A Conversation with Michael McDonald – HuffPost 4.2.14

Mike Ragogna: Hey Michael, it’s great to talk with you again. Thank you very much for taking the interview.

Michael McDonald: Oh, it’s my pleasure, thank you.

MR: I wanted to ask you about the new Dukes Of September DVD/Blu-Ray that’s out. You’ve been performing as this configuration for a while, how would you sum up your experience in general on the road with the Dukes?

MM: Well it was great fun the whole time. I think it started for us with the fact that it was a fantasy, self-indulgent endeavor on our part. We all have our perspective bands that we work with, we play our own music, which in so many people’s eyes would be a dream job, and it is, but of course anything you do long enouch, it’s not that you don’t enjoy it anymore, it just becomes what you do all the time. As much as I love playing with my band, and I truly, truly do, it was a nice departure. Better than that, even, it was a chance to play songs that–I think I speak for all of us on this–some of the songs we do in the show are songs I haven’t done since I was fourteen or fifteen years old, so it was great fun to be up there with such a fantastic ensemble musically. And to be taking the stage with Donald [Fagen] and Boz [Scaggs] once again after all these years is always something that means a lot to me. Just the idea that I’m up there singing a song that I used to sing with a girl singer in the band I was part of in 1967, there’s just something wonderful about that.

MR: It’s very obvious that the three of you have such a love of R&B. Some of the choices you made are wonderful such as “Who’s That Lady?” What are some of the songs that were most fun to perform?

MM: Well it’s fun for me to play some of this stuff with Donald and Boz aside from the oldies that we all love, I really love doing “Lowdown,” because to me it’s just one of the classic R&B songs, as classic as any of the other ones that we’re doing. And I loved doing “Peg” and I loved doing “Kid Charlegmagne.” It’s just great fun to be up there with Donald doing those songs. And I loved doing my stuff with a different band doing a totally different take. Every time you get up with a different bass player and a different drummer you’re going to get a different result. One of the things I’ve really learned over the years is so many times I think an artist will get up and they want this band to play their song exactly the way they’re used to hearing it played by their band, and I think that’s a futile effort, I really do. I think at best you’re just frustrating yourself, because these are different people and if you really want to get what they do best you need to let them play it the way they would play it, with what their instincts tell them to do and then you can kind of work with it from there. But you have to first of all start of accepting that these guys are going to play the song, not my band, and I need to appreciate what they bring to this moment and then work from there if I have any suggestions. But when you’re playing with world-class players you kind of have to start out trusting their instincts, I find. You’re just better off if you do. That’s become fun for me over the years. If I get up and play with The Roots, I love what they do with songs. I love how they feel and hear the songs and it’s uniquely their interpretation. With those guys I’m almost amazed with how much attention to detail they pay. They’ll be playing synth parts that I don’t even remember from the first records. I crack up, “I haven’t even thought about that in years, since 1975,” but the thing is they’ll make it work in a new, more contemporary, funkier version of the song. Same thing with the Steely Dan band. Those guys just do it their own way and it’s such a great experience to play the original stuff with those guys.

MR: When you hear some of the reinterpretations, are there any parts that make you go, “Damn, I wish that I had done that originally?”

MM: Oh yeah, sure, many times. I think you always take away something that you’ll probably introduce to your band, a different way that the same part was approached, you’ll get back with your band and go, “Hey, let’s make this section a little more tight-feeling,” simply because that’s the way the other band played it and it grew on you.

MR: What about the back-up band? What are they bringing into the mix and how is the relationship with all you guys?

MM: Oh, it was just great fun. We all hang together. We three principles kind of do our own thing, but if I’m going to go out to dinner it’s usually with one of the guys in the band. You get a little stir-crazy up there and you want to get out, so everybody kind of mingles at their own pace. Mostly on the tour Shannon [Forrest] and I–we were doing a record together this whole time, and we’ve been doing this record over eight years–we would go to dinner and talk about what we were going to do next, so we were kind of a natural pairing on the road, but everybody kind of goes off on their own little jaunts. We travel in small groups.

MR: You brought Shannon Forrest into the mix, did the other guys bring any of their troops?

MM: Yeah, between band and crew we all brought our significant crew guys who kind of collaborated to run the operation technically every night. Don had his personal guy to handle the acoustic piano, Boz had a couple of guys in his crew to handle his guitars and monitoring, so we all had specific guys in specialist positions to handle our stage monitor mix and stuff like that. Boz and I have a guy that we both use a lot so that was an easy collaboration there. We just look for every place we can to use redundancies that will save us money out there. But everybody has their specific needs and the things that make them comfortable, so we kind of take that into consideration, too. The Dukes is a lot larger operation than anybody I go out with.

