If you want to feel like you’re swing dancing in the July heat, The Doobie Brothers are your band. Here are some songs by the group that still make me want to dance and jive, no matter the season.
“Listen To The Music”
Written during the Vietnam era, this song is definitely The Doobie Brothers’ most anthemic song. “Listen To The Music” is all about bringing people together.
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Patrick Simmons of The Doobie Brothers talked about the song with AXS TV. “I’ve been playing music almost as long as I’ve been alive since I was a little kid, and here I am still doing that. And that song, you know, expresses that Joy of sharing music and the great feeling that brings of sharing it with really the world. I think that’s the way Tom [Johnston] wrote it, you know. It was supposed to be, you know, an anthem of, let’s bring everybody, all these guys, all these world leaders together, and uh, we’ll sit out on a grassy null somewhere and uh, you know, have bands playing…”
“Long Train Runnin’”
“Long Train Runnin’” just sounds like bliss if you ask me.
This song went through several working titles. Before it was “Long Train Runnin’”, it was also “Rosie Pig Moseley” and later “Osborn”. Apparently, as Tom Johnston, the Doobie Brothers’ guitarist, told Songfacts, this one took a while to finish.
“…We played ‘Long Train Runnin’ for three years before it got recorded, and it got called several different names, and most of the time I would make up the words as we were playing the song,” he shared.
“China Grove”
This one is definitely an underrated pump-up jam. What’s more is that “China Grove” was unknowingly inspired by a real place. Johnston came up with the idea for “China Grove” without realizing he’d ever been near the small Texas town.
He told Songfacts: “The words were written last, and they were made up around this whole idea of this wacky little town with a sheriff that had a samurai sword and all that sort of thing. The funny thing was that I found out in 1975 in a cab in Houston that there really was a China Grove, although what happened was in 1972 we were touring in Winnebagos, and we were driving into San Antonio. And there is a China Grove, Texas, right outside of San Antonio…”
Photo by: Frank Carroll/NBC via Getty Images
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