If there’s a bad thing about our weekly music videos, it’s that some songs can make you feel old – like this week’s offering of The Doobie Brothers, which corresponds with the band’s ongoing 50th anniversary tour. Fifty years (yikes)! Conversely, they can also make you feel young again as you relive old favourites.
In this case, and despite Jack Wilder’s (Michael Douglas) lament in the 1999 film “Romancing the Stone” – “Dammit man, the Doobie Brothers broke up! S**t! When did that happen?” – we’re pleased to observe that Tom Johnston and company did reconvene and have continued rockin’ down the highway for a few decades more.
One excellent show in particular took place at Wolf Trap (a national park in Virginia) in 2004 – an epic performance that spawned both a CD and DVD in no small part because a full horn section helps put a fresh twist on a lengthy list of Doobies classics, such as “Listen to the Music,” “China Grove,” and our choice, “Long Train Coming,” a song that first appeared on the 1973 album “The Captain and Me.”
With performances like this, it feels really good to be young again.
Lyrics
Down around the corner, half a mile from here
See them long trains run, and you watch them disappear
Without love, where would you be now
Without lo-o-o-ove
You know I saw miss Lucy down along the tracks
She lost her home and her family and she won’t be coming back
Without love, where would you be right now
Without lo-o-o-ove
Well, the Illinois Central
And the Southern Central Freight
Got to keep on pushin’ mama
You know they’re running late
Without love, where would you be now
Without lo-o-o-ve
Well, the Illinois Central
And the Southern Central Freight
Got to keep on pushin’ mama
You know they’re running late
Without love, where would you be now
Without lo-o-o-ve
Well, the pistons keep on turning
And the wheels go round and round
The steel rails are cold and hard
For the miles that they go down
Without love, where would you be right now
Without lo-o-o-ve ooh
Where would you be now
Mmm, got to get you, baby baby, won’t you move it down?
Won’t you move it down?
Baby, baby, baby, baby, won’t you move it down?
When the big train run
When the train is movin’ on I got to keep on movin’
Keep on movin’
Won’t you keep on movin’?
Gonna keep on movin’