Robert Palmer – Bad Case Of Loving You (Doctor, Doctor)

Robert Palmer’s first big American hit was another man’s song, and the writer’s own record never charted.

Capitol Records’ 1978 promotional 12-inch, catalog SPRO-9025, names the song in four words: Bad Case of Lovin’ You. That was Moon Martin’s original title, on his debut album, Shots from a Cold Nightmare. When Robert Palmer released his version through Island a year later, the label added a parenthetical, (Doctor, Doctor), lifted from the chorus. No document says who added it. Palmer’s version charted around the world. Martin’s never charted at all. By May 1983, in front of a Rockpop In Concert crowd in Dortmund, the song was Palmer’s in every sense but the writing credit.

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Martin came from Oklahoma. He started in rockabilly with a band called the Disciples, which moved to Los Angeles, became Southwind in 1967, and made three country-rock albums before splitting in 1971. He did better as a writer of songs other people made famous. Willy DeVille took his Cadillac Walk, and Palmer took this one. Craig Leon produced Martin’s own recording for Capitol, a lean, nervy record that the radio mostly ignored. The song’s central joke was already there, a lovesick man diagnosing himself with a medical vocabulary, and someone with a bigger voice was about to use it.

Palmer cut it at Compass Point Studios in Nassau for Secrets, producing the album himself with Karl Pitterson engineering. Record World reported the Moon Martin recording finished and on its way by March 10, 1979. Island issued the single in Britain as WIP 6481, backed with Love Can Run Faster, and in America that July as IS 49016. Britain barely noticed: the Official Charts Company logged a single week at No.61, on July 7. America took to it. The Billboard Hot 100 held it at No.14 on the charts dated September 22 and 29, while Cash Box had it at No.10 and Record World at No.9. Canada took it to No.1, France to No.9, Australia to No.13, and Secrets reached No.19 on the Billboard 200.

Four years on, in Dortmund

The song also put Palmer up for his first Grammy, Best Rock Vocal Performance, Male, at the 1980 ceremony, against Joe Jackson, Rod Stewart and Frank Zappa. Bob Dylan won it with Gotta Serve Somebody. Palmer didn’t need the trophy for the song to keep working. By 1983 he was touring Pride, and Bad Case of Loving You had become the number that told a crowd who he was, a reliable closer in any set he played.

ZDF recorded the Rockpop In Concert marathon at the Westfalenhalle in Dortmund on May 14, 1983, and broadcast it for the first time on July 2. Palmer shared the bill with Nena, Men at Work, the Tubes, Ultravox, Little River Band and the B-52’s, and his own segment ran about 36 minutes. Jack Waldman, who had played keyboards on Secrets, was in the band, along with Alan Mansfield on guitar and keyboards, Frank Blair on bass, and Dony Wynn and Michael Dawe on drums. That night Palmer was an established act with one American hit everyone knew, playing to a West German hall that had come for pop and new wave. The song held up in that company because it fits a stage so well: a fast rock shuffle built around a chorus a whole arena can shout back.

The bigger chapter came soon after. Palmer joined the Power Station in 1985 and then made Addicted to Love, which won him the Grammy that Dylan had beaten him to, with Simply Irresistible winning another in 1989. That same year Palmer had Eric “E.T.” Thorngren remix the song for Addictions: Volume 1, with heavier guitars and drums, which suggests he never thought the 1979 mix did it justice. Palmer died in 2003. Moon Martin died on May 11, 2020, and he outlived his song’s most famous singer by seventeen years.

The two versions of this song tell the same story about songwriting and performance. Martin wrote the song and recorded it first, and the record vanished. Palmer gave it a bigger name, a bigger production and a voice built for halls like the Westfalenhalle, and it went to No.1 in Canada and into the American Top 20. What the Dortmund footage shows, four years after release, is a song that had stopped being a cover in the minds of the people singing it back. The four extra words on the label didn’t change the song, but they were how it came to be filed under Palmer’s name.