worse than someone hurling while there’s zero gravity,” he says. “You’re watching the vomit quiver in midair. Then the gravity goes back into play and it lands on someone.”
Dressed in blue jeans and a flannel shirt, his trademark beard white and his mane white and swept-back, McDonald recounts this tale with a bemused smile. The photo did wind up on the back of the album, but what about the upchuck? “That’s not in the picture,” he adds.
Roughly half a century after they began, the Doobie Brothers are the embodiment of classic-rock respectability. At the time of this conversation with McDonald — the pre-pandemic America of early 2020 — they are in the midst of their first-ever Vegas residency, at the glitzy Venetian Resort. Although McDonald has not been in the band since the early Eighties, he has flown into town to help them prepare for a planned 50th anniversary tour in which he’ll participate. The group is also enjoying the fact that they’ve been voted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, with a ceremony set to take place in Cleveland just before that summer tour.
The Doobies and McDonald were once something of a punchline in rock: Remember the classic SCTV skit in which “McDonald” races in and out of a studio while singing his part on Christopher Cross’ “Ride Like the Wind”? Now, though, the Doobies are having the final chuckle. They have been the subject of a tribute album featuring marquee country artists like Brad Paisley and Blake Shelton; hip-hop acts from the late J Dilla to Meek Mill and Drake have sampled them. Earlier this year, Bernie Sanders rallies would sometimes end with “Takin’ It to the Streets” roaring from speakers. For a band that feels it didn’t even get respect from its record company in the old days (“the rest of us were playing second fiddle to Captain Beefheart,” says founding drummer John Hartman), the recognition is long overdue. To paraphrase one of their album titles: What were once vices are now honors.
But the saga of the Doobies isn’t merely about fame and hit records. Over the course of the Seventies, the Doobies transformed from long-haired biker rockers to shag-cut pop stars — a makeover that doubles as a metaphor for the ways rock was tamed by the end of that decade. After McDonald took over as their most prominent voice, their new style — lightly syncopated rhythms and smooth, high-thread-count production and harmonies — became the definitive example of what’s now known as yacht rock, encompassing everyone from the Doobies and Steely Dan to suave crooners like Boz Scaggs and Kenny Loggins. Given the robust, guitar-driven hits that established them, the Doobies were never 100 percent yacht. But like it or not, they’re now semi-ironically appreciated as pioneers in a cottage industry that spans a YouTube parody series and a satellite-radio channel.
The mellow rock scene of the Seventies was rarely as tranquil as the tunes: James Taylor and Walter Becker grappled with heroin addiction, Loggins lost himself in a tequila bottle, and Dan Peek of America — those “Ventura Highway” and “Sister Golden Hair” guys — partied so hard that he was thrown out of the band.
But in the air or on the ground, little in the world of yacht-rock matches the turbulence of the Doobie Brothers’ story. As unlikely as it may seem for a band that’s given us the smooth white-guy R&B of “What a Fool Believes” and the lazy-day folk-blues singalong “Black Water,” their saga encompasses Hells Angels, explosive devices, and a degree of debauchery more often associated with louder and heavier bands of the time. Their emphasis on note-perfect record-making, a yacht-rock prerequisite, drove each other to the edge of madness. “It’s so funny to get super-high on cocaine and make music like the Doobie Brothers,” says Nicholas Niespodziani, lead singer of the Yacht Rock Revue, a touring genre tribute band that includes more than a few Doobie songs in their repertoire. “It doesn’t quite compute for me. It’s the chillest music to the least chill drug. They were innocuous on the surface, but pretty rock & roll in real life.”
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Written by: David Browne