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Band will take your breath away, then help revive you |
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Written by Sherri Gallant
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Friday, May 08 2009, 10:33 PM |
A rock band that could save your life?
Believe it.
DNR (the medical abbreviation for Do Not Resuscitate) is a local classic rock group comprised of four doctors and a nurse, playing tonight at the Blarney Stone.
You might want to get there early. When DNR played at the Ventura in Coaldale, they drew such a crowd that the pub ran out of booze — and glasses — and managers had to call in extra waitresses — stat.
“We have a lot of friends and co-workers who like to come and hear us play,” said Kevin Martin, ER physician and drummer. “At first I think people came to listen out of curiosity, but now they actually seem to like it — we’ve been getting some good feedback.”
Vocalist Colleen West, an emergency-room RN with a background in gospel music, said DNR is enormously grateful to friends and family for always showing up and being their biggest fans. All of the band members are married with children and take turns practising in each other’s basements and garages, usually late in the evening, once the kids are asleep.
“Because there’s such a high rate of burnout in the emergency room, this really helps us cope,” said West. “The friends that you make when you’re playing music are so cool — we get along so well. We just laugh all the time — it’s really healthy.”
The name DNR came to them partly because it’s a medical term — one that betrays their collectively raucous and slightly dark sense of humour — and also as a twist on GNR, the short form of Guns ‘N Roses, led by legendary rocker Axl Rose.
Their faces will no doubt be familiar to scores of southern Alberta patients, but fans of live music in Alberta are bound to recognize some of them, too.
Rob Strank, a bass player and vocalist, is a family physician at the Haig Clinic who’s played in a number of other bands. West performed and recorded a CD as a gospel singer and sang with Razor’s Edge, a well-known Edmonton band. Wes Orr is an ER doc and guitar player who was recently recognized by a patient in the emergency room not as a physician, but as a rocker. And Morley Wong is the city’s only guitar-playing nephrologist (kidney specialist), who played in a number of bands as a teenager — including a punk band called Canis Lupus.
Their co-workers enjoy seeing them out of scrubs and in their rocker personas so, for the most part, their appearances have been limited to staff parties and similar events. It all started about three years ago when Martin, Orr and some other staff (who have since left Lethbridge) would get together and jam. They found themselves a few bricks short of a band and started looking around.
“We couldn’t find a drummer, so I said ‘OK, I’ll drum,’” Martin recalled. “Then we couldn’t find a singer and somebody said one of the nurses could sing, so we talked to Colleen and found out she really could sing.”
Eventually Strank and Wong came aboard and as a group they managed to find time in the midst of clashing shiftwork schedules to rehearse about twice a month. Their busy lives permit between three and five shows a year, and they’re working on an original, as-yet-unnamed tune of their own to add to their list of cover songs that span about four decades
“We’re not making money, but it’s not about money,” said Strank.
“We just want people to come out and have a good time,” said Martin.
“I think the goal is actually to get us through a safe, happy mid-life crisis,” laughed West.
The band is keen to play for charity fundraisers and its members aren’t shy about using their new celebrity for promotional purposes. West, for example, will be reminding the audience tonight to celebrate the importance of medical personnel, pointing out that May 11-17 is Nurses Week in Alberta.
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