Tiran porter biography of rory
•
“I came up with a lick, started putting the words tillsammans and called Ted Templeman at two in the morning”: The Doobie Brothers’ Tom Johnston recounts the stories behind five of the band's classic tunes
“We were a work in progress all the time,” Tom Johnston says, recalling the Doobie Brothers’ first era, from 1970 to 1977. The effort certainly paid off: You’d be hard-pressed to find a band with a more prolific and successful eight-year run than the Doobies had at that time.
Formed in Santa Cruz, California, the Doobies put four of their first six albums in the Top 10 of the Billboard 200, with two – 1973’s The Captain and Me and ’74’s What Were Once Vices Are Now Habits – selling double Platinum. Then there were the hits: Listen to the Music, Long Train Runnin’, China Grove, Takin’ It to the Streets, and many more, which accounts for the Diamond status of 1976’s Best of the Doobies.
•
•
ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED ON JUNE 6, 1991
By Steve Newton
The five members of the Doobie Brothers that pull into the Pacific Coliseum on Friday (June 7) will be the same five guys that posed nearly naked on the racy (for 1972) fold-out sleeve of the breakthrough Toulouse Street album. They’re also the same gang that dressed up in old-fashioned Western garb and hopped on a stagecoach for that album’s hit-filled follow-up, The Captain and Me.
But despite promotional claims to the contrary, this particular team—guitarist/vocalists Tom Johnston and Patrick Simmons, drummers John Hartman and Michael Hossack, and bassist Tiran Porter—isn’t the original Doobie line-up per se.
“They just call it that for convenience as much as anything else,” admits Johnston. However, it is the Doobies line-up that first achieved real success. “The first album didn’t do anything, but the second album, Toulouse Street, took off,” says Johnston, “and the people that were on that are the ones in the b