Chip Minemyer: Still listening to the music

Jul. 9—When Tom Johnston was writing what would become his band's first big hit in 1971, he said he was envisioning "a somewhat utopian view of the world."

That song — "Listen To The Music" — catapulted the Doobie Brothers into stardom and put the group on a journey now five decades on and still rolling.

Johnston and the Doobie Brothers — including co-founder Patrick Simmons and keyboardist Michael McDonald — are scheduled to perform Saturday at The Pavilion at Star Lake near Pittsburgh.

It's hard to imagine a set that doesn't include thousands of fans singing along to "Listen To The Music."

Johnston describes what he was thinking when he strummed out the first chords of that tune in the new autobiograpical book "Long Train Runnin': Our Story of the Doobie Brothers" (2022, St. Martin's Press and DB Entertainment).

The book is available in stores and online. I bought my copy at Books-A-Million in The Galleria.

Johnston's recollections of 1971 offered a timeless message — poignant then, at the height of the Vietnam War, but deeply meaningful now.

"The idea was that music could lift humans up — including world leaders, if they were able to sit down on some big grassy hill where the sun was shining and listen to the music," Johnston says in the book. "Then they could figure out that every-body had more in common than they thought and that no disagreement was worth getting so bent out of shape about. So the world could benefit from the point of view that music could make everything better.

"Sounds very hippie-dippy, but that's just what I was feeling at the moment."

The book takes readers through various milestones for the band, including the amazing album "The Captain and Me" in 1973 — featuring the songs "China Grove" and "Long Train Runnin' " — then McDonald's arrival in 1976, when Johnston was battling a stomach ulcer that nearly took his life, the Grammy Award-winning "Minute By Minute" experience in 1978-79 and right through today.

Members came and went over 50-plus years. Some have passed away. Others are still writing and performing.

Simmons called music "truly a time machine that can take me anywhere, anytime I need to go. I can become someone else as well: a blues guy, a hipster, a cowboy, a bebopper, a rebel, a mountain man, or (my personal favorite) a rocker! Is this magic? Maybe ... Whatever it is, I like it.

"And the best thing about it is, there's always music you've never heard before and a new experience waiting to be enhanced by a special song that, by fate, happens to be woven into the tapestry of the moment."

And that "tapestry of the moment" — the notion that music can be a world-changing phenomenon — can be heard across the Johnstown region every week, from the Roxbury Bandshell to Central Park to Peoples Natural Gas Park and beyond.

The region is blessed with enormous musical talent across a diversity of styles and genres — which was the inspiration for a new podcast The Tribune-Democrat will roll out later this summer.

We're already lining up potential guests and starting interviews for what we think will be an important project — shining a brighter spotlight on the performers here in our midst.

The concept was crystalized for me when I heard Jeff Webb's "Classic Vinyl" ensemble perform Stevie Wonder's "Songs In The Key Of Life" at the Jammin 4 Jabs event in May. The stage was packed that day with amazing singers, percussionists and guitar, bass, keyboard and horn players — every one of them connected to various local groups — and each one a great narrative waiting to be told.

We'll let you hear local artists' stories in their own words.

And we're looking to include some clips of these talented people playing their instruments, singings pieces from their favorite songs and letting us hear what inspired them to step onto that path of performing or recording.

You can suggest someone for this podcast series by emailing me at cminemyer@tribdem.com.

We want to cover Johns-town's music scene from jazz to rock, funk to country, hip-hop to classical, bluegrass to soul.

These are the Johnstown folks who have us all listening to the music.

They're the ones proving every day that music — as Johnston believed all those years ago — can make everything better.

Chip Minemyer is the editor and general manager of The Tribune-Democrat and TribDem.com, GM of The Times-News of Cumberland, Md., and CNHI regional editor for Pennsylvania, Maryland, Ohio, West Virginia and North Carolina. He can be reached at 814-532-5091. Follow him on Twitter @MinemyerChip.