The Doobie Brothers - PBS Soundstage, Alpine Valley Music Theatre, East Troy, WI, 7-21-1979

Here is an episode of the Doobie Brothers performing for the TV show "PBS Soundstage," from 1979. They also did an episode in 1977. I've found about 70 episodes of this show so far, and I believe this is one of only two times a musical act had two episodes so close in time. It was very rare for the same act to get two episodes at all.

Soundstage ran from 1974 to 2018, with some significant gaps in there. Sometimes, during that long run, the concerts would be edited horribly to fit the hour long time slot. Plus, some producers got cute and liked to jazz things up by cutting in interviews and other scenes not from the concerts. Unfortunately, both Doobie Brothers episodes were butchered pretty badly. I'm posting the 1979 show first because I still have to figure out how to fix some of the problems in the 1977 show.

For this show, I found three different versions, all with slightly different song lists and different edits. This was a lucky thing, though also a pain in the butt, because I was able to combine them to make the longest version, while avoiding some of the problems that were present in only some of the versions. For instance, the songs "Sweet Maxine - It Keeps You Runnin'" and "Minute by Minute" are not found in the most commonly traded versions of this bootleg.

Unfortunately though, some stupid edits were present in all versions. For instance, right in this middle of the song "Don't Stop to Watch the Wheels," a song about motorcycles, an interview with a band member about his love of motorcycles was overdubbed over the music. Ugh! It was the same deal with a couple of other songs, with interview segments right in the middle of them, during instrumental solos. In other cases, songs were faded in or out early. Luckily, I was able to use parts of different versions to fix those. For instance, one version of "Listen to the Music" was cut short, and another version had one of those damn annoying interview sections over the soloing. By combining the two, I was able to get the full version without the overdubbed interview. 

However, note there are a couple of places where the sound quality gets a bit rough. I used the UVR5 audio editing program to separate out the talking of the interview from the music, but sometimes there was some damage to the music. Luckily, those damaged parts that remain are petty short, half a minute or so.

Another problem is it turns out the song order in the video was all jumbled up. For instance, "What a Fool Believes" was the third song, which didn't make sense since it was their huge Number One single at the time. I found the correct song list and reordered it to match. (There are a bunch of missing songs, unfortunately.) That meant some of the song transitions didn't sound good. So I fixed those up by adding in more applause. 

Also by the way, many versions of this bootleg state the date was July 20, 1979. But during the banter between songs, a band member clearly stated this was the second night of a two night stand at the venue, which makes it July 21st instead, since they played this venue two nights in a row.

This album is an hour and ten minutes long.

01 Take Me in Your Arms (Doobie Brothers)
02 talk (Doobie Brothers)
03 Clear as the Driven Snow (Doobie Brothers)
04 Dependin' on You (Doobie Brothers)
05 Jesus Is Just Alright (Doobie Brothers)
06 Long Train Runnin' (Doobie Brothers)
07 Sweet Maxine - It Keeps You Runnin' [Edit] (Doobie Brothers)
08 Minute by Minute (Doobie Brothers)
09 talk (Doobie Brothers)
10 Don't Stop to Watch the Wheels [Edit] (Doobie Brothers)
11 Black Water (Doobie Brothers)
12 Slack Key Soquel Rag [Instrumental] (Doobie Brothers)
13 Takin' It to the Streets [Edit] (Doobie Brothers)
14 I Cheat the Hangman [Instrumental] (Doobie Brothers)
15 China Grove (Doobie Brothers)
16 What a Fool Believes (Doobie Brothers)
17 Listen to the Music [Edit] (Doobie Brothers)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/BJ2kFoiQ 

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/tc7vZHS4kYR1WpV/file

The cover shows lead vocalist Michael McDonald. I took a screenshot from a video of this exact concert. I used the Krea AI program to improve the image quality.

The writing on his T-shirt intrigued me. I looked at the video to read the whole thing, and found out it was what I'd thought from taking this screenshot: it reads "Bruce Hornsby Band." The odd thing about that is that Hornsby didn't get famous until his first hit single in 1986. I looked it up at his Wikipedia page, and in 1979 his musical career was just getting started. He was only playing small clubs in his hometown of Williamsburg, Virginia. So why the heck was McDonald wearing a shirt with his name on it?!

I did a little more digging and found out there was an interesting story there. It turns out that in 1979, Hornsby boldly went in search of the Doobie Brothers when they were playing a concert near Williamsburg. He found McDonald in the lobby of a hotel, and invited him to see them perform in a small club that night. Remarkably, McDonald went to the club later that night, despite the band being so unknown that only about 15 people were there. McDonald liked the band so much that he invited the entire Doobie Brothers band to see Hornsby's band the next night, which they did. This then led Hornsby to Los Angeles, where he stayed in McDonald's house for about ten days while they did some recording and tried to get a record company. Ultimately, that didn't work out and it would take many more years for Hornsby to even get a record contract. 

You can read the whole interesting story here:

Don't Call It A Comeback - Style Weekly

That story certainly explains the unusual T-shirt. Kudos to McDonald for recognizing Hornsby's talent so early.