A few days back, we looked at the band Love, a band unusual in its time for being bi-racial. Today, we remember a good day for another bi-racial band from California – the Doobie Brothers.
In the early-’70s, CCR were a band out of the Bay Area in California which struck gold by sounding decidedly like something out of the southern swamps. A few years later, the Doobies, another Bay Area band found it to be a key to their success as well. They had their first #1 single on this day in 1975 with the decidedly un-Californian sounding “Black Water.”
Formed about five years prior and originally rather a rough-cut bar band, the Doobies had prior success with singles like “Listen to the Music” and “Long Train Runnin'” . But months after their fourth album What Were Once Vices Are Now Habits was released, it appeared to be flopping for them. The first two singles (“Eyes of Silver” and “Another Park, Another Sunday”) met with little interest…but then some Virginia station flipped over the latter single and found the B-side, and liked what he heard. so too did his listeners, and soon that B-side, “Black Water” was their most popular tune yet. As Tom Johnston of the band noticed about a decade back, the organic, region by region success “could have happened back then but never could happen now…(a radio station in) Roanoke, Virginia, picked the tune up, started playing it…somebody in Minneapolis who knew somebody in Roanoke heard it and decided to follow suit”. Soon it was a hit in a few cities, and in weeks it became their biggest A-side until 1979’s “What A Fool Believes”.
“Black Water” differs from most of their other singles in that it was written and sung by Patrick Simmons, whereas most of their early stuff was created and sung by Tom Johnston. Simmons found inspiration for the song when they went to New Orleans and “the way of life and vibe really connected with me,” saying the song was “my childhood imaginings of the South from reading Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer.”
Like a long train, the Doobies are still runnin’. They put out their 15th studio album, Liberte, last fall and have a number of shows coming up this spring in Las Vegas and as Simmons, Johnston and Michael McDonald (the voice of “What A Fool Believes”) are with them now, they should sound quite true to their ’70s originals.
A Sound Day 
Black Water is the song I’ll always remember them by. I never was a huge fan but I did like Black Water a lot. Hard to believe it was a B side.
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And Max takes the words right outta my mouth again! Who woulda thunk it?
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We catch the same wavelength many times…
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A very good song. I liked the vast majority of their singles but was never a gigantic fan of theirs… I should get a decent GH album or theirs though some time. Odd coincidence that both posts yesterday were basically ’70s hits that “made” the band that weren’t even supposed to be singles!
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Yes…good ole B sides…I always listened to the B side.
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me too…occasionally I’d buy a single when I already had it on the LP if there was a new song on the b-side and I liked the artist well enough.
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Nothing more to add Dave, except the fact that , no, this sort of DJ/ listener interest doesn’t happen any more because the DJs are now cyphers, instructed to play by rote the lists that the computerised algorithm besotted Geeks have deemed worthy of maximising the listening pleasure/potential advertising revenue stream of the audience. No time to take a chance on the flip side, we gotta stick with the big numbers/bucks now and keep playing the perennial Bohemian Rhapsodies, the latest barfworthy Bieber single, whatever the bubbly ffff- effervescent Tay Tay is dishing out today.,Which is why the music now sounds so soulless. Which is why people don’t listen. Which is why people switch off. Oh, I’ve ranted again. Sorry Dave!
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LOL, rant on, rant on! Very true – those really were the good old days when radio mattered and one DJ with a following and a bit of curiosity could single-handedly create a hit record… and when we heard a lot of variety on air. Of the local stations I usually listen to here, I think only one of three has real DJs, in person, in studio, most of the day. The other two do have a morning guy but besides that it’s all syndicated shows taped way in advance … at times I’ve heard their bits repeated… it becomes obvious if they mispronounce a word or stutter accidentally and do the same two days later over the same song.
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Pretty stellar B side Dave!
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sure is… it’s easy to imagine how a band can mis-choose the single, but you’d think WB would do better and be able to predict what would work to boost sales, but apparently they weren’t always on top of that.
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