{"id":508507,"date":"2026-04-02T06:49:10","date_gmt":"2026-04-02T06:49:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/508507\/"},"modified":"2026-04-02T06:49:10","modified_gmt":"2026-04-02T06:49:10","slug":"the-band-who-shaped-the-doobie-brothers-sound-the-most","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/508507\/","title":{"rendered":"The band who shaped The Doobie Brothers\u2019 sound the most"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"The<\/p>\n

(Credits: Far Out \/ IFA)<\/p>\n

Thu 2 April 2026 3:00, UK <\/p>\n

\u201cWhy don\u2019t you call yourself The Doobie Brothers<\/a> because you\u2019re always smoking?\u201d<\/p>\n

Such was the question from Keith Rosen, a friend of the band\u2019s who, according to Tom Johnston, posed the suggestion and was met with confusion. \u201cEverybody looked at each other and said, \u2018Well, that\u2019s really a stupid name,’\u201d Johnston recalled to The Minnesota Daily<\/a> in 2013. Still, the name stuck, and the instance was one of various chance encounters that would change The Doobie Brothers\u2019 trajectory. <\/p>\n

Forming from the fringes of California\u2019s Bay Area music scene, The Doobie Brothers were founded by Johnston, who enthused to Ultimate Classic Rock<\/a> that the scene, as it was in the late 1960s, played a significant factor in shaping what would come to define The Doobie Brothers\u2019 sound. Living in San Jose, Johnston\u2019s new life was soundtracked by the likes of The Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane, but one band, in particular, helped to shape the Bay Area sound and were instrumental to the formation of The Doobie Brothers: Moby Grape.<\/p>\n

Moby Grape were a pivotal psychedelic rock band<\/a> out of San Francisco, melding rock with folk, pop, blues and country who, from their very formation in 1966, were an early iteration of psych music that became synonymous with the counterculture, and whom Johnston happened to meet while jamming with various musicians in and around the scene.<\/p>\n

\u201cI played with a lot of guys who were in the Santa Cruz Mountains, a lot of jam sessions,\u201d Johnston reflected, \u201cand I also met Skip Spence from Moby Grape early on. Jammed with him quite a bit.\u201d <\/p>\n

It was Spence, Johnston reveals, who first introduced him to John Hartman, the original drummer for The Doobie Brothers. \u201cHe put us together because John had come out from Washington, DC, looking for people for a Moby Grape reunion,\u201d Johnston explained. Indeed, Hartman had travelled to California from his native Virginia to meet Spence, specifically, hoping to join the plans for the reunion that sadly, never came to fruition. <\/p>\n

\"Moby<\/a>(Credits: Far Out \/ Moby Grape)<\/p>\n

\u201cMoby Grape had a cult following as well, and I was one of the cult,\u201d Johnston asserted. \u201cAnd so was John and so was Pat and so was Tiran [Porter, The Doobie Brothers\u2019 bassist] and so was everybody else I knew.\u201d<\/p>\n

In Moby Grape\u2019s music, Johnston heard the potential for what his band could become<\/a>. He even cites The Doobie Brothers\u2019 1975 song \u2018Neal Fandango\u2019 as resulting from Moby Grape\u2019s sound, stating, \u201cThat song jumps out at me right off the bat because that has a real Moby Grape flavour to it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThey had three-part harmonies, they had guys that were able to fingerpick, they had a driving drummer, they had all these facets that nobody else had,\u201d Johnston explained of his admiration for the musicians. \u201cThe songs were really good, well-crafted, well-thought-out songs. I love their lyrics, they\u2019re incredible. They weren\u2019t just dumb-headed lyrics.\u201d<\/p>\n

While Moby Grape were essential to what became the California sound, the band never achieved mainstream success and eventually fell to the wayside of bands who came after them. This is attributed to two key elements: one, the band\u2019s legal disputes with their former manager, Matthew Katz, who, shortly after the band formed, insisted on his ownership of the group name. This intensified when, in 1973, their rights to Moby Grape\u2019s songs were signed away without their knowledge. <\/p>\n

The second element came about around 1969 when members Bob Mosley (vocals, songwriting and bass) and Spence (guitarist and co-founder) began to show signs of suffering from respective mental illnesses. Mosley had left Moby Grape in 1969, opting to join the Marines before being discharged for medical reasons. He was later diagnosed with schizophrenia and wound up homeless, though sought after by the band to join a Moby Grape reunion on multiple occasions. He eventually rejoined the band in 1996 to record their album, True Blue. <\/p>\n

\"Bob<\/a>(Credits: Far Out \/ Album Cover)<\/p>\n

Spence, who had begun to abuse LSD<\/a>, was introduced to heavier substances while the band were in New York recording their third album, Moby Grape \u201869. \u201cSkippy changed radically while we were in New York,\u201d lead guitarist Jerry Miller recounted, quoted in The New Hampshire in 2007. \u201cThere were some people there [he met] who were into harder drugs and a harder lifestyle, and some very weird shit. And so he kind of flew off with those people. Skippy kind of disappeared for a little while.\u201d<\/p>\n

When Spence returned to Moby Grape, he had changed his appearance \u2013 shaving off his beard and wearing a leather jacket and chains \u2013 and, under the influence of drugs and a psychotic break, took an axe to Miller\u2019s Albert Hotel door. He ended up placed in \u201cThe Tombs\u201d, the Manhattan Detention Complex and later, committed to New York\u2019s Bellevue Hospital, spending six months under psychiatric care. Spence was then forced to depart Moby Grape, completing his song \u2018Seeing\u2019 (also known as \u2018Skip\u2019s Song\u2019) in his absence.<\/p>\n

Moby Grape persisted throughout the years, occasionally reuniting and recording new material until 1989, before the deaths of Spence in 1999 and Miller in 2024.<\/p>\n

\u201cUnfortunately, they burned out really fast,\u201d Johnston lamented, concluding, \u201cbut in the small snippet of time they were around, they put out a couple of albums that were just phenomenal. The first one [their 1967 self-titled debut album] has yet to be equalled. I played the grooves off of that one.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

ADD AS A PREFERRED SOURCE ON GOOGLE \"\"\/ <\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"(Credits: Far Out \/ IFA) Thu 2 April 2026 3:00, UK \u201cWhy don\u2019t you call yourself The Doobie…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":508508,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[96,128,114509,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-508507","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-entertainment","tag-music","tag-the-doobie-brothers","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/508507","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=508507"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/508507\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/508508"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=508507"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=508507"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=508507"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}