Balancing Medicine and Country Music Stardom

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This story is from the Anamnesis episode called Resilience and starts at 17:00 in the podcast. It’s from James Robert Webb, MD, a musculoskeletal interventional radiologist by training who practices pain osteoporosis management in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and who is also a country music performer.

Following is a transcript of his remarks:

Some of my earliest memories as a kid involve music. Whether that’s in church or mom playing piano, or me tingling around on the piano, music seemed like it was always part of my life.

The Spark of Creativity

Some of my early memories, as of probably about 4 years old, are listening to my mom’s eight-track of Fleetwood Mac Rumors at their stereo console. I didn’t really come from a particular musical family. My mom played piano and people sing, but there weren’t anybody in any bands.

Outside of piano, I didn’t really have any family that played, say, guitar or fiddle or anything like that. It was mostly vocal, which is kind of ironic, because I never really liked the sound of my voice coming up. I think because I would tape myself on a cassette player back in the ’80s, sing along to something, and it never sounded like I thought it should.

Years later, I kind of figured out that’s because I didn’t have vocal training, but I had a pretty good ear for pitch. My voice wasn’t doing what I thought it was capable of, I guess.

I was going to be a physical therapist when I went to college. I came from a small town, and I didn’t really have any models for huge success.

When I was in college as physical therapy, as my plain career, I was a biology major and I started noticing, “Well, I’m tutoring all these pre-med guys and gals in general chemistry and stuff.”

That’s kind of when I first started thinking, “Well, you know, maybe I could do that.” I had already had the healthcare background.

Medicine Calls

I changed my major and got into what was my first choice at the University of Oklahoma and went on, and eventually did a year of internal medicine, and then 4 years of diagnostic radiology residency, where you’re guided away from patients in a consultant role.

What really was a big turning point for me is my fellowship in musculoskeletal radiology. That’s technically a diagnostic radiology fellowship. Most of us spend all day reading knee and hip and shoulder MRIs. But in my fellowship, about half of that time was spent doing minimally invasive pain management — so epidurals, radiofrequency ablations, kyphoplasties … things like that.

Fast-forward after my fellowship, I worked for a year at a hospital with a group of radiologists…. I felt I was doing what I needed to do, what I was supposed to be doing, but I was recruited for my title as a MSK radiologist, but I didn’t get to practice that aspect. I was mostly being used as a general radiologist, which is pretty common when you enter at the bottom of the practice.

After a year, I went out on my own and started basically an interventional radiology pain management practice, which over the next 10 years really morphed into a 99% clinical practice of treating osteoporosis patients, diagnosing osteoporosis patients, and also treating them with kyphoplasty.

I have kind of made my career of being the stopgap person that kind of stands in the gaps of patients who fall through the cracks of how we conventionally treat osteoporosis and pain.

My pain practice is really focused on hopeless cases and people who had failed back surgeries, for example, with post-laminectomy syndrome, people who are too old or too sick “to have anything done,” and just people in general that have been through the gamut of surgery or pain management and they’re still having pain.

Following My Passion (and Finding a Stress-Reliever)

All along, my medical career in college, medical school, residency, and everything, music has always been a big part of my life. I would play music. I played guitar starting probably around 14 or 15. I played bass. I played drums. I played marching. I played pretty much everything. At one point or another in marching band, in the percussion section, I played bass drum and snares and quads and pit percussion and xylophone and stuff like that.

I always use that as the thing to kind of keep me sane. I’d say it keeps me balanced. That’s one of my stress relievers, whether listening to music or just playing along with a song on guitar, or just kind of playing on the guitar and making my own music — not even thinking about an outcome or trying to compose music, but just playing free-form on instruments. Those were things that could probably have foretold that I might be a songwriter eventually because I did these things early, kind of the experimental things and not playing it like everybody else and playing different ways. I got interested in songwriting probably at the end of 2011.

So I started looking into songwriting and got involved in a group called Nashville Songwriters Association locally in Tulsa and sort of kind of sheepishly recording these demos on GarageBand. Because, remember, I didn’t like my voice so I didn’t want anybody to hear it.

But I had a friend who tuned my piano, who used to be a bandleader for a guy named Razzy Bailey, who was like a male vocalist back in the ’80s, a country music artist and touring guy. He heard these demos when he was tuning my piano because I was playing for him — because he was kind of the only guy I knew that used to be in the industry — and he could hear through that luckily.

I had kind of a happy pattern of events where I started working with people in Nashville and pretty soon tumbled to a supportive group of people at Banner Music that have really helped me develop as a writer and artist. I started just recording music and playing and things. I kind of went from this role of just being a physician, intelligent-shift, focused on a medical practice, very left-brain, as we might say, to letting back in a lot of that right-brain, creativity stuff.

We’re looking at a particular compression fracture condition where there is over 750,000 a year that’s treated with kyphoplasty, vertebroplasty, and one of the main intent-to-treat is a test that’s no better than a coin flip.

