Here to Love You

You drop the needle on Minute by Minute and the first thing that meets you is not a riff from the biker-bar years. It is a piano, a voice with that low burn in it, and a promise. "Here to Love You" opens the eighth Doobie Brothers album the way a good freeform jock opens a set: no announcement, just the song that tells you which version of the band you are about to spend the next half hour with. Michael McDonald wrote it. Michael McDonald sings it. Three minutes and fifty-eight seconds, and the San Jose rock outfit that once kicked out "China Grove" and "Long Train Runnin'" has walked all the way into blue-eyed soul without apologizing for the trip.

The record came out on Warner Bros. on December 1, 1978. Ted Templeman produced it, the same man who had been in the chair since the beginning. Donn Landee engineered. They cut it at Warner Bros. Studios in North Hollywood and mixed it at Sunset Sound in Hollywood, with Loyd Clifft helping on the engineering side and Bruce Cohn still handling the management. The lineup on the sleeve is the one that defined the late seventies edition of the band: Patrick Simmons on guitar and vocals, Michael McDonald on keyboards, synthesizers and vocals, Jeff "Skunk" Baxter on guitar, Tiran Porter on bass and vocals, John Hartman on drums, Keith Knudsen on drums and vocals. Bobby LaKind, who had come up through the lighting crew, is on congas and vocals. Rosemary Butler, the session singer who also turns up on "Dependin' on You," stacks the backgrounds on this one. Tom Johnston, the co-founder whose voice had carried the early hits, is down to a single guest vocal, on Pat Simmons's "Don't Stop to Watch the Wheels." It was the last studio album with Hartman until Cycles, and the last with Baxter.

"Here to Love You" was never the single that broke the album. That job belonged to "What a Fool Believes," the McDonald and Kenny Loggins song that followed it on side one and went to number one. The title track, written with Lester Abrams, followed that into the Top 20. "Dependin' on You," split between McDonald and Simmons, made the Top 30 with Pat out front. The opener sat on the record and did its quieter work, setting the temperature before the hits arrived. Warner Bros. finally pulled it as a single in early 1982, off Best of the Doobies, Volume II, catalog number 50001. It peeked at number 65 on the Billboard Hot 100 and number 72 on Cash Box, six weeks in the Cash Box listings, the kind of late chart life a deep cut gets when a greatest-hits package sends people back to the album. On a station that still plays albums, that is not a demotion. That is the song you reach for when the request line wants the Doobies and you are not in the mood to hand them the same two tracks they already know by heart.

To hear why the opener sounds the way it does, you have to go back to San Jose in 1970. Tom Johnston and drummer John Hartman had been knocking around the South Bay, introduced through Moby Grape guitarist Skip Spence, trying to build something with the snap of that band and the drive of the rhythm-and-blues shows Johnston had been playing since his teens in Visalia. Patrick Simmons, born in Aberdeen, Washington, and already a fixture in the local clubs on folk, blues and his own songs, fell in with them. Bassist Dave Shogren completed the original four. A housemate tossed out the name as a joke, Doobie being the local slang for a joint, and it stuck harder than any of the serious names they tried. The first album arrived in 1971. Tiran Porter replaced Shogren. A second drummer, Michael Hossack, gave them the double-kit thump that became a signature. "Listen to the Music," "Jesus Is Just Alright," "Long Train Runnin'," "China Grove" and the a cappella-into-swamp-groove of "Black Water," their first number one in 1975, made them a national act. They were a guitar band, two and then three guitars, harmony vocals, a road reputation built in clubs before the sheds ever opened.

The turn came when the road caught up with Johnston. Ulcers took him off the '75 tour. Baxter, who had come over from Steely Dan in 1974 and brought a session player's ear with him, pointed the band at a keyboard player he already knew from the Dan sessions: Michael McDonald, out of St. Louis, a singer who could sit in the pocket and a writer who heard suspensions where other people heard barre chords. He was supposed to be temporary. He sang "Takin' It to the Streets" for Templeman and the temporary tag came off. The 1976 album of that name is the hinge. Livin' on the Fault Line in 1977 pushed further into the jazz and soul colors and did not hand them a hit. Minute by Minute, worked on for the better part of a year between stretches of live dates, is where the new lineup cashed in. Simmons was still the man the others looked to in the room. McDonald was the one writing and singing the songs radio could not get off the turntable.

The album spent five weeks at number one on the Billboard 200 in the spring of 1979. At the Grammys the following year the Doobies walked out with Record of the Year and Song of the Year for "What a Fool Believes," and Best Pop Vocal Performance by a Duo or Group for the Minute by Minute album, which was also up for Album of the Year. The title song took its own pop vocal Grammy and lost Song of the Year to the band's other track. Four trophies from a single ceremony is the kind of sweep that freezes a band in a particular photograph. The photograph is McDonald at the Rhodes, Simmons still holding the guitar chair he has never given up, Baxter on his way out, Hartman on his way out, the old boogie band and the new soul band sharing a sleeve.

Listen to the opener with that in mind and it stops sounding like a warmup. The lyric is a man showing up, not a man explaining himself. McDonald's melody sits in the same neighborhood as the hits that follow it, major chords leaning on color tones, a verse that could have come off a Steely Dan session and a chorus built for a band that still knew how to stack voices. Porter's bass does the talking the old dual guitars used to do. Knudsen and Hartman keep it from floating off into the wallpaper. Butler's harmony is the lift on the title line. It is a love song that does not beg and does not swagger, which is exactly the register McDonald was writing in when he sat down with Loggins for the next track on the side. Play them in sequence, the way the album asks you to, and the side tells one story: a man who is here, a man who was wrong, a man taking it one small measure at a time.

The band did not stay in that photograph. Baxter and Hartman were gone by One Step Closer. The farewell tour came in 1982, with a live album behind it. A 1987 benefit for Vietnam veterans at the Hollywood Bowl sold out faster than anything there since the Beatles, and the reunion stuck. Cycles in 1989 put Johnston back up front and gave them "The Doctor." McDonald built a solo career on "I Keep Forgettin'," "Sweet Freedom" and the Patti LaBelle duet "On My Own," and kept circling back. The Doobie Brothers went into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2020. The lineup that made Walk This Road, with Simmons, Johnston, John McFee and McDonald, is the one still taking the old book and the later book out on the same stage.

That is the long way around to a song that lives in the first groove of side one. "Here to Love You" is the doorway. The hits are the rooms everybody remembers. On this station we play the doorway too, because the album is the point, and because a band that could start a number-one record with a McDonald ballad and still be the same band that cut "Black Water" is the whole argument for album rock. The Doobies keep the road warm, and the catalog keeps answering.

The band's own site is thedoobiebrothers.com, with tour dates and the new record posted there. Their official Facebook is facebook.com/thedoobiebrothers, the official Instagram is @doobiebrothersofficial, and the official X account is @TheDoobieBros. Fans compare notes in The Doobie Brothers Fans Club, and the long-running unofficial readers' archive lives at db-fans-site.hippy.jp. You are hearing all of this on THE ZOO, listener-supported, commercial-free, the station that still plays the album and not just the single.