Boxcover of the Week: Watching My Daughter Go Doobie

I am sure there are half-remembered things from your youth that, as time passes, you begin to doubt ever happened. For example, for the longest time I thought George W. Bush was never legitimately elected to the U.S. presidency, and yet there he is on this souvenir placemat I bought when I visited the White House.

But seeing Jesse Jorden’s pose on the cover of “Watching My Daughter Go Black 3” conjured a memory of a publicity photo of the late 80’s/early 90’s Doobie Brothers. I remember seeing it in the flyers I’d get from the Columbia Record & Tape Club, back when there was a United States Postal Service.

Or did I? Might I have imagined it? After all, I never saw the picture again.

It was a transitional time for The Doobie Brothers, after all. Following the departure of Michael McDonald and the group’s unfortunate (but lucrative) “Minute By Minute” yacht rock phase, returning founder Tom Johnston struggled to reinstate the band’s early-70’s relevance.

All that uncertainty is right there in the photo. It is as if all the Doobies had watched their daughters go black and were shaken by the experience.

You’d think that a simple search on “Doobie Brothers” would cough up this image pronto, but it’s almost as if the band wanted to suppress this photo, featuring the band in self-conscious poses, gesturing to the guy dressed like Miami Vice-Meets-China Grove.

It took way too long to find even this tiny thumbnail photo on Google, indicating that Google isn’t going to be Skynet anytime soon. I will only willingly cede my individual liberties to sentient machines when they can provide me with high resolution publicity stills taken by Joyce Ravid for the Doobies’ warmly-received 1989 “Cycles” comeback album.

Finally, the porn trend of imposing a father/daughter narrative is really distasteful. Why, exactly, would you want to watch your daughter “go” anything? [See this for more of the same.]

• Buy “Watching My Daughter Go Black 3” here

Previously on Porn Valley Observed: You can’t apologize with a cock in your mouth