THE DR. HOOK STORY

THE DR. HOOK STORY

Or, Every time You Try To Find The Bottom, It's Never There

Lester Bangs

Dr. Hook & the Medicine Show are playing the Community Concourse in San Diego. They've just come tumbling onstage, seven raggedy wastedorties picking the ticks out Of their beards, giggling in the classic pothead manner, tossing off as many four-letter naughties and peepee doodoo sniggerines as the market will carry. It Vail so infectious that between the kaka you might miss the fact that a series of aching Countrytinged ballads is actually emanating from this pack of prifce doofuses bumping into each other in whinnying bliss, blowing cues, solos, equipment and whole songs because all that honky professionalism means nothing up against your own perfect blundering enlightenment, and if you trip over your own ankles and put your big clodhopper thru the bass drum it's only natch'l and meant fo be that way! Because Dr. Hooks commit this primo fuckup exactly the same way at every single performance !

They're the most pristinely professional imitation of total nonprofessionalism I've ever seen.

I was sitting on the floor next to a couple of swabs on leave in madras sportshirts. They're passing this doobie back and forth, and one drawls t'other: "Maaan, are those cats , ever fucked overi"

"Yeah," drools his pal. "Sure wish I

was one o" them."

* * *

"We've been on the road for almost two years," gurgles Dennis Locorriere backstage. "But b^sed out of Sausalito..."

"Fort Dix," corrects Ray Sawyer.'

"Yeah," whips Dennis, "we got three years to go... we're on leave, gotta go right back; I gotta be in bed by ten!"

Everybody breaks up. Everybody has not stopped breaking up for the past 45 minutes. Dennis is cooking full-throttle now, dilating the military one-liner, chasing it to limb's end: "When they were fixin" to draft me," he chokes back bubbles of laughter, "I said if some cat gives me a gun and sez here take this and go out and shoot them motherfuckers, I'm gonna take it and kill the cat that gimme the gun... They immediately made me a sergeant... I was a

sergeant in the army for 15' years. I drilled them men till they couldn't stand up, I made them walk around in clots, I made "em march up and down flagpoles, I made them do shit no human being's ever did... and then they caught me, and threw me out..." He trots into mock-pout, close to tears. "I think it's very unfair, I was groovin", I had. my own bag, my own set o" changes, I woke up and it was HUT TOT TUT TUT, fifteen miles to the chowhall fifteen, miles back, wash them dislies, spotless them pies!. . . I don" wanna bore ya, I can tell ya about when I hit the shores of Tripoli... right on my teeth.. . cracked my face open..."

As he ad-libs his rap percolates, his eyes twinkle and pop, his yellow teeth flash, he swats the air erratically, jello rhumbas vibrating from his porky frame

". . . they're like a bunch of manic kids whose mothers forgot to feed 'em their Ritalin this morning. ..."

and greasy army surplus jumpsuit tjll he's practically bursting with utter foolishness, which is the identifying modulation of Hook; they're like a bunch of manic kids whose mothers forgot to feed "em their Ritalin this morning, and the wonder is it's all so spastic party irresistible. They make you a partisan to their goof, just like they make you believe all those skullbutting onstage traffic jams are anything but studied.

"You can get killed once a night," avers Dennis, beginning to take notice of the fact that the set they just concluded enjoyed an unusually grand finale when Ray Sawyer fell off the stage and, as is becoming evident, broke his leg. (The audience, of course, just thought it was part of the act.)

Ray is the first member of the band you notice, because he's the one with thex eyepatch, and aside from the fact that he and Dennis are clearly the Personalities present, the others sorta blend together by the simple truth that

just like any other passel o" hippies, they really do tend to look alike! Bassist Jance Garfat and rhythm gitox Rik Elswit sport identical wire-rim spectacles and long upchucks of wavy dirtblonde hair. As for keyboarder Billy Francis and steel guitarist George Cummings, they're jusf dark stalkers till you wise up that Billy's the certified backwoods pigfucker of the band. Jay David played drums and had the bony flat face of an English popster; becuzza. that and the fact that he was the only one without a beard, they booted him out.

But Ray's a banty little feist, probably taken more knocks than the'rest of the band put together. Used to be one of the most prominent speedfrCaks in the great Northwest, 'carried a sacramental bag of ups "n" downs and floated "em in poorboys of Market St. wine, till one night he hit the magic combo behind the wheel of a speeding jalopy, got shishkebabbed by the steering wheel and survived with eyepatch and shiny plastic forehead as trophies. Being a one-eyed buzzard is still getting him into trouble, like tonite, because his equilibrium's as blotto as his peripheral vision.

