Doctors’ Mob – Last One In The Van Drives

Doctors’ Mob were already a half-assed new-sincerity band gigging around Austin when MTV’s “Cutting Edge” crew came to town in the mid-1980s. Grown into an intoxicated stupor, driven by Glen Benavides’ fondness for creeds such as, “If it ain’t warm enough to burn my hand, it’s cold enough for me,” they somehow managed to play both Rickenbacker-wrought melodic pop and speed-demon punk-metal, though they never quite copped to either.

At the time they were the first and only drunk-rock band I had any reason to know about. It is possible Steve Collier had caught wind of what the Replacements were doing in Minneapolis, and equally likely that Doctors’ Mob were simply the inevitable result of hopeless ’70s-music devotees surfing a Schaefer wave. Either way, they were inebriators, and a joy to hear pre-hangover.

As the story goes, they recorded their first album in 1985 as the studio was being constructed around them; it was, consequently, a haphazard affair, and the band reputedly had to be paid an hourly keg to get them in the studio at all. Fifteen years later nobody had any idea where the master tapes were, so some guy named Bosco tracked down original vinyl copies of both the debut album (Headache Machine) and its 1987 follow-up (Sophomore Slump) and made a turntable-to-digital transfer. They left all the mistakes gloriously intact, didn’t drop the song (“Let Me Try”) that nobody liked at the time, and were far too lazy to resequence anything.

Doctors’ Mob was the first band that ever rehearsed in the garage of The Lodge (the house where I lived at the time). They turned me on to the Young Fresh Fellows, and, flipping through my stack of LPs, stole several of them, I’m pretty sure. They were fond enough of Sweet that they played “Ballroom Blitz” as a closer when they opened for the True Believers (who I mistook them for the first time I saw them). Damn, they were a great band that night, both of them.

I love these records, even though I’ve never bothered to give anyone tapes of them over the years, even though I’m quite certain they’re not the great artistic accomplishment I’d really like them to be, even though this disc is 22 goddamn songs long. Yes, it’s true that Doctors’ Mob were never the great, passionate band that the Replacements and Scruffy the Cat became — Collier’s songs were sometimes too gimmicky (“Pat Blashill”) — but it’s also worth noting that they showed up drunk, and they showed up late — which was infinitely more fun than if they’d never showed up at all.