LOS ANGELES — When it finally happened last summer, the Doobie Brothers' long-anticipated reunion with Michael McDonald took just more than a week to run into trouble.
Nine days after they kicked off a tour marking the California group's 50th anniversary — a year late due to a pandemic-forced delay in 2020 — McDonald tested positive for the coronavirus and had to pull out of a performance at the Minnesota State Fair with just hours until showtime.
"The mistake I made was thinking I could go out to eat once in a while," recalled the white-haired crooner, whose bandmates went ahead without him that night before calling off a handful of subsequent gigs while they waited for McDonald to recover.
