Hot Stamper Pressing of the Music of The Doobie Brothers Available Now
UPDATE 2026
By 2009 I had been randomly buying clean copies of The Captain and Me for two decades, with the expectation that one day I would play them and find the mysterious deadwax and other clues that would lead me to the potentially best sounding copies.
Even though I had learned a fair bit about stamper numbers by that time, there was no getting around the fact that the best stamper numbers cannot be predicted for any given title. I didn’t know any especially good ones, which means that I needed to learn them for this title the way I learned them for all the others — one album at a time.
As I was not a fan of the pre-McDonald Doobies, I confess I really had no idea what to look for. I probably had picked up a few of the exceedingly rare Green Label pressings, but were they the best? I couldn’t say. I just hadn’t spent enough time with the album. And I had disproved that old canard that the originals are always the best sounding so many times by then that believing that nonsense was out of the question.
We had tried twice before to get something going, but could not find the sound we were looking for and had simply given up and moved on to greener pastures. This is long before Prelude Enzyme Record Cleaning System had come our way in 2007. It, along with our Odyssey record cleaning machine and some other tricks we learned about record cleaning, allowed us to get a shootout going a couple of years later.
The failed attempts to understand the album mentioned above happened long before we had turned the business over to carrying out shootouts all day, every day, which is all we were doing by 2009. We had stopped promoting Heavy Vinyl in 2007, and by 2009 we were on our way to selling nothing but records we had cleaned and played and evaluated for their sound quality with our own ears.
Eventually we sat down with the copies of The Captain and Me that we had — more than thirty according to the listing you see below, the one we wrote at the time — and gave it our best shot.
Our 2009 Listing
OH BABY! This is the HOTTEST copy of The Captain And Me to ever hit the site, bar none. The sound is nothing short of PHENOMENAL from the first cut to the last. Side two earned our top A+++ grade while side one clocked in just half a plus behind. You can’t even begin to imagine what we’ve gone through trying to find Hot Stampers for this album. Here’s the copy that proves it was all worth it.
We had TWICE tried to shootout this album and gave up both times with little to show for it. The one great sounding, reasonably quiet copy we found had a nasty edge warp that obliterated the first track on both sides. So we knew that great copies of this album must be out there, but where? We had OVER THIRTY COPIES of this record on our shelves and none of them were worth listing. The warped copy sounded so much better than any of the rest that we felt it was wrong to call even the best of the rest a Hot Stamper.
We kept looking for clean copies with the magic stamper numbers, and kept coming up empty. When we did manage to find one, it was usually too noisy. Finding a copy that played even Mint Minus Minus was a tough enough task, but finding one that sounded amazing looked like it might be impossible — even to us.
Fast forward to the present. We had a few new copies on our shelf to evaluate, and gave them a good scrubbing. With the help of the Walker Audio Active Enzyme Cleaning System and a whole lot of good luck, we were finally able to find a few copies that passed our Pepsi Challenge. This is the KING of them all. Folks, if you’re looking for an amazing copy of this album, we don’t think you can do any better than this.
The Captain We’ve Been Looking For
We were positively OVERJOYED when we dropped the needle on this side one and heard the sound we had hoped for. It’s very sweet and open up top, and there’s lots of deep, tight bass. Long Train Runnin’ and China Grove sound SUPERB — tubey magical with a meaty bottom end and LOADS of energy. The sound is clean, clear, lively, musical, and correct.
Imagine our surprise when we flipped this baby over and heard even better sound on side two! Note-like bass, clear transients on everything, incredible energy, richness, sweetness. ambience — you name it, this one’s got it. A+++ all the way!
These Don’t Come Quiet
As mentioned above, about 9 copies out of 10 we come across are thrashed beyond playing condition. This one plays between Mint Minus and Mint Minus Minus on side one and a bit noisier for the last song. Side two is close to Mint Minus throughout. Not too shabby!
The Nautilus Can Be Good
We had a few Nautilus copies of this album that we included in our shootout. Some sounded like junk, but the best of the bunch was actually quite nice — natural and lively, but lacking some of the Tubey Magic found on our Hottest Stamper.
UPDATE 2026
Years later we realized just how wrong we had been about the Nautilus pressing.
It’s definitely not good.