The Doobie Brothers – What A Fool Believes

I don’t believe I was really aware of The Doobie Brothers until they turned up on the soundtrack to the film “FM”. I have never seen that movie (the plot summary on Wikipedia suggests a fairly pedestrian rebellion story that I probably would have loved when I was 14), but I did own the double album soundtrack, likely thanks to one of my memberships in Columbia House. Owning it was an easy way to get recent hits by a bunch of artists I liked – Steve Miller Band, Foreigner, Bob Seger – without buying the 45s, and it was absolutely the first place I ever encountered Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers. And right in the mix, as the opening track to side four, were The Doobies and their 1976 top 40 tune “It Keeps You Runnin’”.

If you’ve been reading along at all, you would expect this to be the place where I say that a lifelong love of the band began then and there. But this is not that story. Truthfully, the song made very little impression on me: the band’s variant on boogie rock just wasn’t where my ears were in 1978. (See here, here and here, among others, for examples of what I favoured.) So, when they had a monster hit in 1979 with “What A Fool Believes”, it was just another decent pop song that I enjoyed but formed no great attachment to. That’s how music works: you can’t fall in love with everything. Even when the song took the major Grammy categories in early 1980, it didn’t lead to any reconsideration. The band had a few more lesser hits, then broke up in 1982. If it weren’t for former lead singer Michael McDonald being a constant chart presence over the next few years, I might have forgotten them entirely.

My first name is of Greek origin and means farmer. My last name is French and means pear tree. So it was something akin to nomenclatural destiny that I became – this is absolutely true – a pear farmer in the mid to late 1980s. From April 1986 to October 1988, I worked for a vineyard and orchard maintenance company, helping the farmers of the Niagara region of Ontario get their pears, apples, peaches, plums, grapes and other produce off the trees and vines and on to be processed or otherwise directed towards the marketplace. It was hard work that didn’t pay all that well, but I was incredibly fit – easily the closest I’ve ever come to being even remotely buff – and had a glorious year-round tan from working outdoors (winter wind burn counts, people). I spent hours of every day working on my own, listening to music and enjoying the outdoors. There were a lot of things that I was trying to work out in my life, but I was pretty satisfied – save for the pay – with my employment right then.

My employer was a man named Bernard, who was maybe 10 years older than me. When it came to listening to music, Bernard was a purist of a most unusual sort: everything he owned was stored on reel-to-reel tapes, which he played on a monstrously-sized yet surprisingly portable machine. He thought the sound was better, and since I typically listened to music on a cheap plastic stereo or some low cost Walkman variant I had picked up at Consumers Distributing, I was not in a position to argue the point. Bernard loved The Doobie Brothers. He did not love Michael McDonald. To his ears, The Doobies’ glory years ended in 1976, when McDonald started sharing lead vocals with Tom Johnston. “What A Fool Believes” might as well not even exist.

(Commercial reel-to-reel players are still a thing, and while I’ve seen new models going for over $12,000, there are lots of used versions on eBay and elsewhere. I could at this very moment walk into a store not a 10-minute drive away and trade some $1,600 for a used one from TEAC if I so desired, though why would I do that?)

Co-written by McDonald and Kenny Loggins, the song actually showed up first on Loggins’ 1978 album “Nightwatch”. The Doobies’ version was an anomaly, one of the few non-disco tracks to top the charts in 1978/79, and that it managed to pop and become a hit in that context says something about the record. It’s still unbearably catchy – from the first bar, the keyboard almost demands that you start humming along. We’re not reinventing the wheel here: that I can listen to it over and over to write this piece is because it’s a sort of musical wallpaper, comforting and unchallenging. And it never wavers – the backing track barely changes from start to finish. It’s a pretty conventional pop song – I won’t even call it pop/rock, since I can’t clearly hear anything that resembles an electric guitar, and while there is probably a real drum in there somewhere, I defy you to find it. It definitely qualifies as yacht rock, but it feels more like a sort of white guy funk, which is very low on the scale of genre coolness.

And what’s it about? I have to be honest here – I never cared, I just figured it was about a guy deceiving himself about his relationship with a woman. The lyrics are sort of vague (why is she apologizing?), and force you to pay attention to certain nuances, which I absolutely had not done, and it doesn’t help that McDonald sometimes sounds like he is singing with a few walnuts tucked away in his cheek pouches. I now see that it’s about two former lovers where one partner hopes to rekindle things while the other is merely being nice. Again, nothing earth-shattering.

Although Loggins got there first, the tune is a rather slight confection in Ken’s (as he went by on the record’s credits) hands, and not a recording that would give the slightest impression of glory ahead. I would blame it on Loggins’ lack of funk were it not for Complex ranking him as the 25th funkiest white boy in music history in a 2013 article. (McDonald was not ranked.) Let’s just call it an honest misstep. When Aretha Franklin covered it brilliantly in 1980, she followed the Doobies’ template, but with the funk dialled up to 10.

I last spoke to Bernard a short time after I left his employ in 1988: he was my boss, not my friend, and I was at the time also running away from his faith, which I had realized I didn’t share. His firstborn, still a toddler when I knew him, is staring down his 40th birthday, which makes me feel unbearably old. Googling Bernard this past weekend was not a satisfying experience, as I learned that he passed away in September 2019. (I have got to stop turning over these old rocks.) He and wife were together 38 years, and ultimately had five children together. And he continued to work in vineyard and orchard maintenance until, it seems, ill health took that away. Bernard loved being outdoors, loved the sun and the fresh air, and even the blast of a January wind across a wide open field of barren grape vines couldn’t break him. He was a very spiritual man, and I expect he was disappointed when I turned out not to be, or at least not his type of spiritual. He wouldn’t have forgiven me for that choice, and I never expected him or anyone else to: I knew that was a consequence of walking away. I do hope, however, that he forgave Michael McDonald for ruining his favourite band: as redemptive acts go, I think “What A Fool Believes” is a pretty good listen.