Story Behind the Song: 'Long Train Runnin'

"Without love, where would you be now?" asked Tom Johnston on The Doobie Brothers' 1973 hit "Long Train Runnin.' "

And without a little prodding from the band's producer, Ted Templeman, Johnston may have never written words for the tune — which he thought of as just a jam he and his bandmates played in bars.

Johnston recalled putting together "Long Train Runnin' " with Bart Herbison of Nashville Songwriters Association International.

You were playing this song for a long time, live, with different lyrics.

Or no lyrics (laughs).

Here's a couple of things you called it: "Rosie Pig Mosley," "Parliament," after the cigarettes. And so your amazing producer Ted Templeman says "Dude, write some words. We need to cut this song." I don't know if you were so sure.

I wasn't. I think it's because of what prefaced that era. We'd been playing it for three years in bars all over the place, and it was a jam. It had a form, it had (plays chord progression), but there was no real verse. We'd take off and play solos for like, a half-hour. That's how I always looked at it, and I didn't really think of it as a song like "China Grove" or "Listen to the Music." So when Ted became adamant and said "This really could be a good song," I said, "Are you sure?" Pat had come up with that picking part over the top, which was great back and forth. You've got this R&B bass rhythm, and then a bluegrass picking thing over the top. That's one of the things that makes The Doobie Brothers what we are. We come from all over the place as far as American music goes. It ended up being a pretty cool track, and I was very pleasantly surprised by it. I finally came up with the words. I went in the bathroom and said, "All right, screw it, I'm gonna do this." The best place for natural reverb is the bathroom, I'll tell you right now. Especially if it's got tile walls. We were in Amigo Studio, where we did all of our work in those days, in north Hollywood. I went in there and came up with the lyrics and we already had the train mode going, so I wrote the rest of it. It became what it is now, and the rest of it is hysterical, as they say.

Every Doobie Brothers song ... when they come on the radio, sonically, they were so great. I know part of that's Ted, and part of that's the song.

The other part was Donn Landee. He was the engineer, and he was excellent. He wasn't given a lot of credit like maybe he should have been, but we had phasing (effects) on one of our songs, and that'd only been done once before (on Toni Fisher's 1959 single "The Big Hurt"). He really had a lot to do with the sound of the band, as far as how he mixed the instruments together, the voices and harmonies. That had a lot to do with it.

— Compiled by Dave Paulson, dnpaulson@tennessean.com