Continuing the Doobie Brothers/Michael McDonald rabbit hole that I fell into earlier in the week, I stumbled upon this very long Rick Beato interview of Michael McDonald, that was posted around the time when McDonald had published his memoir, What a Fool Believes. I’m a real sucker for stories about the creative process and folks with lots of talent who stumble into success. I remember a roommate coming home with the “Minute-By-Minute” LP and sheepishly offering the excuse that he’d heard that it was a great album to listen to with headphones (I guess he was a bit embarrassed to be “caught” buying a Doobie Brothers album…. Evangelicals in the late 1970s were such a weird bunch). Checking my iTunes playlist, apparently I didn’t bother purchasing any Doobies or McDonald until I got a two-record Greatest Hits set much much later. 

It’s a real long interview, but it covers so much great music and how different the music business apparently was in the 1970s and 80s, when artists, producers and AR guys had a say on what the single was and when singles and albums actually mattered. Also of note is the part of the conversation where McDonald comments that he couldn’t imagine going to his label with a demo of a song using a Sting song but his own lyrics recorded on top of it. For coders, I guess the comparison is like you work in assembly language and some guy doing vibe coding assumes that you’re doing the same thing. It’s different when you fingers are at the piano keys or guitar strings and not computer keyboard or voice prompts to an AI. Okay, enough with the old man rants…. Here’s the two SC-TV skits referred to in the interview, beginning with the “Over-Booked McDonald Running from Session to Session,” and ending with the Doobies Sell Carpeting skit. Click the links below for your own Michael McDonald rabbit hole. Enjoy and have a blissful weekend. JBB

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Tags: 1970s music, Michael McDonald, Rick Beato, The Doobie Brothers, video Fridays

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