Michael McDonald's high times with The Doobie Brothers: ‘I'd done a pretty good job of screwing up'

Telegraph

6 days ago

Fifty years ago this spring, the 23-year-old known to everyone on the Los Angeles recording session scene as Mike McDonald got the call that would change his life. And the listening pleasure of two, maybe three, generations.
The instantly-recognisable vocalist who would become the de facto captain of the good ship Yacht Rock was about to set sail on a musical journey that, as a member of The Doobie Brothers and a solo artist, would net him five Grammys; an induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame; another induction into the Songwriters Hall of Fame; and a truly beloved status as the writer and/or singer of stone-cold classics such as What a Fool Believes, I Keep Forgettin' (Every Time You're Near), Ya Mo Be There (with James Ingram) and, with Patti Labelle, On My Own. Not to mention, in another AOR staple, Christopher Cross's Ride Like the Wind, a walk-on part – well, single lyrical line – that's still shouted at him to this day.
But half a century ago, all that was a long way off. Only a fool would have believed that, in 2025, The Doobie Brothers – McDonald, Patrick Simmons, Tom Johnston, John McFee – would be playing a 50th anniversary tour (it reaches the UK in July) and releasing a rocking new album, Walk This Road (out in June), the first by the foursome in 40 years.
The offer in April 1975 from an LA muso mate was simple if challenging. Did McDonald fancy filling in on vocals and keyboards with a California boogie band who'd outgrown their roots in the biker bars in the hills of Santa Cruz and San Jose and were now, courtesy of monster hits Listen to the Music and Long Train Runnin', one of the biggest touring outfits in the world? It was, to be clear, a temporary gig with a multi-vocalist band promoting their fifth album, Stampede. And he'd have to fly to New Orleans. Tomorrow. And go straight into two days of rehearsals to learn the set-list. Then, at Shreveport, hit the road.
Still, it might have more prospects than his other current gig, as a studio backing vocalist for Steely Dan.
'I felt like I'd just been thrown out of a window – and hadn't hit the ground yet,' McDonald remembers of the minutes before curtain-up on his opening night in Louisiana with The Doobie Brothers. His piano was festooned with Post-Its, reminders of the notes, chords and lyrics he had to perform. 'I realised that I didn't remember the songs nearly as well as I thought I had.'
But as soon as the house lights went down and the audience roar went up, for the newbie – who'd been drafted in to make up for the absence of guitarist/lead singer Johnston, out after five gigs on the tour through excess and illness – the rush was immediate. 'It felt like I was strapped to the hood of a Fifties vintage Buick going down the highway at 80 miles an hour. it was a thrill and a terror all at once,' says McDonald with a chuckle. 'Somewhere in the middle of the show, it was becoming a blur.'
Eventually, guitarist/co-vocalist Simmons introduced him to the audience. 'It was a tepid response, because they had no idea who the hell I was. 'On piano, Michael McDonald!' And so, from that night on, my name became Michael McDonald.'
Later that year, he made his presence felt in the studio. With McDonald now a full-time member, The Doobie Brothers recorded his composition Takin' It to the Streets, a jazzy, soft-rock groover blessed with the creamy, soulful R&B vocals of the white kid from St. Louis. In that moment The Doobie Brothers were reborn. McDonald became fundamental to their sound, a change that reached its peak in 1978 when they recorded What a Fool Believes, a co-write from McDonald and his friend Kenny Loggins. It became an American Number One and would go on to win the Grammys for Song and Record of the Year.
The Doobies gig was a much-needed break for McDonald. He'd come to LA from the Midwest in August 1970 in time-honoured fashion: to make it in music. And, certainly, eventually, after an abortive solo album project, the big-ish time beckoned. In 1973 he went from playing Wurlitzer for teen idol David Cassidy on his single Daydreamer (a British number one) to auditioning for Steely Dan, the East Coast intellectuals and proper musos who were busy reinventing what Seventies rock could be. It was a ridiculous-to-the-sublime moment. But for the jobbing musician, that was the MO: a gig's a gig.
'Yeah,' nods McDonald as he Zooms in from his long-term home in Santa Barbara, California, that career-long beard now a Christmassy white but that soul-man charisma very much undimmed at age 73. 'I always marvel at the fact that Stephen Stills tried out for The Monkees! And didn't pass the audition! I guess he was a little too rough around the edges or something. But for the grace of God go all of us…'
McDonald, however, did pass his audition for Steely Dan, the band centred on Walter Becker and Donald Fagen. He wound up singing backing vocals on Bad Sneakers, Peg and many more, and joining them on tour. In fact, Fagan revealed last year, McDonald was almost too good.
