I don't know if this is of any particular interest to anyone, but I thought I'd share it anyway - feel free to skip it if you're not interested in hearing about my personal relationship to these albums!
I've certainly gone on to enjoy plenty of other music, but the Doobie Bros. was one of the first, if not the first bands, I ever liked as a (very) young kid. My parents had the Doobie Bros. 1976
Best of the Doobies on 8-track tape, and I have distinct memories of being 3, 4, 5 years old listening to it in the family car, and at my grandfather's cottage, where there was also an 8-track player, and hearing the distinct 'clunk' as it switched programs. When you're that young, your attention span is about as short as it can get, and what I loved about that tape was that every song was "good!" I didn't have to endure a whole bunch of songs I didn't like to get back around on the continuous loop to the ones I did enjoy:
China Grove, Long Train Runnin', Jesus is Just Alright, Listen to the Music, Black Water, Rockin' Down the Highway, and so on and so on - every tune a banger, all-killer-no-filler.
I went through several musical phases growing up, and music like the Doobies fell by the wayside: for a long time it was "comedy" music like Weird Al Yankovic and the stuff you'd hear on Dr. Demento's show, and then mostly rap as a teenager, but then I had a kind of musical renaissance in my mid-late teens when I started to realise I actually liked the music that the rap groups I was listening to were sampling more than the actual rap itself, and I started to dig into that and it was then that my musical adventure really began.
I talked about this a bit a few years ago in the Chicago Quadio
thread, as they were the first group I really fell in love with during that period, but the Doobies weren't far behind, and it was actually thanks to discovering quad on the internet that reinvigorated my love for them. I got my hands on a couple of the Q8's, and then DTS CD conversions of all four QRs, and I was just blown away! All the hit songs I remembered from my childhood were there, and the attention to detail in the quad mixes was (and is!) superb: little production flourishes that were so important to the sound are all preserved, like the tape flange effect in
Listen to the Music, for example.
While my attention span as a kid meant I was all about the greatest hits, what really hooked me as an adult was the uniformly high quality of the deep cuts on these albums. I remember when the Chicago Quadio box came out there were quite a few people saying "I don't really know much about them other than their hits" and then subsequently being blown away by how good the albums (and quad mixes) are, and I think the Doobies are equally strong in that regard. For me anyway, this isn't a group where I have to ride the fast forward button - at least not for this group of albums. And at the risk of overhyping the quad mixes, I just have to say that I think that they're amongst some of the best examples of the format, especially
Vices and
Stampede. Over on the 'first look at the box' thread,
@Steel Woole mentioned how breathtaking it is when the quad mix of
Listen to the Music opens up and the bass guitar appears in the rear speakers, and for me that in a nutshell is what makes these mixes great - they do things that are unexpected, but not illogical or nonsensical.
And last but not least on this esoteric ramble, the Doobie Bros. also spurred another new (at the time) hobby for me, collecting promotional posters for artists and albums that I love. Sometime around 2004, just by chance I happened upon an unused promo poster for
Toulouse Street on eBay, and then not too long after found another one for
Vices, and I somehow got it in to my head "
I wonder if I could get a promo poster for every Doobie Bros. album?" The answer to that (after about a decade of collecting) is yes, but like so many hobbies, what starts small grows over time - a lot of poster collectors prize live gig posters above all others, but I really like record store promo posters, because they often seemed to be designed by the same people who did the album covers, so for me the promo posters almost felt like "directors cuts" or "expanded editions" of the artwork I loved in my vinyl collection. What started with just collecting Doobie Bros. posters grew to collecting "just" Doobie Bros, Chicago and Steely Dan, then expanded to Parliament/Funkadelic, and expanded to Black Sabbath, and Led Zeppelin, to eventually there were no real parameters other than if it was groups that I loved. I've never counted my collection but I imagine at this point it probably numbers somewhere between 200 and 250 posters. In recent years I've slowed way down, both because I've managed to get a lot of what I wanted, but also because I realise that at this point I'd basically need an aircraft hangar or school gymnasium to live in if I wanted to display it all, not to mention how much it would cost to have even a small portion of it framed.
Anyway, from that collection here are all my Doobie Bros. promo posters (minus
One Step Closer, which I must've forgotten to photograph) - apologies for a couple of them being a bit blurry, the quality of digital photography (not to mention my own skills in taking them) wasn't as good 10 or 15 years ago as it is these days, but I thought Doobie Bros. fans and people anticipating this release might find them interesting.
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First I got a server error after I entered my credit card info. Then I tried to purchase again, and the site just locked up while still in the cart. Tried multiple browsers. It was always SLOW, but now seems locked up.
I can hardly wait to hear these in glorious Hi-Res. Oh, the code still works for anyone holding off for any reason. I was surprised to get charged tax though so my order came to $72.29 US. Any Canucks get it cheaper or without tax? Not complaining just curious. It is still worth it. I'd end up paying more if they came out as standalones. Hey Alan Parsons, here's a thought...
