Dancing down the Middle

By JAY COCKS

The Doobie Brothers rack the hits and stack the charts

Not ten years ago, Paul Freelob ran the neighborhood head shop. His hair was shoulder length, and he called himself Paul Free. He sold rolling paper, black-light posters and patchouli oil across the counter, and something a little more interesting under it. He wore biker boots, denims contoured by Levi, not Seventh Avenue, and diamond-shaped shades in wire frames. His favorite band was the Doobie Brothers, and he could sing all the words to Listen to the Music.

Now the head shop is a freestyle hair salon called the Grin Reapers. Paul has another new name: Lofree. He wears temple-to-temple aviator glasses and designer jeans that inhibit circulation. His shoes are made for jogging, not stomping, and he drives a Japanese sports car. His favorite band is still the Doobie Brothers, and he can sing all the words to What a Fool Believes as he works on a blow-dry.

The apocryphal Mr. Freelob is an archetypal Doobies fan. If he could play a little guitar he could even be a Doobie; even if he couldn't play, some spoilsport critic might suggest, he could still join the band. Paul's personal history is a lot like the band's. The Doobies (the name is San Francisco slang for reefer) started out playing for Hell's Angels and similar roughriding biker types ten years ago, had a couple of random hit singles, endured several massive changes of personnel and finished out the '70s as one of the flushest, smoothest groups in pop rock. The Doobies, in fact, define as well as anyone that median straight down the middle of the road where pop meets rock and the bucks are made.

There is certainly no arguing with the statistics. Minute by Minute (1979) sold 4 million copies and spawned two hit singles. Their new album, One Step Closer, released a month ago, gunned right for the chart tops, packing a hit single, Real Love, right along with it. There is no reason to doubt, either, that there are a few more where that came from. Warner Bros, is projecting an album sale of at least 2 million by Christmas, a figure that can make the middle of the road look like the swankest neighborhood in town.

If you cannot quarrel with the figures, you can certainly pick a fight with the numbers--the songs. From the straight-ahead tunes of their early years, like Listen to the Music, the Doobies have turned fancier, slicker and more synthetic. They were a good singles band that was tuned up and turned into a commercial phenomenon. Producer Ted Templeman did the tuning. When he produced the first Doobies album in 1971, the band was led by Founder Tom Johnston, a hang-tough rocker who wrote many of the group's first hits. Templeman gave the early records an uncluttered, unaffected sound. But as the group started to change, its producer changed with it, and if he did not initiate these changes and new directions, he certainly encouraged them. The Doobies, who over the years have probably had more recruits than the all-volunteer Army, picked up Guitarist Jeff Baxter from Steely Dan, and that group's inverted rhythms, strange melodic breaks and jazzy riffs began, in homogenized form, to seep into the Doobies' music. Johnston dropped out of the group in 1975--accumulated years of hard touring and hard partying had given him an acute case of ulcers --and that same year Baxter suggested another draftee, a Steely Dan tour keyboardist named Michael McDonald.

It was McDonald who wrote the band's first major hit in two years, Takin ' It to the Streets, and helped change the Doobies from journeymen to super stars. McDonald's sprightly, airy tunes telescoped neatly with Templeman's cushy production. The results had hints of funk and disco, discreet jazz inflections and uninsistent horn breaks, and sounded like contemporary nightclub music. McDonald, who professes vast admiration for R & B luminaries like Marvin Gaye and Sam and Dave as well as tunesmiths like Burt Bachrach, says, "I like to write hits. My biggest reason for writing a song is to have it on the radio. It's kind of a Tin Pan Alley approach."

That particular address may be way across town from where the best rock dwells, but the Doobies are flourishing anyway. Guitarist Pat Simmons, the only surviving original Doobie, keeps the group together and resents the oft-repeated criticism that the Doobies are a band musically at war within itself, between the raffishness of the old days and the calculated worldliness of McDonald's songs and his goose-down singing voice. "The Doobies are one band!" he shouted from a concert stage last year. Now, instead of yelling at the audience, he jumps down into the crowd, Springsteen style, and romps among them. Like our old friend Paul Free, he has also had his shoulder-length hair shaped into some thing more modish, just right for the group's appearances on the Dinah Shore show and their own celebrity golf tournament. The Doobies' management has already booked the boys into Las Vegas.

The stage show they are currently touring around the U.S. is a professional and tightly structured turn that could have come straight from the Aladdin, where, indeed, they have appeared eight times. The next time they get to Vegas, the Doobies can look down and see, right at the edge of the ringside seats, Paul Lofree, not caring a bit. And probably singing along too .

--By Jay Cocks

Reported by Robert Goldstein/ Los Angeles

With reporting by Robert Goldstein

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