One Street Over

Montana! We're coming back for 2026! Multiple dates and locations - Hamilton Sept. 18th and Butte Sept. 19th! Start makin' your plans, tell your friends!

Here's a 1995 photo of the first bassist, John Billings, performing as the bassist for Donna Summer, whom he played with for many years. John is an awesome guy and an incredible player! He's featured on a number of our songs that we'll be re-releasing soon. John and Michael played many shows together back in Nashville. He and his wife now own a little store in the Nashville Airport called "Nashville Jam Session." Check it out here: https://www.nashvillejamsession.com/

Have you heard us play this song? Here's the story... "In 1978, Michael McDonald sat at his piano in Los Angeles, playing a melody that had been stuck in his head for months. The chords were unusual. The rhythm felt slippery. Something about it seemed promising, but he could not figure out how to finish it.
He had already played the fragment for Ted Templeman, the Doobie Brothers' producer, who kept insisting the same thing: finish that song. It is a hit. But McDonald kept putting it off, unsure where to take it next.
Then Kenny Loggins came to visit.
The two musicians had wanted to collaborate for years. When Loggins heard McDonald playing that unfinished melody, something clicked. Loggins already had a phrase running through his mind: "She had a place in his life." Together, they built a story around it: a man who runs into an old flame and completely misreads the situation, believing a romance existed that was never really there.
What a fool believes, he sees.
The recording process was anything but smooth. The Doobie Brothers spent five or six days working on the rhythm track alone, unable to capture the feel they wanted. The song had what producer Templeman called a "floppy" quality that was hard to pin down. Eventually, Templeman made a decision that horrified the band: he cut up the master tape into sections and physically reassembled it to create a version that worked.
McDonald added keyboards, vocals, and strings. Layer by layer, the song came together.
But not everyone believed in it. When McDonald played an early version for his sister, hoping for encouragement, she delivered a verdict that could have stopped the project cold. It sounded, she told him, like circus music. Maybe he should forget about it.
He did not forget.
The Doobie Brothers included the song on their album Minute by Minute, released in December 1978. The single dropped in January 1979, debuting at number seventy-three on the Billboard Hot 100. Week by week, it climbed.
By April 14, 1979, "What a Fool Believes" reached number one.
The song stayed there for a week. Radios played it constantly. It became one of the few non-disco hits to top the charts that year. At the Grammy Awards in 1980, it won both Record of the Year and Song of the Year.
In 2024, it was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame.
Today, "What a Fool Believes" is considered one of the defining songs of its era. Music critics rank it among the greatest tracks ever recorded. On the yacht rock scale that enthusiasts created to measure the genre, it scores a perfect one hundred out of one hundred, the song against which all others are measured.
Michael McDonald could have listened to his sister. He could have abandoned the strange melody that refused to fit into any easy category. He could have given up when the recording sessions stretched on for days without finding the right groove.
Instead, he trusted the music.
And the music carried him into history.
Sometimes the songs that sound effortless are the ones that required the most faith to finish. "What a Fool Believes" is proof that the difference between forgotten demo and timeless classic often comes down to one thing: refusing to quit when the people closest to you tell you to stop." History Timelines "