The Doobie Brothers

We were up in NYC with Papa Bear over New Year's Eve. After a long and frigid new year's eve, we took it pretty slow on the first. Virginia Tech was playing a bowl game that night, which had Ms. Abstract Citizen quite excited. So, as part of the family left to take in a horrifying amount of Abba songs, I convinced my dad to stay in with us and watch the third or fourth American football game of his life. (He dimly remembers a Super Bowl game in 1979 or so.)

During the conversation, I mentioned that I won't be checking the "latino" box on my grad school application, going instead with my old standby - "other." (More on that in a different post.) Papa Bear was, I suppose, happy to hear this.

The game continued, and we continued to explain the intricacies of American football to him. We were drinking Catena, St Emilion, eating food from Balducci's next door, and generally having a grand time. Till the halftime entertainment started. "Who are these people? They're friends of your brother's, right?" I chuckled. "Who, the Doobie Brothers?"

My dad: Wait. Really? This is really the Doobie Brothers?
Me: That's what they said last commercial. Halftime entertainment is the Doobie Brothers.
My dad: There's a history there. The Doobie Brothers. You won't check the "latino" box, and there's a story about this...

And down that rabbit hole we go. It seems that many moons ago, while my dad was a grad student, the Latin American Studies Center at Berkeley was having a party. Brazilians don't quite fit into a lot of these categories, but my dad decided to be a sport anyway and go. As he tells it, they were playing insufferably "native" music. Stuff that's basically as "authentic" (whatever that means) as your average subway-musician's take on "El Condor Pasa." (God, how I hate that song.) You know, music with costumes, flutes, and so on.

My dad and some of the other Brazilians imposed on the organizers to play some Brazilian music. This was, ostensibly, a latin american-themed party, and while we're not Latinos or Hispanic, we are proudly Latin American. So, he got them to play a Rita Lee tape.

There's an old leftist mentality in parts of Latin America that considers Coke to be an imperialist drink, and rock to be its cultural equivalent. Well, these were these kinds of people. And Rita Lee, Caetano Velos, and the other tropicalistas were the first big artists to openly embrace American rock during the turbulent 1960s. And her stuff in the 1980s was unabashedly commercial. But she is important, as any fan of Beck's and other post-tropicalista artists ought to know. Does it get much better than "Panis et Circenses"...?



Anyway, enough background about Rita Lee. Let's move on to the punchline. One of the Chilean organizers gets tired of the lone representative of Brazilian music after a few minutes. He changes the tape, finds my dad, and returns the cassette to him, saying, "Here's your Doobie Brothers, or whatever the hell it was."

May everyone's 2009be full of contextually-inappropriate contempt for the Doobie Brothers.