MR: This particular tracklist on the DVD is for PBS, but I imagine you’ve got a much larger catalog for this configuration.

MM: Absolutely. We might have even played more songs that night than they used in the edited version of the concert.

MR: Was it just the time limit that confined it to this track list?

MM: Yeah. In some cases, I think it was personal choice by one of the principles. For me, there was one song that I loved doing, “If You Don’t Know Me By Now,” it’s a great tune but that night was not a particularly good performance on my part. I kind of hit some stinkers on that one and we were trying not to redo our vocals on this. In the end there might have been some technical snafus that we absolutely had to redo, but short of that none of us replaced much. I just kind of eliminated what I didn’t think was acceptable. There were nights when that song went really well, but that just wasn’t one of them, so I just kind of edited those things that I didn’t think were particularly all that great and I just kept things where I had a choice, songs that I sang, and hoped that I sang in tune on the rest of everything else. It’s a very live performance and the mix was overseen by Donald and Pat, our engineer and they did a good job. We had some technical snafus. I don’t think they were prepared for how loud I sing, so typically my voice winds up sounding very small or distorted because it hits the compressor so hard that it kind of washes out, so we had to work around that.

MR: I’m not sure you have anything to worry about. It came off very smooth, it was a beautiful presentation.

MM: Oh good. Those guys kind of saved it in the studio, it was a little problematic when I first heard the tapes, it just sounded like everything on my vocals kind of got real quiet at the end of every line because you could hear the compressors kind of squashing it, which is what they’re meant to do, but they would’ve backed them off a little bit had they known how loud I was going to hit them.

MR: Hey, was it also fun working with director David Horn on this?

MM: Oh yes, absolutely. He did a great job. Those guys are great because they in no way hinder the musical performance, and yet they get the most out of it I think visually. They pretty much have their whole thing set by the second dress rehearsal. It was almost like they didn’t know we were there, we were just playing a show, which I think speaks a lot.

MR: What is your advice for new artists?

MM: You know, if I look back on anything about my own career or the careers of my friends who I’ve seen persevere, I think it’s to believe in yourself and what you do. Believe that you have something to bring to the mix of whatever genre you’re trying to approach. If you’re a blues artist, look for what is unique about yourself and keep your faith in that. At the same time, keep your head open so you don’t look at everything as criticism or the kind of input that would make you cynical after a while. That was what was hard coming up. I think by the time I had joined Steely Dan I had pretty much given up on being a solo artist. I came out to California with a record deal from RCA records and I thought I was going to make an album, go home, and hear it on the radio a couple weeks later. I had no idea what it would be like in California. But I found by the time I got the break with Steely Dan…I didn’t even realize it was just the best gig I had gotten, and with the band that was my all-time favorite band ever since The Beatles. It was a dream come true on a lot of levels, but I still didn’t see myself as a recording artist anymore. I thought, “Well, I’ve run that gambit.” My ambition at that point was to play as many sessions as I could whether it was singing or playing and then fill it in with the live club gigs around LA, and then my dream became, “Oh man, if I could just get a gig with Steely Dan or The Eagles or someone like that and go on the road as a utility guy…” Of course, I never dreamed I would end up writing music for a band like The Doobies, but they were just situations that presented themselves. I think that only comes from keeping the faith. To young artists, I think that’s sometimes the hardest thing to do, just keep the faith and understand that nine out of ten things are not going to go your way. But if it does, it can make all the difference in the world in terms of how it effects your over all career and your life. You have to be looking for the door that’s open and not paying too much attention to the ones that close.

MR: Beautiful. It must feel amazing to have a career where you not only did you have your own hits, but you had hits with The Doobies, and you’re on hits where your voice is prominent with Christopher Cross and Nicolette Larson and others over the years. In my opinion, Michael McDonald has left a nice mark on pop music history.

MM: Well, that’s nice of you to say, Michael, I appreciate that. I’m thrilled to have been a part of the seventies music scene in California because to me it will always be one of the best times in California music, like the late sixties. I hated to miss that, because that was my era when I used to sit at home in my bedroom all night long on a school night listening to Crosby, Stills & Nash, Buffalo Springfield, all those bands. But the seventies was equally great and I got to be a part of it and I got to work with some people who, up until that point I had only imagined what it would be like to meet them. So it was a real dream come true for me and in hindsight I wouldn’t have it any other way, I wouldn’t pick any other decade. The seventies for me was a lot of fun. I think the most rewarding thing, too, is that I still get to be friends with all these guys all these years later, The Doobies, Boz, Walter and all the people from over the years. It was nice to have the experience, but it was particularly nice to share it with those guys.

Transcribed By Galen Hawthorne