The Doobie Brothers are a year shy of their 50th anniversary. But we’ve always wondered about their name. We suspected but to be sure here is the guy who founded the band, Tom Johnston and he says what you suspect is at least partly true.
“Ah, we were all sitting around the table on 12th Street in San Jose, which is kinda… we’ll call it the band house. One of the guys that lived in the house that wasn’t part of the band just came in one morning — well, one midday, actually — and we were playing that night and we didn’t have a name at that point, it was early on. He says, ‘Why don’t you just call yourself The Doobie Brothers?’ For reasons that are kind of apparent. Everybody said, ‘That’s a really stupid name, but we’ll use it tonight, ’cause we don’t have anything else.’ So we did, and we just never got around to changing it.”
Probably for the same apparent reasons.
