They are all music people. The kinds of people who may have full-time jobs, kids and partners, but still carve out the time to join multiple bands, subgroups, trios and duos and make music. They seem to always be on Cherokee Street, they say, calling themselves “very southside St. Louis.” They’ve done a lot of jam sessions, they’ve rapped at a lot of bars, they’ve heard a lot of beats.
But this night in January 2021 at the Cola Lounge on Cherokee — well, that jam session was unlike anything they had ever experienced before in their lives.
“It was absolutely magical,” says Wesley Ragland.
“That moment, the chemistry was crazy. It was like some ‘Splash Brothers’ stuff,” says Donovan Hunter, referencing Stephen Curry and Klay Thompson, considered to be among the greatest shooters in NBA history.
That night, five men — Ragland, Hunter, Jose Marks, Jamell Spann and Mickey Hayes — just started jamming, Hayes on the guitar, everyone else on the mic. They went for over an hour, Hayes hammering away on the guitar and the rappers following him, passing the mic back and forth, bar after bar after bar. Everything in that moment just seemed right.
Ragland and Hunter say it was the guitar. “I've never heard any rappers freestyling to an acoustic guitar,” Ragland says. “Like, this is different, you know?”
The moment spawned an idea: They should make a rap album together. But not just any rap album. They wanted to make the album over live instruments — guitars, drums, keys, basses. A live band, essentially, just like at the Cola Lounge.
Nearly two years later, that jam session has led to the group’s debut EP, a self-titled jazz-fusion style rap album recorded under the name DOUG. The group will celebrate the release with a show at Blank Space on February 4.
The official six-person roster is long for a rap group: MCs Hunter (Donovan RaMon), Marks (POET X), Spann (SPANN) and Ragland (WASLY); engineer/producer Owen Ragland; guitarist Mickey Hayes; and Dogtown Athletic Club helping the instrumentals.
The product is an eclectic album that captures the variety of musicians — the jazzy strumming of Hayes, the pace-setting of the Gram Tolish from Dogtown Athletic Club, the deep, raspy, melodic voice of SPANN, the fluid freestyling of Ragland. But Hunter says it’s the live instruments that allow the group to roll and resonate with listeners.
“Just harmony and music and vibrations,” Hunter says. “When you got that live band, it's always natural. So it's always something that you can feel within your soul and your heart.”
DOUG’s core members started making music many years before this EP and many years before the phrase originated. Wesley Ragland, Owen Ragland and Jose Marks are brothers. Hayes went to Webster Groves High School with the brothers. Marks and Hunter say the first time they connected was in elementary school when they beat up a bully. The list goes on — it’s an intricate web of relationships.
They are unified by one word: “DOUG.” This isn’t just an artist name, though. It’s a verb, a noun, a self-created nickname, a handshake, the name of their former house, a way of living, a culture, a brotherhood, an acronym for “Doing Our United Good” and “Driving Our Universal Growth” — and now, a band name.
Ask what a Doug is, and you’ll get a confusing response.
“Man, you a Doug,” Hunter says. “There are Dougs out there that don’t know they Dougs.”
“It’s like a culture,” Ragland adds.
But understanding the idea of Doug is integral to understanding DOUG. The name developed as many as a half-dozen years ago. After watching The Hangover, Hunter says, the image of the mild-mannered bridegroom Doug, played by Justin Bartha, stuck in his head. Every time he saw his friend Marks, he made references to Doug. “Where’s Doug?” “Aye yo!” Then they started calling each other Doug. Then it just evolved.
“We just took it and ran with it man, I just wanted to make it a family and have deeper meaning to it,” Hunter says.
Sitting from behind three separate video screens, Hunter, Ragland and Marks demonstrate the DOUG handshake, a handshake they say represents love, respect and unity. Screen to screen, they simultaneously move their arms, gripping the air as if they are shaking hands, bringing each other in for a fake hug and attaching their fist to their chests.
“It's more than just a group, it's a brotherhood,” Marks says. “So it doesn't just come with the handshake. It comes with an acknowledgment of, ‘This is someone that I want to lift up and I want to see do good.’”
Now it’s a band. After their jam session at the Cola Lounge, the group started hanging out more. In the early days of 2021, for “DOUG days,” as they called it. They’d eat dinner, freestyle and make music.
“I think the feeling of improvisation and freestyling is something that is incredibly powerful, incredibly positive,” Ragland says. “It feels good when you're in a room seeing somebody create something from nothing.”
In those sessions, Hayes realized that the music needed to reach more people than his basement.
“Yeah,” he remembers thinking, “we need to actually do something with this.”
So after grueling days of work on a construction site, Hayes returned home and channeled his days of studying jazz guitar at Loyola University New Orleans to sketch out an entire musical score. It became the basis of the sound in the album.
Over the past two years, DOUG has been recording, mixing, engineering and producing their four-song EP. The hardest part hasn’t been the music or the chemistry or even finding space for six creative people to fit into an album. They recorded the songs in a single day.
It’s scheduling.
Everyone in the group has a full-time job outside of DOUG. Some have kids and partners. Hayes lives in New Orleans, where he teaches music and works as a bartender. They each have their own musical careers and subgroups and duos and trios.
“The challenge is just, how do you get seven, eight people to all line their schedules up?” Ragland says. “We’re all adults, we all work — but when we do so, the energy is so natural.”
The group plans to continue making music. They’re all working on separate projects now, but their group chats with each other are continuously blowing up with ideas. When Hayes returns to St. Louis in the summer, they hope to record another album.
But for now, they’re reveling in their creation. In some ways, they still seem like they’re riding the high from two years ago, from that jam session at the Cola Longue, the night they discovered the sound that fit like nothing before.
“That band just gives it that full DOUG feel — everything natural,” Hunter says. “It’s all love. It's rough. It's love. It's chaotic. It’s beautiful.”
This story has been updated to include photography credit.
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