20 Years in 27 Days: A Marriage in Music
Day #3: The Doobie Brothers—“What a Fool Believes”
by Mark Anthony Neal
I’ve always considered myself a writer. Wrote my first play at 8 (performed by my Boy Scout troop) and throughout middle school and high school I wrote a collection of teleplays (all in steno pads), where I imagined myself as part some Black middle-class utopia that I knew nothing about growing up in the BX. Before I ever heard things like “a writer writes,” or heard Sonia Sanchez explain that she wrote everyday, I instinctively knew that I was supposed to put pen to paper everyday.
I most regularly wrote in series of diaries that I kept from the summer of 1981 until the fall of 1983. Most of the entries occurred during my daily two-hour trek home to the Bronx from BK (two-trains and a bus), when I wasn’t reading the New York Times (which we were required to subscribe to) in that commuters-would-only-know way that I still read the New York Times in. I still have my diaries from those three years (ages 15-17) and find myself returning to them often enough, not quite surprised that the germs of the narrative voices I use now, particularly in my personal writing, were apparent even then.
One of the features of my dairy entries, is that I would have a theme song for each day—a playlist of which would look like that of a kid who grew up listening to Ken “Spider” Webb, Chuck Leonard, George Michael (of Sports Machine fame), Frankie Crocker and Harry Harrison on the radio. That day that I finally asked “That Girl” her name, the song of the day was Gilbert O’Sullivan’s “Alone Again Naturally,” which would become professional relevant to me years later in ways that I could never have imagined in 1982.
The theme song for May 24th 1982 was The Doobie Brothers’ “What A Fool Believes.” Though I wasn’t a big fan of the Doobies in their early Rock days (“Black Water”), “What A Fool Believes,” which came out in 1979, was one of the group’s first big hits with Michael McDonald as their lead. If you would have asked me in 1982, I would have told you that the song was one of my favorites—that is until McDonald dropped his first solo single “I Keep Forgetting” later that summer.
Of note that Monday, May 24, 1982, is that it was the day that my future wife and I first kissed (shortly before first period). By day’s end we were holding hands walking down Dekalb Avenue.
