As a rocker and a doctor, he's all about commitment

His story is not exactly Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, but Jamie Hall definitely has two halves to his life. Ironically, one half is fronting the dark rock band HafLife. In the other he's a family practice doctor at Detroit's largest public health clinic, where he's the physician in charge.

What's consistent in both his half-lives is that Jamie Hall is a rebel. As a doctor, the 42-year-old could have a cushy suburban practice, but he chooses to serve the poor and uninsured in the Third World health care conditions of urban Detroit. He eschews the white lab coat in favor of leisure suits found at urban clothiers. He doesn't hide the punk rock hair, complete with little bleached blond tufts that look like horns, although he does replace some of his pierced earrings with flesh-colored plugs for the office.

"I get up and go to work and I put on basically the equivalent of a costume or an outfit to do what I need to do. It's the same thing when I go on stage. And work is just another stage; that's all it is," says Hall. "You can be sincere, and you can be very good at what you do. It's not living a lie. But it's another stage, another performance. And I love to perform -- and I'm good at doing it."

Even as a rocker he's a bit on the fringe. No straight-ahead rock for singer/songwriter Hall. On his trophy from the 2004 Detroit Music Awards, HafLife is called Best Industrial band, but his music doesn't really fit the genre, combining elements of funk, punk and heavy metal and definitely courting the dark side. To deal with the descriptive quandary the band calls their music "bootycore," a tongue-in-cheek swipe at "hardcore" and "horrorcore" as genre monikers.

As a physician, he's pretty low-key, but his dedication is evident in the amount of time and effort he puts into it. He works five days a week at his Detroit clinic, one day at a rural clinic in Ionia and half a day each week at the Wayne County jail. It's hard to imagine how he fits in band practice, performing and the occasional deejay job. "My work week is six to seven days, sometimes more. I have the ability to bend the time-space continuum," Hall laughs, then says a little more seriously, "I don't sleep much and I don't have kids."

His own childhood was spent in East Detroit (now Eastpointe), though he now calls Detroit's Indian Village home. "My mother was a platinum blonde bombshell, and my father was a biker," Hall says. "But he was a really super-intelligent biker, so it was pretty strange." And it seems to have rubbed off. "I've been a strange boy since I was born," he says.

As family practice doc to poor and uninsured patients, Hall is a jack of all trades, hitting medical areas from gerontology to pediatrics and wound care -- everything but major trauma. "It's the most frustrating, humbling, rewarding experience all in one day," he says. "I've walked into work some days smiling, happy, then on the verge of taking all my diplomas, throwing them in a box and walking out the door, and then being thankful that it was the best day I ever had -- all in an eight-hour period. It's pretty amazing.""

HafLife will be playing at P.J.'s Lager House, 1254 Michigan Ave., Detroit, at 11 p.m. Saturday.