'There was a serious discussion about whether Mike should replace me as a lead singer in Steely Dan, which would have been my personal preference,' Fagan said in a contribution to a profile of McDonald tied to the publication of his memoir, also titled What a Fool Believes. 'But for some dumb reason, I was voted down. I didn't insist, and have regretted it ever since. I mean, here's this monster singer, a musician, and he's also really funny and a sweetheart of a guy. What's not to like?'
Was he aware of that backroom plotting to enthrone him as the face of Steely Dan? 'No, I wasn't!' he replies, laughing. 'Donald is one of my favourite people on earth… Him and Walter were hysterical, you know? But to this day, whenever I work with Donald, I become that 19-year-old kid on stage. If he looks up and glances in my direction, I'm all but sure I'm getting fired in that moment. I tense up in all the wrong places.'
Equally, he can't believe that we're all still talking like this. 'It's amazing to me that all these years later – and I don't think any of us would have ever bet on this – that in our 70s we'd be, once in a while, still taking the stage together, the way we did when we were twentysomething years old.'
McDonald has more reason than most rockers of his vintage to feel that way. His book opens like this: 'I'm getting fingerprinted and processed – for the second time this week.' It's 1971, the musician is in jail in Van Nuys, and this is his 'third or fourth interaction with LA County's finest that year. I'd lost track… This time I was pulled in after falling asleep in a booth at Du-par's pancake house following a 48-hour marathon party-for-two with a female friend, walking the tightrope between a cocaine binge and copious amounts of Jack Daniel's.'
This, he acknowledges to me now, was indicative of what his life was like as a 19-year-old not long arrived in LA.
'It was becoming more of that and less of what I had gone out there to do. What had literally been laid in my lap, as far as an opportunity,' he says of the early buzz around town about the young Midwesterner's musical talents. 'I'd done a pretty good job of screwing up. I remember thinking: am I going to be one of those guys who came out here with all the best intentions, but who winds up spending a good part of the rest of his life in institutions like prison? I knew that this was not boding well for my future. And that I needed to somehow get a grip on myself.'
It would take McDonald the best part of a decade-and-a-half to get that grip. His book details several misadventures, including a blackly comic moment when, sharing an apartment with Becker (who wrestled with heroin addiction), the pair attempted to make a small fortune on a cocaine deal – only to pre-squander the profits by getting very high on their own supply. McDonald would eventually go drug-free in the mid-Eighties after suffering grand mal seizures.
'I increasingly was frightened by the prospect that all the willpower in the world was not going to save me from myself,' he reflects of high old days that, to be fair, were characteristic of the LA music scene in the Seventies and Eighties. 'That I had a malady that wanted to kill me. To this day, I find that any place I sit in a chair sober, my disease is out in the parking lot doing push-ups, waiting for me to lose that much conscious state of mind about what my real problem is, and what is at the centre of my existence. Which are my addictions. My propensity to addiction.
'I had to learn that the hard way,' he continues, 'like most people do. But in the process, I was given some great fortune, in spite of myself, that has more to do with what my career [became]. I don't think I'd be here if it wasn't for sobriety. I think I would have passed away a long time ago. I'm all but sure of that.'
On August 1, McDonald will be 39 years sober. 'It seems like a blur, it really does… My life is better today than it was a week ago. I don't know how that works. But I know it [is] by virtue of me not picking up a substance, one day at a time.'
Not that his demons dimmed his abilities, or his work-rate. In 1979, the year What a Fool Believes topped the charts in the US, he recorded backing vocals on the title track of Elton John's Victim of Love album. And, at the behest of another LA studio contact, he also laid down, as he writes in What a Fool Believes, 'a line or two' on a new song for a new artist. Was it apparent in the studio that Ride Like the Wind and Christopher Cross were both going to be big?
'Um, you know, it was such a fast and furious thing,' replies avuncular, easygoing McDonald. 'It was like: 'Come on in, this won't take more than half an hour. You've just got to sing two parts.' But I remember thinking: 'This is a clever song.' It felt like a hit. And it piqued my interest about Christopher. We became friends in that moment and have remained friends to this day.'
Interviewed together, Cross and McDonald made for an engaging double-act in HBO's brilliant 2024 Yacht Rock film. It was a, if you will, 'DOCKumentary', as it was subtitled, about the ironic-not-ironic love for the genre of easygoing, exquisitely produced, mostly West Coast American rock from the Seventies and Eighties.
'Oh, yeah, it was funny,' he cheerfully agrees of the film (Cross's daughter was one of the producers). To McDonald's credit, he takes the Yacht Rock appellation in the spirit in which it's intended. Certainly there's a whiff of satirical mockery, baked into the genre from its coinage in an online video series from 2005. But that fades next to the genuine appreciation for the songcraft, musicianship and, yes, peerless vocals that characterise the genre.
