The Doobie Brothers Hit That Was Nearly Tossed in the Garbage Bin by Their Producer: “A Piece of Crap”

The bigger the hit, the more shocking it is to discover that the song in question was one tiny, emotional impulse away from never seeing the light of day. For example, if producer Ted Templeman had acted on his frustration and tossed a spliced-together reel of tape in the garbage bin like he wanted to, The Doobie Brothers would have missed out on their 1978 hit song that topped the charts in the U.S. and Canada.

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Of course, to be fair, most musicians can empathize with where Templeman’s head was at during that time. He and The Doobie Brothers had been working tirelessly on a track that vocalist Michael McDonald and Kenny Loggins wrote called “What A Fool Believes”. No matter how the band tried to arrange the song, it just didn’t feel right.

So, Templeman decided to hop behind the kit and try to give the track a loose, “floppy” feel, per Inside The Hits. “It flops around,” Templeman elaborated. “The drums aren’t perfect. Nothing’s perfect on it.” A liberating approach, perhaps, but only if you’re able to endure bouts of burnt-out frustration and resist throwing the entire tape in the can.

Record Label Executives Helped Save “What A Fool Believes”

To say that The Doobie Brothers and Ted Templeman had gotten into the weeds on “What A Fool Believes” was an understatement. After numerous takes and various arrangements, Templeman decided to opt for a more hands-on production technique—literally. To the band’s shock, Templeman began manually slicing the master tape and splicing it together to make the final cut. In today’s digital age, you’d still be copying and pasting, but the process is far less tedious.

As can often happen when you bog yourself down too heavily in any one track, Templeman hit a wall. He still didn’t think his arrangement had the right feel. When he presented the final cut of “What A Fool Believes”, he didn’t exactly sing its praises. “This thing is a piece of crap,” Templeman recalled telling the Warner Bros. executives in a 2022 interview with The Guardian. “But I’ll play it for you anyway.”

Templeman said he was “just about ready to throw it away,” referring to the master tape. “They said, ‘Are you crazy? That’s great.’ Even when we went to collect the Grammy for Song of the Year in 1980, I was thinking, ‘How did this happen?’”

The fact that “What A Fool Believes” sounded so unlike anything else in The Doobie Brothers’ catalogue only adds to the extraordinary circumstances of its release, proving that sometimes, the best thing a fool can believe is in himself.

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