Photos courtesy of Jeff Severson
For a brief shining moment within the new wave era, one group hailing out of Washington, D.C. came, saw, conquered, and went completely overlooked.
Yet a listen pre-2020 reveals just how close these modern musical men came to being the next Cheap Trick.
Quirky, irreverent, and undeniably talented, the power pop quartet 4 Out of 5 Doctors deserve the attention of your ears. Their lyrics alone are WTF in the most pleasant way, courtesy of the unique vocals of its band members: bassist and vocalist Cal Everett, guitarist and vocalist George Pittaway, keyboardist and vocalist Jeff Severson, and drummer and vocalist Tom Ballew:
- “Be a jet setter, be a space cadet. Be a modern man!” (“Modern Man”)
- “‘A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do’ — John Wayne, Nineteen Fifty-Two” (“Jeff, Jeff”)
- “It’s a tough guy job for Bad Ass Bob!” (“Danger Man”)
- “I sit alone strapped to my chair — I am the Mushroom Boy, get me out of here!” (“Mushroom Boy”)
- “She’s got those Bambi eyes making me butter inside!” (“Waiting For Roxanne”)
All jokes about their band name aside, there’s traces of The Cars (“You Might Think”), The Romantics (“Talking In Your Sleep”), The Kings (“Switchin’ To Glide”), and The Monroes (“What Do All The People Know”) in the Doctors. And I haven’t been able to get them out of my head for months. If their music itself doesn’t attract you just gaze at the album covers of their 1980 eponymous debut and their 1982 follow-up Second Opinion.
Asked to summarize the philosophy behind the Doctors, Severson recently offered this perspective via email:
“We had no big plan other than to win the hearts and minds of every music lover on earth. Ha! We came up with some strong melodies, or so we thought, and matched those with some too dark and too clever for our own good lyrics. Add in some distorted guitar, a few Buddy Holly vocal hiccups, layer in tracks of good old American stacked harmonies to the beat of a nasty drummer and you have 4 Out of 5 Doctors.”
The Doctors began with Severson and Pittaway writing and recording “documentary soundtracks,” investing their money in studio gear to better polish their sound.
“The band was a studio band in its first five years. We rarely played live as we wanted to focus on developing our own original sound rather than what other local bands were doing,” Severson told me. “We were after bigger things.”
Everett joined the group via the classified ads. Then, per Severson, “we went through more drummers
than Spinal Tap before eventually finding Tommy Ballew, who turned out to be a great singer for background parts.”
This led me to put forth two seemingly obvious questions to Severson — What were the group’s collective influences? And where oh where did they come up with their name?
The first question proved trickier to answer: “We were a pop music band with three songwriters with three different writing styles and it took some time to find out who we were as a group,” Severson said.
The answer to the second question, rather unsurprisingly, proved on the verge of hilarious. After rehearsals in a studio dubbed the “Lost Basement,” group members would assemble to kick around potential name options.
“We were in no hurry so eventually we filled up a legal pad with potential band names like The Stork, the Lads from Bonitar V, Fastbuck Operator, the Butch Popes, the Young Snorkels and Host and the Parasites. Then one night in a THC influenced haze…George Pittaway came up with 4 Out of 5 Doctors and we lost it — I mean fell on the floor laughing,” Severson said. “When it came time to finally decide on a group name, we took a list of the top ten contenders to an English teacher we knew, and she had her high school class vote on them. Nobody voted for 4 Out of 5 Doctors so that’s the name we went with. It opened some doors for us and got us in front of a few people who otherwise wouldn’t have noticed.”
While it’s easy to dismiss the group as being humorous to a fault, Severson is quick to point out that years were spent writing and recording, four to five nights a week. When it comes to the Doctors, the whole truly is equal to the sum of its parts.
“We got to the point where you couldn’t tell which of the three songwriters wrote what song. You couldn’t tell them apart,” he said. “So there was a chemistry that carried over to the stage that people picked up on.”
Through a combination of demos and local live gigs, the group quickly secured interest from “five major labels,” Severson said, adding boutique label Nemperor (owned by CBS) fit their creative mold the best.
“Our thinking was that we wouldn’t get lost in the roster of a major label but still have the marketing prowess of a major label when it came time to getting the Doctors known throughout the land,” he said.
Working with famed British producer Alan Winstanley (best known for his work with Elvis Costello, Madness, and Bush), the group spent six weeks of “intense recording” in a windowless room at a studio called — no joke — Coconuts in Miami. While it’s easy to listen to the Doctors now and ponder the notion they became immediate superstars, alas this was not meant to be. Their first tour involved a “miserable van” and a series of club and college gigs along the East Coast. Their two standout shows were opening for the Clash at the University of Maryland and opening for the Cars at the Capital Center in Washington DC.
“I was shitting bricks two weeks in advance of the Cars gig imagining myself playing in front of 15,000 people,” Severson said.
When it came time to record their second album in Atlanta, the band made a collective decision.
“We wanted to make a LOUD record. Before the second album, we had the experiences of playing live and finding out what audiences responded to and since they were beaten to death by heavy metal airplay of the hair bands of that time, it seemed they liked it loud, so that’s what we went after,” Severson told me.
Mission accomplished. Second Opinion has more edge to it than 4 Out of 5 Doctors but also a greater sense of musical majority. “Good Pretender” and “Call Me At Home” are riddled with slinky grooves while “Never Say Die” is the kind of anthemic tune John Hughes could have salivated over for his Brat Pack movies.
And then there’s “Waiting For Roxanne.” This is not hyperbole — this is one of the greatest pop songs ever written that never became a hit. In fact, it’s a tragedy it never became a hit. It’s intense, it’s catchy, it’s anti-climactic, and it’s straight from the heart. Best of all, like the Knack’s “My Sharona,” there’s a real Roxanne that influenced the song’s creation.
“Roxanne was George’s live in and I wrote the song after hearing George tell tales of their distinctly different shopping styles – his was search and capture and her’s was dawdle and adorn bright shiny objects for hours,” Severson said. “You know, the typical man/women disparity.”
Yet despite another college tour (this time with Hall and Oates) and a noticeable appearance in the horror film “House on Sorority Row,” the group quickly ran out of creative gas.
“It was time. We had been together as a unit for nine years and it was time to move on rather than beat it to death. We had just finished our third album we had self-produced, but we had such a bad taste of the musical industry we wanted no part of it,” Severson said. “We felt we had done our part; bringing our best work to the table, many songs that coulda shoulda been hits. However, what happened after the two albums were released was out of our control. We were one of the most popular bands in the Mid-Atlantic region and it was the record company’s job to sell us nationwide and they failed miserably – or else they tried and the people rejected us.”
Doctors reunion gigs are few and far between (your best chance of seeing one of these is if you live in the DC area) but I’m going to use this forum to appeal that they head north sometime soon. Even the group’s third release Post Op, despite being rough around the edges, shows signs of brilliance on tracks like “The Big Hurt,” “Daddy Drives A UFO,” and my favorite, “Never Go To Africa.”
For any newcomers to the band, this is the best way I can summarize them. It’s cliché I know but it can’t be helped. They are, very easily, the relief lollipop you receive after you’re nervously poked and prodded at doctor’s office.
***
Share your feedback and suggestions for future columns with Ira at [email protected].
