(Credits: Far Out / Warner Brothers)
Mon 24 November 2025 0:00, UK
While perhaps enjoying less presence in the rock and pop memory of today, San Jose’s boogie outfit, The Doobie Brothers, for a moment looked set to join the ranks of Creedence Clearwater Revival, The Band, or even the Eagles in their early country and folk rock stomp during the first half of the 1970s.
Much of their former rootsiness was owed to founding frontman and principal songwriter Tom Johnston. Beginning a series of on-off appearances with The Doobie Brothers, Johnston’s membership in the band would waver precariously following 1975’s Stampede, recurring health issues forcing Johnston away from live shows and full commitment to studio sessions.
In need of a replacement, the band looked to Steely Dan’s regular backing vocalist, Michael McDonald, to prop up the struggling band and chart a new creative course.
With McDonald’s entry into The Doobie Brothers’ fold came a distinctly new sound. A blue-eyed soul boy at heart, his LP debut on 1976’s Takin’ It to the Streets immersed in a smoother pool of soft rock sunshine, caramel vocal harmonies, and glittering brass blasts. For better or worse, the yacht genre was forged there and then, coasting the rejuvenated Doobies toward their second pop resurrection.
1978’s Minute by Minute would yield the most success they’d enjoyed in years, topping the Billboard 200 largely off the back of its lead single. Equally topping the US singles charts, the canonical ‘What a Fool Believes’ would sail straight to the affections of their new fanbase, if alienating the old ‘biker rockers’, delivering a relaxed languor of loose Oberheim synth ripples and stirring strings providing the perfect score to relax by the pool, sipping a Blue Hawaii or Piña colada for good measure.
Such a seemingly effortless soft rock jam was anything but chill when cutting in Hollywood’s Warner Bros Recording Studios, however. Having worked out ‘What a Fool Believes’ basic hook with co-writer Kenny Loggins, who would release his own version five months before, the sessions would prove a nightmare; the Doobie team never quite nailing a version they were happy with.
Desperate times call for desperate measures. In a moment of creative exasperation, and just after he had joined Keith Knudsen on drums to shake the sessions up, producer Ted Templeman strode into the control room and began cutting the boxes of tapes stacked as high as the ceiling to assemble their individual tracks, a risky move back in the pre-digital days.
They needn’t have worried. Finishing the single with McDonald’s final arrangements, the ‘What a Fool Believes’ experience was so stressful that Templeman still wasn’t entirely convinced of the smash he held in his hands. “I went over to Warner Bros and into a meeting with all these hitmakers and old pros,” he recalled to The Guardian in 2022. “’This thing is a piece of crap,’ I said, ‘but I’ll play it for you anyway’”. I was just about ready to throw it away. And they said: ‘Are you crazy? That’s great!’”
The Doobie Brothers had won a global chart topper and an even greater degree of fame all off the back of ‘What a Fool Believes’, standing as a live staple from then on and enduring as one of the key numbers of the LA songbook. Through it all, Templeman was never quite able to believe it: “Even when we went to collect the Grammy for ‘Song of the Year’ in 1980, I was thinking: ‘How did this happen?’”
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