After more than 50 years of music, the Doobie Brothers, now septuagenarians, are still rocking down the highway. And they’ve got no plans to slow down, even if it kills them.
“A lot of people will be like, ‘Oh god you want to be out, die on the road?’ Well, why not? It’s as good as going anywhere else,” Pat Simmons, the longest tenured Doobie Brother, said with a laugh in a recent interview with syracuse.com.
“I’d rather be doing something I love and be out here enjoying it. I wouldn’t be afraid of that. I wouldn’t feel bad about that at all.”
Simmons and The Doobie Brothers will come to St. Joseph’s Health Amphitheater in Syracuse this Sunday, June 19.
Simmons, 73, was just 21 years old when he teamed up with a few other guys in California to form what would become one of the most iconic groups of the decade. They found success with the 1972 album “Toulouse Street,” and its lead track “Listen to the Music,” launching a career that would spawn 15 albums, five decades of tours and a berth in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.
The band’s lineup changed countless times over the years as members came and went, but Simmons’ presence in the group never wavered.
They’re joined on this latest tour (which kicked off earlier this month) by vocalist Michael McDonald, who has been an on-and-off touring member of the band for decades. He joined the Doobie Brothers in 1975 as a temporary fill-in when singer Tom Johnston had to leave the group, and soon found himself a permanent member of the group.
“I had met Mike about a year before [at a] Steely Dan gig,” Simmons said. “When I heard him sing I went, Oh my god, we’ve got Ray Charles here.”
Along with Simmons and McDonald on this tour are Johnston and John McFee. All four are part of the lineup inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame two years ago.
The group has continued to record and perform live. Simmons and Johnston published a memoir last month outlining the band’s genesis in the 1960s and the tumultuous years in the late 70s and early 80s.
They released a new album, Liberté, last October. It’s filled with Americana themes, with songs like “American Dream” and “Cannonball,” a track about not slowing down.
Simmons described some of the new tunes as “having a good time on the weekend” music that draws from all sorts of American genres, from blues and country to jazz and rock.
The band is featuring three songs from the new album on this tour, Simmons said, but their shows mostly rely on the standards that got them this far.
“We do introduce some of the newer songs, but we know that the audience is out there to hear the more familiar tunes,” he said. “[The new record] is more maybe for us than it is for the audience -- give us a chance to do something new.”
For Simmons, what started as a fun project as a young man has evolved into a lifestyle that he wouldn’t trade.
“The dream of getting up there and rockin’ onstage, that was all kind of what we idealized as kids, and here we are, as old guys, still living it,” Simmons said. “And probably we’ll go down living it, because that’s what we are.”
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