DR. HOOK'S VD & MEDICINE SHOWS

By Tim Cahill

San Francisco–Napoleon, Mussolini, Hitler, Nietzche and Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show–all of them itched. The first four with syphilis and gonorrhea, the seven members of Dr. Hook because they had just done an anti-VD show for public television and had developed med student syndrome, which is the fals and overwhelming impression that the last disease studied is the one you have.

Dr. Hook was working on its second album at the Columbia Recording Studio here, a studio that the engineers call, with ambivalent pride, "the home of Sylvia's Mother." Jokes about poor Sylvia were in circulation. You remember her: She's on her way to Galveston to marry that fellow down there. Mother wants her to take an umbrella because it's starting to rain. Well, Dennis Locorriere, the bearded lead singer of Dr. Hoook, wasn't sure, but he thought it may be beginning to drip. He had spent too much time listening to all that depressing information about spirochetes and gonococci, heart damage, brain disease and open sores.

Still, here he was with the complete Medicine Show, working on the last few cuts of Dr. Hook's second album–running one more time through a song called "Looking for Pussy," to be included on the album which will be called Sloppy Seconds.

Puerile faith, you say? Who needs this shit, you ask?

Dr. Hook, say the image makers. "Sylvia's Mother," some critics have argued, was the Love Story of rock, the archetypal Top 40 teen-age hit; a song with the most lachrymose set of lyrics since some bud went running back to the stalled car for her high-school ring and got smashed flat by the California Zephyr. The song has sold three-and-a-half million copies to date, was number one on the charts in America and Europe for months and even now tops the charts in Japan. You couldn't turn on the AM radio without hearing it. And nobody seems willing to forgive Dr. Hook. The BBC voted "Sylvia's Mother" the worst record in the history of pop music, according to Dennis.

When I called the image-makers to arrange an interview, I was told that Dr. Hook didn't want to be known as a one-hit, Top 40 group. As for "Sylvia's Mother," I was told, "They hate it as badly as you do."
"We love Sylvia's Mother," Dennis said. As for top 40 aspirations, Dennis felt no compunctions about appearing on American Bandstand, lip-synching a gold record. "Listen," he says, "15 years I wanted to dance with those kids on American Bandstand." Ray Sawyer, the strutting eye-patched Dr. Hook of the group, had confidential information to add. "Dick Clark swore."

Dick Clark did?

"Before the show he said, ‘What's this bullshit, who locked the fucking bathroom?'" Dennis, in the interest of decency, qualifies Ray's statement. "I don't think he actually said ‘fucking.'"

"He said ‘bullshit', anyway."

The show was one of those unqualified Bandstand disasters. The record spluttered and died, leaving the group mouthing silence and pounding dead instruments. Ray leapt into the crowd and ended up doing a frenzied dance in the midst of a crowd of rythmically clapping bandstanders. Even Dick Clark dissolved into laughter.

"They cut that part," Dennis said ruefully. "Clark wasn't too bad, really. I thin we were a little drunk."
"Did he ask you who your spokesman was," I wanted to know.
"Yeah, that was the first thing he asked."
"What did you say?"
"We just kind of looked at one another. We didn't know. We were drunk."
"What did Clark say then?"
"He asked if the questions were too broad."

Dr. Hook was originally one of those super competent, versatile lounge bands, a hard working group that played the bars in Union City, New Jersey. Dennis was on vocals and leads, Ray on vocals and bass, George Cummings on vocals and Hawaiian guitar, Bill Francis on keyboards and Jay David on drums and vocals. They played country & western, Top 40, "anything," Dennis says, "that would make them not hit us."

Ray adds, "These were the kind of places were motorcycle cars would come on in and get really juiced. Then they'd fight over pretty girls in blond beehive hairdos. We usually found that if we played country & western stuff, it would stop the fights. We worked really hard on our country chops."
"Hey," says Jay, "you ought to tell him about Wayne Tibbs."

"Wayne," says Dennis, "was this drunk Texas truckdriver that came into this place in New Jersey where we were playing. It was called the Sands Lounge and it had plastic palm trees around the dance floor which pretty much describes what kind of place it was. Tibbs came over to Ray and said, ‘You ever see what a shotgun does to a man's face?' Ray said he didn't know but he could guess. So this guy went over and got another drink and came back and told us that he was going to shoot someone that night. Later on he was out in the parking lot waiving a gun around and a cop shot him. The ‘fantastic part' about it was–and I swear this is true, you can look it up in the papers–as Wayne Tibbs was lying there on the ground bleeding, he looked up at the cop and said, ‘Hey, that was a pretty good shot.'"

"Anyway," Ray says, "we were getting a little tired of playing these bars."