The Doobie Brothers The 2024 Tour

The Doobie Brothers The 2024 Tour

he Doobie Brothers had two distinct phases during their 1970s peak, evolving from boogie rockers with a penchant for mellow good vibes into a smooth blue-eyed soul outfit. Subsequent reunions and decades as a successful live attraction blurred the divide between the rambling “Black Water” and funky “What a Fool Believes,” the band’s two number one hits on Billboard. The Doobies racked up numerous other hits in both incarnations, songs that wound up as classic rock perennials. “Listen to the Music,” “Long Train Runnin’,” and “China Grove” were early-’70s hits all written and sung by Tom Johnston, the guitarist who was slowly replaced as frontman by Michael McDonald, a husky-voiced keyboardist who wrote and sang “Takin’ It to the Streets,” “It Keeps You Runnin’,” and “Minute by Minute,” along with “What a Fool Believes.”

McDonald was drafted into the Doobies to help support the ailing Johnston and he wound up steering the band toward slick, soulful soft rock — the kind of music that would retroactively be dubbed “yacht rock.” McDonald’s hits with the Doobie Brothers propelled him into solo stardom and he’d re-enter the band’s orbit after the group reunited with Johnston as the frontman in 1989. They would continue to tour with a rotating lineup into the 2020s, with the core trio of Johnston, John McFee, and Patrick Simmons — the guitarist who wrote and sang “Black Water,” the one constant member in the band’s history — recording the occasional album of new material, such as 2021’s Liberte.

About Robert Cray

The most commercially and critically successful blues artist of his generation, Robert Cray took his music to the upper reaches of the pop and rock charts when many major blues acts were counting their sales in the tens of thousands. On the strength of his breakthrough album, 1986’s Strong Persuader, Cray landed eight singles in the Top 40 of the American Rock Singles charts between 1986 and 1992, with two of them (“Smoking Gun” and “Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark”) rising to number two and number four, respectively. One of the most important things that set Cray apart from his peers on the blues scene in the ’80s and ’90s was his focus on songwriting rather than guitar heroics. While he was an impressively strong player, his soloing was clean and concise for the most part, without excessive showboating, and his songs were more closely related to vintage Southern soul in their storytelling and sense of character than in the typical 12-bar paeans to whiskey and women favored by most blues acts of the era. 1

983’s Bad Influence was the album that first earned Cray a major buzz among blues enthusiasts, while 1986’s Strong Persuader was a near flawless set of songs that made him a star and allowed him to cross over to the mainstream on his own terms. A hard-working performer, Cray recorded and toured steadily once he became a major headliner, and the consistency of style and quality among most of his subsequent albums meant that few were major standouts, but 1993’s Shame + A Sin dug deeper into traditional blues than most of his ’90s efforts, 2001’s Shoulda Been Home saw him giving himself a change to stretch out on guitar, 2010’s Cookin’ in Mobile was a potent document of Cray and his band in concert, he dipped his toes into topical material on 2015’s Nothin’ but Love, and 2017’s Robert Cray & Hi Rhythm was an inspired collaboration with one of the great soul studio bands of the ’70s.