Doobie Brothers
The Captain & Me

Striking cover for the third record release of the Californian band (year 1973): the quintet is immortalized along with their manager, all six dressed in 19th-century costumes as they ride a carriage with a quadriga, and captured at the foot of one of those stretches of the highway from the Sierra Nevada down to Los Angeles, tragically collapsed here and there following the strong 1971 earthquake.

The album is absolutely among those I am most musically tied to, or rather sentimentally: I was just starting with the guitar back then, and these forty minutes of authentic American rock gave me so many lessons, allowing me a precious, even decisive leap forward in terms of mental openness and guitar awareness. By fortunate inspiration, I agreed to trade with a friend, on par with a very boring LP of the pseudo-jazz pianist Eumir Deodato, this authentic guitar manual (especially acoustic) for self-taught muses.

Until then, I knew the Doobies only superficially, like many, since they had recently stormed radios and discos with their first global hit "Long Train Running", today an evergreen. The fact that this song was included in this record was more than enough to push me to the exchange, which immediately proved to be much more valuable... much of the rest of the songs turned out to be even more engaging and interesting from then on!

Very few in Italy react ecstatically to the art of this band, which blends a good dose of rock with Californian lightness and dry technical prowess, a generous portion of rhythm & blues, episodic but talented forays into country and even into bluegrass, a taste for gospel choirs, the usual precious lessons of jazz, blues, rock'n'roll, and the Beatles. Perhaps because their years of greatest commercial and media success, those of the late seventies, coincide with the most superficial and insipid phase of their discography. Many, way too many, have never experienced what their best period has to offer, which stretches from the second album "Toulouse Street" of '72 to the fifth "Stampede" of '75 (apart from the well-known "Long Train Running" understood by everyone), and even fewer know the last four scattered between the nineties and 2000s, in which a mature and aware restoration of the initial style and approach occurred, with the return of the main singer and songwriter Tom Johnston and a substantial holding of their writing capacity, as well as freshness and energy, enhanced by an exponential increase in class, experience, and measure.

Additionally, being a sincere admirer but also aware of what I consider magical and important about them, I stopped, like many early fans, buying their records and following their career when in 1976, with the entry of the talented but cold and fleeting Michael McDonald, they entered that "pop" phase, which first earned them a colossal amount of money and fame but then led to their breakup in 1982. When they reunited in 1989, with Johnston back at the forefront and reinstating the passionate and brilliant original sound, I enthusiastically started following them again.

The masterpiece of this work, to my taste, is certainly not the famous, super-covered, evergreen funky/rock ode to the Long Train Run, but rather track number five "Clear As The Driven Snow". The "snow" in the title stands for cocaine, and the lyrics deliver yet another warning against its abuse. Patrick Simmons is the composer, author, solo voice, and brilliant conductor on the acoustic guitar, tuned in an unorthodox way by lowering both the low and high E strings to D and fingered with his beloved metal picks slipped on his fingertips. After two verses and choruses, Pat heads off in tangents, painting a fairytale instrumental interlude with harmonics, mutes, chords, and slides: the acoustic flies solo for a while, painting superb rhythmic and melodic patterns, then insistently returns to a low D drone on which Johnston's lead guitar takes off, more and more compelling until involving the two drums in a full-throttle final ride, reverberating with echoes and resonances, stop&go and final bass whimpers. It's five minutes of excellent music: original, ancestral, visionary, and not at all commercial, you might even call it progressive/country.

Simmons repeats himself on the same level with the sublime country rock ballad "South City Midnight Lady", a sweet celebration of a casual love, a number that certainly the "specialist" Eagles would have envied at the time. The inevitable dreamy pedal steel guitar, an instrument which neither guitarist in the group knows how to play, is in the savvy hands of guest Jeff Baxter, then still a member of Steely Dan. This is his first collaboration with the group... he'll join them permanently a couple of years and albums later, only to move on and dedicate himself to something entirely different, indeed! Baxter is, in fact, currently, and has been for many years, a highly-paid consultant to the Pentagon for the United States' missile defense, thanks to his recognized skills as a programmer and designer in the field of computer-controlled trajectory tracking systems! Unbelievable.

Tom Johnston, on his part, does not stop at the Long Train... exploit, adding another irresistible anthem and sing-along, as the Americans say. Inspired by the large Chinese community in San Francisco, the metropolis of reference for the musicians of the group all originating from the Bay Area, "China Groove" decisively kicks off with a famous distorted riff heavy with echo, yet is immediately sprinkled with rock'n'roll by the bouncing little piano of the guest Billy Payne (then with Little Feat). Johnston's nasal and sharp, unmistakable voice full of grit and soul pushes with all its might, powerful choirs color the chorus and inject typically free-spirited and Californian joy and positivity, harmonized double guitars underline in the right places, Johnston's carves out a happy solo and here are four more joyous minutes of playing and singing, replicated at every concert and still relatively easy to hear on the radio today.

Tom Johnston's other compositions, as usual the most prolific and energetic musician of the group, are less epochal: it opens with mid-tempo "Natural Thing" seasoned with the dated sound and, to today's ear, sincerely tender of a pioneering ARP synthesizer (again in the hands of guest Payne). Then there's the paced blues "Dark Eyed Canjun Woman" with Tom's most successful guitar solo. There's also the compact and paced "Ukiah" dedicated to the namesake city, more or less an hour's drive from San Francisco, nestled in a green valley full of vineyards (we are in California's so-called Wine County... decent wines, the best in America but priced like Chianti!), apparently and for some reason dear to the guitarist.

Johnston then reserves a final, half masterpiece, set as a rich and evocative end to the album and to give the whole album its title. "The Captain & Me" (the song) begins seamlessly off the tails of the previous "Ukiah" and is immediately a festival of harmonious acoustic arpeggios. The characteristic choirs arrive punctually on the bridge only to explode fully, steeped in gospel, in the super glorious refrain. At this point, an unexpected drum break hurls the piece into its second part, a super funky affair with more than frantic rhythm, drums running wild in a jam session, guitars furiously strummed with full-arm force and Johnston's voice struggling to cut across the sonic mayhem to sing the final lines.

To conclude, the last three things: two of these are the work of Pat Simmons and extremely different from each other: "Evil Woman" is a sharp and rhythmically unorthodox hard rock track, with a drum rhythm that swallows beats and continuously overturns the accents of the idiosyncratic main guitar riff. The amplifiers are on full blast, the vocal harmonies are veritable fiery balls, almost indigestible in their seventh inversions... we are very far from the absolute palatability of "Long Train Running" and "China Groove" and anyone listening to this music without knowing who it's by would have no chance of associating it with the common image associated with the Doobies. The second, instrumental "Busted Down Around O'Connely Corners" has a title almost longer than its duration: forty-eight seconds of an acoustic fingerpicking duet between the two guitarists, nothing transcendental.

The only track with collective authorship is titled "Without You", a typical composition born from a group jam: guitar riffs and drums pounding the rounded, inevitably melodic Californian quintet's hard rock'n'roll... few fragmented chords due to frequent stops, highlighting cyclically the gritty (and not too inspired) riff, complete with subsequent restarts. A short solo is not missing, this time by Simmons and very predictable with Hendrix-like double stops, until the grand finale with every drum and cymbal type on the loose, making it a classic filler, the least interesting moment on this album otherwise studded with several gems, in my judgement more than excellent overall, but to which I must add my personal, ever-present, touching gratitude.