What Doobie do you be?
"What's Happening!" meets the Doobie Brothers in my nominee for best crossover sitcom episode ever. Here, then, is my salute to 80's afternoon re-runs. (No pun intended.)
Back in the mid-80s when I was ‘coming of age’ as a teenager, watching TV after school with my sister and brother became a ritualized affair. We had a “strict” rule in our house: One hour of TV a night on weeknights and only after homework was completed. This particular rule felt a bit onerous, but my siblings and I (I being the oldest, sister two years younger, brother, but a wee lad seven years my junior, and very impressionable) discovered a workaround, a loophole: Between the hours of 4:30 and 6:30 we had a two-hour, unsupervised window in which to consume as much TV as possible before our Mom came home and the ‘clock’ started.
And so, after consuming two or three bowls of cereal, we would head up to the room in our house known affectionately as the “TV room”, because, well, that is all we ever really did there! It held the largest TV in our house, a mammoth 27-inch RCA Trinitron. And that’s when the clock started. Two hours before Mom came home. Two hours, or roughly four, 30-minute sitcoms (24 minutes, less commercials) worth of time.
But, oh, what commercials!! Coo-Coo for “Cocoa Puffs”, Magically delicious “Lucky Charms”, silly rabbits, honeycomb hideouts, toys such as SIMON, Light Bright, Shrinky Dinks, and the hawking of such culinary delights as Big Mac, Filet-o-Fish, Quarter-pounder, French Fries. Coke was It, Sprite had Lymon, or perhaps you’d like to take the Pepsi Challenge, and of course, answer the age-old question, “Where’s the Beef?!”
Back in those days, we had roughly seven TV channels to choose from: There was the big three- ABC, CBS, and NBC, and PBS, but then in Philly, UHF channels 29, 17 (“The Great Entertainer”), or 48 (‘The Kid’s Choice’) we had an all-star lineup of sitcom reruns: The Facts of Life, The Jeffersons, Diff’rnt Strokes, Good times, The Monkees, The Brady Bunch.
“Prism”, a forerunner to cable, would follow in the early ’80s and soon after MTV, HBO, and Cinemax. It was a simpler time, and whether you liked all the shows or not, we watched and rewatched, and as a result, it unified us, an entire generation raised on late afternoon TV. We all had the same collective referents swimming in our heads, from the TV themes to the jingles, the corny jokes, and really just the fun of it all.
As I whiled away the hours one afternoon, time stopped.
What is this?
What is happening?
No, I mean literally: What’s Happening! The greatest (well, my favorite) afternoon TV sitcom is unfolding into a two-part rock concert with one of my favorite bands, The Doobie Brothers!
As Wikipedia states, “What's Happening!! follows the lives of three working-class African-American teens living in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts. The show stars Ernest Thomas as Roger "Raj" Thomas, Haywood Nelson as Dwayne Nelson, and Fred Berry as Freddy "Rerun" Stubbs.
Their neighborhood never seemed particularly dangerous, or even unsafe. Raj and his sister Dee lived with their single mom, called, “Mama”. (Their father would occasionally stop by to try and entice Mama back to bed, but he was nothing more than a deadbeat Dad, and a walk-on character at most). And let’s not forget Shirley, the sass-talking waitress at the soda shop and the “butt” of every joke. (A strange sort of equal opportunity offender agreement must have been worked out in advance, where both Rerun and Shirley made fat jokes about the other.)
Quick aside: In most sitcoms involving an eatery, there is always a choice table readily available for the stars of that show to sit at. It’s never taken, there is never a wait, and they always, always sit there. Raj, Dwayne, and Rerun always, somehow, got their booth right at the center of the soda shop.
(Aside to the aside: And wouldn’t it have been nice for the friends in “Friends”, “Happy Days”, or “How I Met Your Mother” to not get that couch once in a while? Hats off to Larry David and Jerry as the “Seinfeld” crew were constantly rotating the tables they sat at, a subtle but artful nod to what happens in real life.)
Which leads us to the Dobbie Brothers. I knew and loved the Doobie Brothers way before I saw this episode. I discovered them in the late 70’s, as I did most of the music I came to love and still love, at Jewish summer camp in the Poconos. “Black Water” had just come out and that summer we’d sit on our beds before lights out singing the breakdown, “By the hand (hand) take me by the hand (pretty mama!), gonna dance with your Daddy all night long”. Our whole bunk of 10-year-olds singing full volume and loving every second.
A few years after that song came out, Michael MacDonald joined the group, and their sound evolved with hits like “Takin’ It to the Street” and later still the mega Grammy winner, “What a Fool Believes”. With Michael, the Doobies’ sound turned decidedly adult contemporary, more RnB. The band was hugely popular and was just starting to cross over to the mainstream of FM Radio, but make no mistake, despite them having a black bass player, the Dobbie’s feel good, West Cost Rock was decidedly on the white side of the funk line.
