The first LP I ever bought was "The Captain And Me" by The Doobie Brothers.
This was the first of a number of LP purchase decisions that put me out in left field as far as most of my peers were concerned. At the time, hardly anybody in the UK had even heard of the band. However, Piccadilly Radio in Manchester had DJs who played a lot of American music. I heard the first Eagles LP, Steely Dan and Little Feat on that station a long time before anybody else in the UK picked up on those bands too. In short order all three of those bands appeared in my record collection. Then I shifted gears and went towards folk and jazz, picking up on Roy Harper, John Martyn, Weather Report and Ornetee Coltrane among others. That finally convinced some of the guys in my college hall that I was totally weird...
One of the things I liked about the Doobies was that in the beginning they had a pair of very different but complementary guitarists and singers. Tom Johnston wrote and sang the chug-a-lug pop/rock tunes like "Long Train Runnin" and "Listen To The Music", and had a melodic approach on lead guitar that I really liked. Patrick Simmons, a very different player, interleaved finger-style guitar around Johnston's more straight-ahead rhythmic guitar chords. Simmons wrote less prolifically, but wrote many of the more interesting and elaborate tunes like "Toulouse Street", "South City Midnight Lady", "You Just Can't Stop It", "Chinatown" and "Black Water". He also created interesting finger-style guitar instrumentals like "Slat Key Soquel Rag" and "Larry The Logger Two Step".
The main irritating aspect to the early LPs was that the rhythm section just Did Not Swing, partly because Johnston's guitar parts tended to overlap with the percussion, rendering complex top-end cymbal and drum work superfluous. As the band matured, and they stopped borrowing Jeff Baxter from Steely Dan and brought him in as a full-time member, the two drummers model began to work a lot better, both live and in the studio, and made the band swing.
The Doobies rose, then soared to fame after co-opting Michael McDonald as another songwriter. McDonald changed their sound to more of a blue-eyed soul/pop sound, then the band dissolved at the beginning of the 1980s due to personality clashes and road fatigue. They would re-incarnate in the late 80's as a more classically guitar-driven band, and today The Doobie Brothers still tour.
This is a very interesting interview with Tom Johnston and Pat Simmons about their entry to guitar playing and being in the Doobies, and their current guitar collections and preferences. Along the way both men confirm that the band's name was adopted when they needed a new name for a gig and couldn't think of anything else...