We’re in the middle right now of doing a study on that. In that same time, a lot of weeks I’m flying to Nashville and writing with other professional songwriters or recording with Grammy-winning producers and things. It’s kind of a crazy mishmash my life is, it’s interesting, but it’s way more fulfilled, I have found, than if I were just sitting in a room reading x-rays all day.

When I think back on what really catalyzed me to take the step to kind of jump into this… well, I mean, frankly into this field where it was almost as competitive as medicine.

Then I just started kind of dabbling in songwriting.

But it would be kind of like trying to do something in medicine that you don’t have any understanding of. It would be kind of like trying to learn how to start IVs on your own when you’re 16 or whatever without people giving you principles.

I would, of course, use my good doctor-student skills of getting a textbook or getting a book that somebody has written about songwriting, and trying to learn what you can from there.

Really, for me, I think once I started dabbling in it, I started seeing that I probably had some natural talent at it. I was getting good feedback when I was going to play shows. Other people were hearing my songs and liking them.

For me, #1, breaking through in the music industry was about not just approaching this as an avocation and hobby, but as a vocation, even though I’m still a physician and still practicing, and 100% committed to that. I had to really focus on becoming a professional songwriter first, an artist. For me, that meant co-writing with people that I can learn from, co-writing with other professional writers, writing songs regularly.

“You’re Really Good”

Then I think… me applying my medical side of continuous quality improvement, as I always think, I always try to be the best. I always try to get better than I was yesterday and try to write a better song than I wrote last year.

It is a talent that you can hone and try to improve that.

The more I started doing that, the more I felt the response to my music and people in the industry where people had shows and things like that. I think a lot of it just came down to probably also was an early midlife crisis. I think I was turning 40, and I was looking at, I have always felt this call to music and I’ve always kind of denied it. I have always focused on being the doctor. I can remember being in college and playing the backup bands for people that were in talent shows.

One of them said, “Man, you’re really good. Have you ever thought about going to L.A. or Nashville?” I still remember looking out the window at the afternoon sun and thinking, “Well, yeah. I love music, but I also want to have a family someday and musicians’ lives are very hard.” For me, in many ways, I guess medicine ended up being like the fallback plan even though it wasn’t really my career. Looking back now, I have maybe the greatest backup career as a physician if I don’t make it as a musician.

But I think there were some moments of inspiration that kind of guide you and propel you along the way.

One of those things was I could tell, even on these early shows that I was playing, there are certain songs that I would write or that I would play that would be in my vocal wheelhouse. When I’d hit that, I was captivating people and I could see it in their eyes, and I saw the response to the audience.

That fueled me a lot because I could see the feedback from the audience.

I started having some success on the radio. Then somebody took one of my songs to Buddy Cannon, who is a Grammy-winning producer, and he expressed an interest in working with me. That kind of moment is one of those things that is hard to come by and you can’t buy.

I think with my album that came out, “James Robert Webb,” we had it for awhile and we were getting ready to release it. It’s the one that Buddy had produced. We ended up releasing it, I think, May 1st last year in the middle of the pandemic. It was really tough as an independent artist to gain traction and to gain notoriety, and all that kind of stuff without the major label money support like the Sony’s, the Universal’s, and things like that.

But then, especially in the middle of a pandemic, when kind of the touring industry shuts down and that becomes even more of a problem, I’ve been lucky to have a lot of success at, what we call, secondary radio. The smaller radio stations, smaller-town things, not like the major markets.

Success With My Fourth Priority

I think if I look back at when I was younger and say recording my voice on, like I said, singing along to pop hits on the radio or The Police, or whatever, and I play it back and it didn’t sound like I thought it should. What I have come to realize now is that’s because I have a good ear for pitch, so I can hear pitch. But my voice, I never had any vocal training, so it wasn’t doing what I thought it should do.

When I started writing, that was one of the things I had to overcome, that shyness, in performance. A lot of people can’t really put their finger on that, but it may … if you don’t like your voice, it might be because you’ve got a good ear for pitch that your voice isn’t there yet. I always equated that to, well, I’m not a good singer.

When my intuition led me to change my practice to be something more where I’m making a difference and fulfilled, rather than making money necessarily, I really enjoy my practice more. It is back to that old idiom that if you find a job you love, you never work a day in your life. For me, I have kind of tried to make both medicine and music that way.

I spend a lot of time. I write every day pretty much. It may only be an hour, maybe four or five hours.

I have most of my practice compressed down to a couple of days a week. If I need to go fly out to go to Nashville and write, or to go play a show later in the week, then that could happen. I try to compartmentalize that as much as I can because I’m also a father of three, and that’s probably the biggest challenge for me is work-life balance.

Then after that, there is music. Basically, I tell them, “OK, we got to take care of me. We got to take care of my family and relationships, and then we got to take care of the medical practice in Tulsa.” Then #4 can be music, right? And yet somehow try to have success with that being fourth priority.

Other stories from the Resilience episode include “From Tragedy to Advocacy” and “The Power of Social Media”

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