As Jeff Giles writes on the website, Classic Rock, “The idea [for the Doobies to appear on the show] came from their publicist, David Gest, who later gained fame when he married Liza Minnelli. As [guitarist, Patrick] Simmons told Yahoo!, "He was a great publicist. He was really good. He kind of made it up as we went along, but he had great ideas — how to stage events, interesting interviews for us, different things that we hadn’t really done before. That’s how we ended up on the show. That was his idea. So I give him credit in that regard.”
Read More: When the Doobie Brothers Appeared on 'What's Happening!!' | https://ultimateclassicrock.com/doobie-brothers-whats-happening/?utm_source=tsmclip&utm_medium=referral
The premise of this two-parter, called, “Doobie or Not Doobie” is that the Doobie Brothers are coming back to play a show at Coolie High, the fake alma mater of the real Doobie, guitarist Patrick Simmons. Since this is a fake high school, but a real rock musician playing himself, I have to forgive my 14-year self for believing that this was a fact.
Part One opens in the coffee shop with the three amigos- Raj, Dwayne, and Rerun -listening to the Doobies on the jukebox, lamenting the fact that the show, scheduled for the following evening (at their High School, of course) is sold out and they of course have no tickets. Raj thinks he can swing one because he writes for the school paper, but Dwanye and Rerun are SOL. But what do you know? Two shady-looking black men dressed in slick outfits just happen to be at the table next to the friends, where they overhear the boy’s lack of tickets. Raj and Dwayne head out, leaving Rerun alone to sulk in his ticketless situation. But what do you know? These two hustlers, the head guy named Al Dunbar, just happen to have three front-row tickets and will give them to Rerun. Rerun stares at the tickets and asks, “What’s the catch?” “No catch,” says Al Dunbar, Re-run’s new best friend. All Re-run has to do is strap a tape recorder to his body and record (‘bootleg’) the show. Dubious but oh so gullible, Rerun agrees. The entire premise is preposterous on its face, and at almost every turn the plot defies reason, logic and the laws of even sit-com coincidence.
But who cares? We come back from commercial and the camera swooshes in on the Doobies, deep into a soundcheck where they look so badass and cool and rock and roll. The whole band is jamming and grooving as we see Raj, Dee, Rerun and Dwayne enter the high school gym, (Um, security, anyone?) Somewhat begrudgingly, the band welcomes this group of kids with open arms, and invites them onstage (!!!) Dee, who really should have been thrown off the stage for sheer sass, manages to alienate the entire band, but hey, it’s all good! Within a minute she’s back in, cracking jokes with the with the bass player. They proceed to answer some softball questions from intrepid reporter Raj, but then Raj asks, “What really bothers you?” And the band answers in one voice:
Bootlegers.
Cut to Rerun who is looking mighty sheepish (no one did sheepish like Freddy, “Rerun” Stubbs) and starts to realize that his deal with Al Dunbar was perhaps not as altruistic as Al made it sound in the soda shop.
Later, Rerun confesses to his friends that not only was he given the free tickets in exchange for committing a felony, but he was threatened with physical violence if he didn’t follow through. Reluctantly, Rog and Dwayne agree to help Rerun with his crime, setting up the famous line,
TO BE CONTINUED dot dot dot.
I’ve watched a lot of television over the years. Too, too much. I’ve also listened to a lot of rock music (never, ever enough!) and between the two, I think I would know if a famous rock band had not one but two entire episodes of TV dedicated to their band showcasing their music in both an intimate and super cool, exclusive, over the top funny way. Sure, we can all recall when this or than band made a cameo, said a line or two of dialogue, and maybe even played one song (almost assuredly lip-synced).
It hasn’t, (with my vast knowledge on both subjects) happened before or since.
Let’s be honest, the Doobies are terrible actors and that’s fine, no one is paying them for that. But musically? These guys can flat-out play! Not only are they playing live, they’re playing their asses off. Two drummers, two guitarists, keys, bass, percussion. Smog, fire, light show, the whole deal. It’s a straight-up Dobbie Brothers’ concert wrapped in a silly feel-good sitcom.
There is some truly unintentionally hilarious dialogue, like when the drummer tells Dee she should stay in school, sounding like something you’d see between breaks on an ABC after-school special, not coming from a rock star who was probably high as a kite that afternoon while he delivered his line.
There is the hamfisted borsch-belt-level banter between Raj and his sister, between Shirley and Dwayne, and really between every actor. It makes Three’s Company look like “The Bear”. But that’s all so besides the point. It’s so bad, that it’s nearly art. The Doobies look both lost (and so stoned) but also happy to be there. They are a year or so away from Grammy superstardom and rock immortality but at this point, they’re just passing through a soundstage in Burbank probably on their way to their next gig.
This was, in my learned opinion, the highwater mark for sitcom-rock band crossovers, I mean hey, even the Ramones only got to sing one song (“Happy Birthday, Burnsey) on the Simpsons (“Have the Rolling Stones Killed,” whispered Mr. Burns to Smithers after they finished.)
So how does “Doobie or Not To Be” end?
Does Re-run get caught?
Does he confess to his crime?
Do Al Dunbar and his thug partner get away with it?
Will Rerun go to jail?
Only one way to find out!