Fifty years in the past, the Doobie Brothers’ Tom Johnston urged individuals to “Take heed to the Music.” Fifteen years later, he helped them do some soiled dancing.
Johnston was, not less than on paper, an outlier on the soundtrack to Soiled Dancing, the hit 1987 movie about Catskills summer-resort life that grossed greater than $214 million on the field workplace and ensured that no person ever put Child in a nook once more.
The soundtrack was massive, too — it hit No. 1 on the Billboard 200 and was the No. 2 top-selling album for the 12 months. It has been licensed 14-times platinum and launched a sequence of sequel albums, 1988’s Extra Soiled Dancing, 2003’s Final Soiled Dancing and 2007’s Soiled Dancing: twentieth Anniversary Version.
Along with the large hit single — “(I’ve Had) The Time of My Life,” sung by Invoice Medley and Jennifer Warnes — Soiled Dancing additionally launched star Patrick Swayze’s “She’s Just like the Wind” and Eric Carmen’s “Hungry Eyes.” And it gave new life to early Motown favorites the Contours and “Gimme Shelter” visitor singer Merry Clayton, who had been each on the soundtrack and took half in a subsequent Soiled Dancing reside tour. Because of the film, a youthful, MTV-era viewers was in a position to increase its musical vocabulary with tracks by Otis Redding, the Ronettes, the 5 Satins, the Surfaris, Solomon Burke, the Shirelles and others.
And within the midst of all this was Johnston, a decade out of the Doobies and singing the brassy, soulful “The place Are You Tonight?”
“It was utterly out of left discipline, to be sincere with you,” Johnston tells UCR, explaining that the supply got here from Leon Medica, a musician and producer pal from Baton Rouge. “He referred to as me up and requested me if I would be serious about singing at tune for a film soundtrack. I mentioned positive. I wasn’t doing rather a lot at that time. I used to be enjoying with the band, however I hadn’t been with the Doobies for a few years. I would accomplished two solo albums, however I used to be at that time of not doing an important deal. So I flew to Baton Rouge, after which we drove as much as one other city in Louisiana, just a bit there, to a spot referred to as the Studio within the Nation, the place I feel they had been recording a bunch of stuff for [Dirty Dancing].”
Take heed to Tom Johnston’s ‘The place Are You Tonight?’
The singer was “assigned” “The place Are You Tonight?” written by Mark Scola. “I believed it was fairly cool,” Johnston says. “We had been there for most likely three or 4 days. I watched them construct the observe, after which I went out and sang it. I actually did not suppose an excessive amount of about it; it was quite a lot of enjoyable, and I loved it. I did not know something in regards to the film — I do not suppose anyone did at that time. After which, lo and behold, [the movie] was a bit hit and the soundtrack was an enormous hit. I used to be simply blown away by how in style it was. I used to be simply amazed at how nicely it did. It was like strolling in the appropriate door on the proper time.”
Johnston — who rejoined the Doobies for a reformation the identical 12 months Soiled Dancing got here out — acquired to see the movie shortly after it hit theaters. His evaluation: “It was fairly good. It was an enormous hit with girls was my understanding. I heard all this second-hand if you’ll, however the girls appreciated to observe Patrick Swayze dance. At the very least that is what I heard … and that’d make sense.”
Whereas Soiled Dancing celebrates its thirty fifth anniversary, Johnston and his Doobies mates are nonetheless on the street celebrating the band’s fiftieth (now 52nd) with Michael McDonald in tow. “I did not know what to anticipate,” Johnston says. “I believed it was gonna be good, and it is gone over fairly nicely, practically full homes in every single place we have performed. So it has been a really profitable tour.” Johnston added that the Doobies are taking the present abroad, together with Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Japan and different territories.
He and co-founder Patrick Simmons, in the meantime, printed a band memoir, Lengthy Practice Runnin’: Our Story of the Doobie Brothers, earlier this 12 months, whereas Liberte, the band’s first set of recent materials in 11 years, got here out in 2021, and Johnston is hopeful there’s extra to return. “I definitely would not rule it out. I am at all times up for writing new tunes,” he says, including that there aren’t any concrete plans for an additional album but. “Proper now the main focus is principally on the tour and placing on one of the best present we are able to do. The rest, we’ll must see what it is like after we get there.”
The Doobie Brothers, July 12, 2022
The band’s COVID-delayed fiftieth Anniversary tour performs in Akron, Ohio
