Sam Lloyd, best-known as Ted Buckland, the sweaty, nervous lawyer on TV medical comedy Scrubs, will perform Saturday at the Broward Center for the Performing Arts with his a cappella group, the Blanks.
These are the guys known as the Worthless Peons who periodically break into song on the show. The troupe, made up of Lloyd and friends he made at Syracuse University, wedged themselves onscreen with Zach Braff and Donald Faison by impressing the hell out of the Scrubs' producers with their chops.
In our print edition, Lloyd spoke about what it's like to perform with your best friends, to do what you love, and to put on the big, bad lawyer suit every day. After the jump, we have the extra stuff for Scrubs junkies.
Why do you call yourselves The Blanks?
At one point when we were singing for the fun of it Philip's whole family had a reunion party for his grandmother's 80th birthday in Las Vegas and he said, "hey why don't we go down to Vegas and sing for this party?" So we said "it's Philip's grandmother so let's be group. What are good names that go with Philip? Phil and ... The Blanks!"
What are your band mates' other careers?
Philip is an actor. He's worked in television and some films but he does a lot of commercials. Paul, up until recently, did closed captions for the hearing impaired but they had to lay off people so now he's just doing The Blanks. And George teaches English as a second language in his spare time. His students know he's been on Scrubs of course they can't tell him because they don't speak English.
How many takes does it take you guys while you're filming to get the song down correctly?
It depends on if we're actually singing it live or we have to pre-record it. In either case it's a little hairy. Sometimes it really is like we have two days to get the song ready. Paul, as you can probably tell, is a pretty amazing arranger. He will literally be up all night to get the stuff ready for us and then he'll call up our voicemail and play our parts on our machines so that when we wake up we can start learning the part. We'll have to be recording that stuff while they're shooting or setting up the scene we're supposed to do so sometimes we'll only have three or four chances to get the mix right. Or we get out there and have to sing it on the camera and hope we don't fudge the words. Often when you see the stuff we've sung live there are little mistakes here and there but nothing horrible. But it's stuff we always notice.
On the show you're Ted's band but outside of that you're The Blanks. Which do you prefer?
We figure we'd like to be known as The Blanks eventually but for most people it is "Ted's Band from Scrubs." Hopefully after a year or two of touring around eventually we'll just be The Blanks. We do pretty much everything we do on Scrubs in our show but it's not presented as Ted's Band. The show is ridiculous but it's Blanks ridiculous. Scrubs fans won't be disappointed though.
It sounds like the band getting on Scrubs was a fluke, how do you guys feel about everything you've achieved?
We've gotten a huge kick out of it. Our biggest downfall is that none of us want to actually have to do work. Paul never wants to arrange the songs and we never want to rehearse songs. But when Scrubs came along we literally only had three songs to our names. All of a sudden they call up saying "we need Underdog in three days" and so Paul has to spend all this time arranging the song and we have to learn it. The sum of all that is that we have a reportoire after being on Scrubs for 8 years that we never would've had otherwise. It's very strange for us.
Scrubs has been canceled several times over at this point but it keeps coming back. Will you guys keep performing after Scrubs is over?
We're going to give it a shot and see what happens. I figure we've got about another year and a half of Scrubs syndication and we're hoping in that time we'll be known more as the Blanks instead of Ted's Band and be able to keep going.
-- Devin DejarLais
The Blanks, 7:30 p.m. Saturday, April 3, at the Broward Center for the Performing Arts, 201 SW Fifth Ave., Fort Lauderdale. Tickets cost $25 to $35 954-462-0222; click here.
