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Credit: Far Out \/ IFA<\/p>\n
Wed 14 October 2026 2:00, UK <\/p>\n
A lot of young people go through an Alan Watts phase when they\u2019re trying to make sense of the world, as the essays and speeches of the mid-century British-American philosopher, infused with elements from Eastern religion<\/a> and proto-hippie ideas, make a terrific complement to a night of dorm-room dope smoking.<\/p>\n Watts is arguably as popular today as he was in the 1960s, but when Doobie Brothers singer-guitarist Tom Johnston became an admirer<\/a> during his college years in San Jose, California, he didn\u2019t have to listen to old clips on YouTube; he could hear Watts\u2019 latest mind-expanding observations from the horse\u2019s mouth, live on the radio, on Bay Area stations like KPFA and KSAN.<\/p>\n \u201cI was listening to Alan Watts in school a lot,\u201d Johnston told Guitar Player<\/a> in 2024, noting that some of those soliloquies on the radio were influencing his early songwriting, along with the harsh political realities of the early 1970s in America.<\/p>\n He added, \u201cThis was during the Vietnam era<\/a>\u2026 I was still involved with San Jose State [University], and there were a lot of SDS [Students for a Democratic Society] riots over there. I got drafted and had to go to two different draft centres, Fresno and Oakland, so I was familiar with everything and against the war and all that stuff, so it just filtered into the lyrics.\u201d<\/p>\n Specifically, Johnston remembers all these factors coming together as he worked on the song that would become the Doobie Brothers\u2019 first hit, \u2018Listen to the Music\u2019, the lead single off their 1972 sophomore album Toulouse Street. \u201cThat\u2019s actually one of the few songs I just sat down and wrote and had everything, words and music, at the same time,\u201d he recalled. <\/p>\n \u201cUsually the music\u2019s first and the words later\u2026 I thought people would get along a lot better if they used music to communicate rather than political rhetoric. I was trying to give it a utopian view, I guess.\u201d<\/p>\n Over 50 years later, Johnston still claims that \u2018Listen to the Music\u2019 was the only song he ever wrote that he knew, instantly, it was a single, a potential hit. That confidence carried into the studio, where he and his bandmates, along with producer Ted Templeman, laid down the track without changing much of anything from the original demo. <\/p>\n Further reading: From The Vault<\/p>\n That decision was certainly justified when the song was released in July \u201872, powered by those sterling harmonies in the chorus, and raced out to a peak position of number 11 on the US Billboard chart, the first Doobies song to make a dent. Johnston remains proud of the song, but the inspiration that brought it into being is a more complicated subject in retrospect, as the worldview of a 23-year-old is always going to be a tad different from that of a 78-year-old.<\/p>\n \u201cThe idea was that music would lift man up to a higher plane,\u201d he told Songfacts<\/a> in 2009. \u201cAnd that world leaders, if they were able to sit down on some big grassy knoll where the sun was shining and hear music, such as the type I was playing, would figure out that everybody had more in common than they had not in common\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cBasically, that music would make everything better. And of course, I\u2019ve since kind of realised it doesn\u2019t work that way.\u201d<\/p>\n Tom Johnston<\/p>\n Then again, Johnston\u2019s old hero Alan Watts would probably say that he was on the right track the whole time. Maybe music wasn\u2019t going to turn the world\u2019s authoritarian leaders into empathetic angels<\/a>, but living one\u2019s life in a musical way was a pretty good idea.<\/p>\n \u201cWe thought of life by analogy with a journey, a pilgrimage,\u201d he said in one of his famous talks, \u201cwhich had a serious purpose at the end, and the thing was to get to that end, success or whatever it is, maybe heaven after you\u2019re dead. But we missed the point the whole way along. <\/p>\n Concluding, \u201cIt was a musical thing, and you were supposed to sing or to dance while the music was being played.\u201d <\/p>\n<\/p>\n
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