Let the Music Play: The Story of the Doobie Brothers Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		4.0
Video		4.0
Audio		4.5
Extras		2.5
Overall		4.0

Let the Music Play: The Story of the Doobie Brothers Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman November 21, 2012

The Doobie Brothers are one of the very few bands in rock history that radically altered their sound part way through their careers and managed to not just maintain their popularity but actually build on it. The first iteration of the group worked in a sort of California folk rock ambience that highlighted Tom Johnston’s energetic and occasionally gravelly vocals, along with layered backups that were redolent of other big west coast acts of that era. The band churned out a number of huge hits, including “Listen to the Music”, “Jesus is Just All Right With Me”, and “Black Water”. But just at the absolute height of their success, Johnston became very ill and ultimately withdrew from the band. The suits and bean counters at Warner Brothers, as well as most of the band itself, were convinced that the glory days were over. But rather incredibly Michael McDonald came on board and reinvented the band’s sound in a much more sophisticated, urban "blued eyed soul" milieu that gave The Doobies a second lease on life and offered the public some of the band’s most enduring hits, including classics like “What A Fool Believes” and “Minute By Minute”.

This exhaustive documentary, which plays kind of like a VH1 Behind the Music episode, features fantastic interviews with many of the principal players through the years, and is a warts and all look at various internecine conflicts that arose as well as the incomparable music the band managed to turn out in a hugely disparate array of genres and styles. Interspersed with the interview segments are a wealth of archival concert footage that captures the band at every stage of its evolution. Doobie fans of any iteration of the band should find a lot of enjoyable material in this very interesting documentary.

Let the Music Play: The Story of the Doobie Brothers Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Let the Music Play: The Story of The Doobie Brothers Is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Eagle Vision with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.78:1 (some of the archival footage is in 1.33:1). As should be expected, there's a noticeable difference in quality between the contemporary interview segments, which sport very good fine detail, sharpness and well saturated color, and the archival footage, some of which seems sourced from 16mm (and maybe even 8mm in a couple of instances), and is therefore rather ragged, fuzzy and grainy looking. Generally speaking, though, this is a sharp and appealing looking presentation if one takes the age and source elements of the archival footage into account.

Let the Music Play: The Story of the Doobie Brothers Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Let the Music Play: The Story of The Doobie Brothers features a lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 mix as well as an uncompressed LPCM 2.0 stereo fold down. This is a documentary, not a concert video, and so the bulk of this enterprise consists of talking head segments, interspersed with snippets of concert footage. The 5.1 mix therefore might be considered a bit of overkill, but it does nicely open up the soundfield in those concert sequences. Fidelity is strong and natural sounding, with relatively wide dynamic range between the interview and concert segments.

Let the Music Play: The Story of the Doobie Brothers Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

Bonus Live Tracks (HD; 45:38) include:

Rainy Day Crossroad Blues

Without You

Listen to the Music

Black Water

Takin' It to the Streets

Rockin' Down the Highway

Neal's Fandango

Long Train Runnin'

China Grove

Let the Music Play: The Story of the Doobie Brothers Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Let the Music Play: The Story of The Doobie Brothers is a really interesting and in depth piece on one of the most diverse groups of its era. The band managed to carve out a rather distinctive niche for itself, despite radically altering its sound partway through its early career, and all of the members who are interviewed here seem to realize just what a notable (no pun intended) contribution they made to American popular music. Recommended.