'Some of my compatriots do not like the moniker at all, and bristle,' he acknowledges, as aware as anyone of the film's last word: a curt Donald Fagen hanging up on the director with a 'Why don't you go f–– yourself?' (Fagen did nonetheless allow six Steely Dan songs to be used in the film.)
'And I get that. Everybody has a different dog in that race. But I was always a big fan of pop music, so I never bristled at the idea that I wasn't a rock god. I don't mean that disparagingly about any of my friends,' he adds, 'because they were rock gods. Toto were one of the ultimate rock bands of the '70s. The Doobies also, but the guys in Toto played on every conceivable record you could imagine,' he notes of a discography that, for guitarist Steve Lukather and drummer Jeff Porcaro, includes, amongst myriad others, appearances on Michael Jackson's Thriller.
'Just to be counted in among those artists – Toto, Steely Dan, The Eagles, whoever is considered Yacht Rock – I feel a great sense of pride. Those were the guys that I look up to no less now than I did back in the Seventies. So I'm proud to be counted among the Yacht Rock crew!'
Still, the snark persists, with one take being that Yacht Rock is the preserve of old rich white guys, the Jeff Bezos set, the actual yacht-owning class. Is McDonald on board with that?
He laughs gamely. 'I think that's a stretch, because I'm not so sure that those guys like us any more than anybody else! But it had great comic value,' he agrees. 'When those original viral videos came out, my kids were quick to make me sit down and watch them with them. So I had to get into the comic value of it all early on.
'I can't count how many times some drunk has stumbled out of a bar as I walked by, singing [Ride Like The Wind line] 'got such a long way to go', doing his Michael McDonald imitation!' he adds, laughing again. 'I always tell my son: when your music becomes less relevant, your pathetic comic value might come in handy. [And my kids] have punished me with every take on me, from Family Guy to Rick Moranis,' he says – the former a reference to McDonald's appearance in the cartoon in 2008, the latter a reference to a sketch-show skit, both of which riffed on the in-demand McDonald's ubiquitousness. 'I feel oddly honoured by it all!'
McDonald's down-to-earth nature has been a constant; the singer has always been unafraid to apply his supreme skills to the supremely silly. In the 2009 episode of sitcom 30 Rock titled Kidney Now!, McDonald is part of the all-star musical line-up singing on a charity song to raise money for a kidney transplant. 'This country has 600 million kidneys / and we really only need half,' he sings with typical eyes-closed sincerity. 'That means about 300 million kidneys / You do the math.'
He also turned the earnestness up to 11 for 1999's South Park movie. For the soundtrack he sang Eyes of a Child, a faux loving hymn to the magic of children, their angelic innocence meaning 'they've yet to realise the bastards they really are'.
'Oh yeah!' McDonald says with a chuckle. 'I was doing the vocal, and [co-writers] Trey [Parker] and Marc [Shaiman] were sitting in a chair in the control room writing lyrics that were ever more awful. And I kept saying: 'Guys, I can't sing that! That's pathetically awful.''
Which makes you wonder about the lyrics that didn't get used. 'I remember, at the time, [my wife and I] trying to get our kids into a youth group at the church that we decided we needed to attend so that they wouldn't grow up total pagans,' McDonald continues. 'And it was a failed experiment at best – nobody knew that better than my kids,' he notes wryly. 'But after that song came out, I remember thinking you could hear a pin drop whenever we walked into one of the church services.'
Fifty years on from that Shreveport try-out, Michael McDonald remains in good humour, good voice and a good part of the magic of The Doobie Brothers. As much is in evidence in Walk This Road, on which McDonald takes lead vocal on four tracks. As Pulp have managed this month but Oasis aren't even bothering risking, the Doobies' new album achieves that trickiest of feats for the revenant rock stars on the comeback trail and anniversary victory lap: it builds on their legacy without trashing it. McDonald gets that.
'The two things that I was most in fear of losing were: that instantaneous feeling of passion when we performed live. And that place you go to when you're singing a song you've sung 1000 times…
'You renegotiate with all that stuff as you get older. On the road now, I laugh and accept the fact that sleeping in a bunk on a tour bus at 73 is no picnic. And [that I'm going to be] worrying about things like: where are my hearing aids? Did I leave them in a restaurant? '
None of which, though, is important as long as 'when I get on the stage with those guys, I sense that we're 19 again. In that moment, all that matters is between us and the audience. If so, then I have some business to still be there.'
And Michael McDonald knows exactly how to find that moment. 'People always ask me: 'Why do you close your eyes when you sing?' Well, there's a place I like to go to. A place to remove myself to, where it's just me in the song. I know the audience is out there. I know who I'm talking to. I know it's all about this moment. I don't want to ever lose that.'