Taking It To The Streets (1976)

Bass, backing vocals. Wrote “For Someone Special” and plays the bass and sing lead vocals

My favorite bassline on that album is one of Michaels songs. Carry Me Away. It just worked because it had good changes and I could play a bassline I really liked. We never played that song live. There were many songs I really liked that we never played live.

Michael McDonald reflecting on the recording of “Takin It to the Streets”:

“I realize how fortunate I was that Tiran was the bass player in the band when I joined them, because his take on what I was bringing to the band was important in terms of what he played, first of all, but more importantly in what those songs became. Like “Takin it to the Streets” for example, when I brought that song to the band, it was a song I had written prior to being in the band, but my idea of recording it was to go into a church and record it with a big gospel choir, with a church kind of rhythm section.

And the reason being, since the song has socially conscious lyrics, that gospel music was probably one of the best vehicles I could come up with to encapsulate the power of the lyrics and that idea. So, the Doobies were asking what I had and so I played “Takin It to the Streets” for the band. I think the day we cut it we started to kind of play it down, and I was giving everybody the chords to the best of my ability. But naturally, being a rock band, it's not going to sound like being in a church. They're not going to go to the same kind of rhythmic approach or patterns or chord voicings that somebody in a gospel choir or church would. So, I was doing my best to kind of give my own representation or version of that kind of thing and the band kind of took it into a more rock and roll feel. When we played it back for the first time, I remember thinking, wow, it's a whole other animal than what I originally envisioned it to be. So much of this had to do with the bass parts Tiran was playing. And the way the drummers, John and Keith, approached it.

I believe Tiran may have had an affinity with the song that was different from all the other guys, truly in the sense that Tiran grew up in South Central LA. The lyrics of that song probably spoke to him in a unique way. They weren’t the greatest lyrics ever written, but the song was trying to speak truth to power. The truth, all by itself, is something that never goes out of style. It only actually takes on more meaning in time. Songs like “What's Going On,” not to put “Takin It to the Streets” in that category, but still in all songs that were written to be kind of plain-spoken truth about who we are and what we are at this point and for us to really take stock of ourselves at this moment. Those songs with time have only become more relevant. Sadly, in these times, we thought they would have been passe by now. But it's a subject that is more relevant than ever.

As far as recording “Takin It to the Streets,” Tiran was truly being Tiran at that moment in time. Any other bass player would have come up with a different bass part and that record would have been a different record. That's the great cross pollination; it happens almost by accident.”