When Northern Californian musicians Jason Crosby and Roger McNamee teamed up to form a 70’s folk cover duo by the name of Doobie Decibel System, they never could have imagined this heavy of a backlash.
It seems that the Doobie Brothers, the iconic classic rock band that penned hits like “China Grove” and “Listen To The Music”, finds the band’s name to be “highly phonetically and visually similar.” It’s worth noting that, while the Doobie Bros. got their name from a friend who said they smoked a lot of marijuana, the Doobie Decibel System is a play on the familiar “Dewey Decimal System” from libraries.
String Cheese Incident To Pay Tribute To The Doobie Brothers At Lockn’
Still, “the Doobies” is a trademark of the Doobie Brothers Corp., and DDS may very well be in violation on those grounds. Crosby is a regular at Phil Lesh’s venue, Terrapin Crossroads, while McNamee is a member of Moonalice and, coincidentally, a highly successful venture capitalist with multi-billion dollar holdings.
Using the word Doobies, the band claims, suggests “willful intent to trade on the fame and reputation, or to cause confusion, or to cause mistake, or to deceive consumers.” While the Brothers don’t claim to have invented the term, they believe that it “has no meaning in the music industry other than to identify” the Doobie Brothers.
On the other hand, the word does rhyme with Dewey, so DDS has that going for them.
The lawsuit is seeking punitive damages and wants the band to cease using the name. We’ll be sure to update as this story develops.
[Via Billboard]