Prince George is about to welcome The Doobie Brothers and a Doobie daughter as well.
The seminal classic rockers will be live tonight at CN Centre, making their Prince George debut.
They come hauling their glittering track record including three multi-platinum, seven platinum and 14 gold albums. Their Best of the Doobies (1976) has sold more than 11 million copies - a rare "diamond record."
The Doobies propulsive roots-based, harmony-laden, guitar-driven style has sold more than 30 million albums overall and their set list is the soundtrack to the 1970s and '80s including Black Water, What a Fool Believes, China Grove, Takin' It to the Streets, The Doctor and many more.
Opening the show is another star on her first tour of northern B.C. Lara Johnston is as hot in the modern context as The Doobie Brothers are in the retro context. She was a cast member of the MTV show Rock The Cradle, she won that iconic gold ticket on American Idol, she duetted with America's Got Talent Winner Landau Eugene Murphy and The New Velvet. She's sung background vocals for Don Henley and Belinda Carlisle, and as a live performer she has opened for KISS, Willie Nelson, Heart and many more.
As a songwriter her two sings K.I.S.S. and Here At the End of the World won her the International Songwriting Competition's Adult Contemporary division while K.I.S.S. also won her the Unsigned Only Competition.
Oh, and she happens to be the daughter of Doobies frontman Tom Johnston.
The Citizen tracked down this intergenerational team on the road on their way to CN Centre.
Music Is the Doctor for Tom Johnston
The Doobie Brothers have always been a band with many members. Their lead singing position has changed frequently and been shared among many frontmen. The most notable are original member Tom Johnson and, when he had to step out of the band due to prolonged illness, his successful replacement Michael McDonald.
Unlike many bands with ego pressures, these players stayed relatively friendly with each other and never shied from expressing respect for each other's talents. It is why all of them, including Johnston and McDonald, went back to work this year to make Southbound. It is a Greatest Hits package, but instead of resting on platinum laurels, The Doobies went back into the studio and rerecorded their best material, including special guests from the world of country music.
What better way to celebrate The Doobie Brothers trademark vocal layering than having today's party-harmony group The Zac Brown Band do the singing honours with them? Sarah Evans steps up to the mic on What A Fool Believes. Blake Shelton joined in for Listen To the Music. Brad Paisley, Toby Keith, Love and Theft, Hunter Hayes and other Nashville all-stars did their best to reboot the Doobies with a cowboy boot.
"It is very much A-list and I've gotta tell you, the recording was incredible," said Johnston. "We got The Nashville Cats [a crack group of Nashville session musicians] to play, and really, they are the band. They were unbelievable. It's been a very pleasant experience."
It wasn't simply a live karaoke session with twang, though. Country instrumentation was infused into the popular Doobies tunes, like pedal steel, Dobro, mandolin, autoharp, etc.
"I didn't know [the guest artists] had any interest, but to a person they said they loved the band," said Johnston. "We were blown away. We've been doing what we've been doing for so long we never really ran into the country market. And country has changed and sort of taken over what rock was all about. A lot of the root stuff is rock 'n' roll. The whole country scene has kind of devolved in that direction."
So the two finally met each other on the road. The Doobies had always been similar to The Eagles or The Allman Brothers in their hard-rocking style containing a lot of country sensibilities.
For a guy like Johnston who writes songs as his primary passion - "I have 100 songs sitting at home, but they aren't necessarily right for The Doobie Brothers" - he loved the reinterpretation of their familiar old hits.
With any new album comes a new tour, and that is where Johnston gets a particularly big smile on his face. He's of a vintage that isn't prone to being road warriors, so why does he keep doing it?
"I would say No.1 and foremost is interaction with the crowd," he said. "That's always been the driving force of this band. From my perspective, I like werking the crowd, talking to them, exhorting them to get up, I enjoy myself on stage. I have a ball, and that's the one thing that makes being on the road for me at this point in time worthwhile. It's fun."
It is especially fun when you get to do it with your daughter. Children growing up in the wings of Doobies shows has been the reality for all the guys in the band over the decades, but rising pop star Lara Johnston is one of their own, and they were thrilled as a group to book her as their opening act on this ride through Canada.
Daughter's Doin' It For Herself
I discovered Lara Johnson long before I knew her pedigree. There was no family seal stamped on the video for Mister (Be My Man), which showed off a charming diva presence and a whopping vocal range. She showed power and subtly in the self-written song, and the path to her other buzz-tracks was blazed. K.I.S.S. and Here At the End of the World were chunky pop flares, and delving deeper led to Keep You In My Pocket, Sketches, and the humour-tinged I Don't Give A...
She was clearly a rocket leaving the launch pad, no paternal push necessary. But one thing growing up at the feet of the Doobie Brothers did do was give her career perspective about the unadorned sides of the music industry.
"It was so much fun, seeing them do it every night, and seeing the joy they bring to people," she said. "For some people, my dad provided the soundtrack to a part of their lives, and I've become obsessed with music, probably from being around it so much growing up, but it takes me to some place special and nothing else really does that for me.
"I took piano lessons as a kid, and I struggled with that as most kids do," she explained. "Initially I was not great at that, but singing I was obsessed with since I was six or seven, just listening and singing along in my room to other singers, then getting more technical about breaking things down as I got older."
It became clear early in her youth that she had vocal abilities beyond most of her peers. Songwriting, though, was a longer study and hard to acquire any other way than just doing it over and over again, badly most of the time but sometimes catching that edge that sends a song tumbling towards the charts.
"It felt a bit intimidating. Me make a song? Oh my gosh, can I? But once I did, it opened up another can of worms, a whole other side of it. It's kind of an intellectual thing, but on the other hand you don't want it to be, too much, you want it to come out naturally."
She tries to live that way, involved in her own life as it were, in order to have something to write about and the presence of mind to get it on paper. As she lists off her hobbies - she likes to hike, she likes to bake cookies, she likes to read - her phone rings and that tells a different story in five notes of the ring tone. Ba-nu-nu-Na-nu. Bad to the bone. Could there really be this gritty underbelly to the personality of this celebrity girl next door?
"Riiiight. I wish I had some crazy rock star stories to tell," she said with a tinkly laugh. "When I read those biographies I love that part of the story."
Surely her dad told of, or even demonstrated, some of the wild rocker misbehaviour?
"I try to find out if he had any wild stories, but he's been such a solid guy," she said. "In the beginning days, there must have been something. San Francisco in the early '70s, right?, there's gotta be something. But all those guys in the band were such stand-up people. It's something I really respect about them."
Her mom wasn't providing the tabloids with any material either.
"My mom is an amazing, incredible lady," Johnston said. "She is driven and generous and smart and one of my best friends in the whole world. Her name is Diane and she is a great person."
The best song Tom and Diane ever wrote together will open the evening's events tonight at CN Centre.
