1974 · Behind the Songs
The Doobies’ gentle 1974 single stalled at No. 32 — then its B-side, “Black Water,” became their first No. 1.
Every band has a single that history remembers for what came after it. For the Doobie Brothers, that record is “Another Park, Another Sunday” — the lead single from their fourth album, What Were Once Vices Are Now Habits, released in March 1974. It climbed to number thirty-two on the Billboard Hot 100 in the week of June 8, a respectable showing that should have been the story. Instead, the story became the B-side. Disc jockeys flipped the record over, fell for the wistful acoustic flip “Black Water,” and Warner Bros. reissued it as the A-side — where it became the Doobie Brothers’ first number-one single. “Another Park, Another Sunday” is the hit that launched a bigger hit, and it deserves to be remembered for itself.
Tom Johnston wrote it, and it sounds like him at his most unguarded. Johnston, the band’s co-founder and its hardest-rocking voice, had a gift for plainspoken melody, and “Another Park, Another Sunday” is built on one of his loveliest: a gentle, rolling tune that feels like a walk taken at the exact pace of thought. The lyric is a quiet heartbreak — a man alone with his memories on a day meant for company — and Johnston sings it without armor. Billboard, reviewing the single, called it a “tale of heartbreak and loss,” while Cashbox heard an “almost lazy Summer Sunday afternoon type track” and Record World found “gentler fare” than the band’s usual boogie. All three were reaching for the same truth: this was the Doobies at their softest, and it suited them.
The recording, produced by Ted Templeman for Warner Bros., catches the classic early-Seventies lineup in full: Johnston on rhythm guitar and vocals, Patrick Simmons on guitar and vocals, Tiran Porter on bass and vocals, John Hartman on drums and percussion, and Michael Hossack on drums, with Milt Holland adding vibraphone — the instrument that gives the track its dreamy shimmer. Templeman, who had shaped the band’s sound since their debut, keeps everything warm and unhurried; the two-drummer attack that powered “Long Train Runnin’” is dialed back to a soft lope. It is a masterclass in restraint from a band famous for its muscle, and the vibraphone — an unusual color for a rock single in 1974 — is the detail that lifts the record out of the ordinary.
The single’s chart journey was a slow burn with a strange aftertaste. Released on March 13, 1974, it entered the Hot 100 and climbed, week by week, to number thirty-two — solid, but short of the Top 20 heights of “Listen to the Music” and “China Grove.” Across the Pacific it did better, reaching number eighteen on New Zealand’s Listener chart. Johnston himself later blamed FM radio for the record’s ceiling: the lyric contains the line “and the radio just seems to bring me down,” and he believed programmers heard it as an insult and quietly backed away. Whether or not the theory holds, it is a delicious irony — a song about the radio, possibly sunk by the radio.
Then came the flip side that ate the A-side. “Black Water,” the B-side of “Another Park, Another Sunday,” began drawing its own airplay, and Warner Bros. — reading the room correctly for once — released it as a single in its own right. It went to number one, giving the Doobie Brothers the first chart-topper of their career and changing the band’s story forever. In the decades since, “Black Water” has become one of the band’s signature songs, while “Another Park, Another Sunday” has settled into the honorable role of the single that made it possible. It is a rare distinction: how many records can claim to be the B-side’s launching pad and still be worth the price of the single?
The album it came from, What Were Once Vices Are Now Habits — the band’s fourth — was the record where the Doobie Brothers truly became album artists. It also produced “Eyes of Silver” and, of course, “Black Water,” and it confirmed Templeman’s touch at the board. But “Another Park, Another Sunday” remains the album’s emotional center, the quiet track around which the boogie revolves. AllMusic’s Bruce Eder would later praise the song, and Billboard ranked it fifth among the ten greatest Doobie Brothers songs — high praise for a record that never made the Top 30.
There is a footnote for the collectors. The melody of “Another Park, Another Sunday” bears a striking resemblance to “I’ll Keep On Giving,” a song from the band’s 1970 debut, Introducing The Doobie Brothers — a record that flopped on release and was later reissued by Pickwick in 1980. Whether homage, habit, or happy accident, the echo connects the band’s hungry beginnings to its confident middle period: the same tune, first sung by nobodies, then by stars. Johnston never made a fuss about it, and perhaps that is the point — good melodies have a way of returning to their writers, asking for a second chance.
The song endures because it is true. Everyone has had an “another park, another Sunday” — a day off that felt like a verdict, a public happiness that underlined a private loneliness. Johnston’s genius was to set that feeling to a melody so gentle you almost miss the ache, and to let Milt Holland’s vibraphone do the crying he wouldn’t. It is not the Doobie Brothers’ most famous record, or even the most famous record on its own single. But on a quiet afternoon, with nowhere to be, it might be their best.
Listen for the vibraphone first — it enters like sunlight through leaves and never quite leaves. Notice how Johnston’s vocal sits back in the mix, conversational rather than declamatory, and how the two drummers play as one soft heartbeat instead of the double-barreled groove of the hits. Then catch the moment the chorus lifts: the harmonies stack up, Simmons and Porter joining Johnston, and the Sunday afternoon suddenly feels shared instead of solitary. It is three minutes and change of pure California melancholy, and it still works.