"One night," he cackles, "I knocked my microphone over and it scared me, so I jumped back and knocked Rik's over, and that scared me so I jumped over and knocked Jay's over, and it scared him and he knocked his over! All them mikes was on the floor and we was all down on our knees huntin" all oyer the stage tryin" to find "em! And the rowdies came out arid the whole stage was covered with us goirt" "QUACK QUACK!", around like ducks..; We don't fight it; if we started fightjn" it we'd go nuts tryih" to do that choreography.'; ."

"That's the whole trip, man," nutshells Dennis. "Whatever happens, insteada havin" some cat come out and say, a roadie over to fix the fuckin" thing, we'll let it stay broken awhile. Ray always dances my chord right outa my fuckin" guitar. Insteada panicking or fakin" it I just pick up the chord and put it back in."

If Dennis sometimes seems to be what passes for the brains of the group

(and he's very intelligent, make no mistake, it's just that you know.,.), Ray is it's funk even more than Billy. Born in Chickasaw, Alabama, he fished and squirreled his way up the river to Union City, N.J., where he stumbled into Dennis, a bred Jersey boy who cops charismo plea as working class hero in his auto-b, lowin's how in his neck o" Jerz "Bars and factories is all they have..So all the people are either drinking or working hard and both them things make you wanta fight... but fighting is everybody's favorite way of relaxing around there... I played a lot of bars till I met Ray and George and later Bill and Jay... then we played a lot of bars together."

;J/4ND the roadies came out and the whole stage was covert with us go in 'QUACK QUACK wound tike ducks..,"

They mulched' down that classic dead-end street toward oblivion till they happened onto a 'sharp, fast-talking young musicbiz veteran, named Ron Haffkine. Ron'd been around, having already tried and failed to scoop the world on raga-rock via the Gurus, and producing the punko legend LP by the Good Rats. Ron also had connections in Hollywood, and these connections led straight up even more lucrative alleys to Playboy Hefner buddypal and all around Renaissance whackoff Shel Silverstein. Who's not only contributed veritable crockloads of sniggery cartoons to Hefs slick over the years, but's also writ more pop songs than you could shake a diesel dyke's clanking1 dildo at, which is exactly the baton sly Shel's used to orchestrate his muzikbiz fortune. He's written legit hitsaplenty, like Loretta Lynn's classic ""One's On the Way," but where he really gets his giggles is in postadolescent googoo numbers with a little dope and astrology thrown in for relevance. "Freakin" at the Freakers" Ball," "I Got Stoned & I Missed It," ad droolitum. Not to whittle at the man's stature, but out of such honk was the Hook empire built.

"We got connected with Shel through the movie," remembers Dennis ass-backwardly, referring to the Dustin Hoffman bomb Who Is Harry Kellerman & Why Is He Saying All Those Terrible Things About Me? "Our managerproducer Ron was musical director on that, friend of Shel's, Shel wrote the score for the movie, we made some tapes and Ronnie heard "em, said maybe I can use them in the movie that Shel wrote the score for — oh, I got it now! I'm rollin 7 —.and Shel liked the way we did his stuff in the movie so we just

kept workin" with him."

Next step was a debut album to unveil Dr. Hook to the world. I saw them just before that, at the Columbia Records convention in L.A. summer of "71; thought they were the biggest plug of shit I'd ever witnessed. When the album was finally finished, Michael Ochs, who was Columbia's West Coast PR whack at the time, sen Lit out with a letter that said he recommended it with all his soul and please give it full attention and a good review because he really needed a vacation in South America. Fluke of flukes, a single from the album became a worldwide hit.

"We're still living "Sylvia's Mother" down," said Jay. "They played it on every survey station five times an hour. If the people lived 40 miles away, by the time they got tb the gig they'd heard it at least that many times, and the dude said "Here they are..." "

Dennis makes a sound of knives whistling through tha air.

* "Sylvia's Mother" was only a hit; to really grab the planetary scrotum with their second album, they began to map the ultimate Hook riff: grossout band. And to help the process along a little, they augmented the basic mangy lineup.

"Sloppy Seconds was really ShePs "album," says Ray.

\ \ "It was?" breaks in Dennis. "I dunno... hee hee... I don" remembah nothin"!"

"Make it up," I suggested.

"I was born in a canoe.. -. floating down the Mizoo... we never rehearsed. .. learning the same mistakes over and over'd be so hard... good thing we're just naturally clumsy..."

Now we were getting down to the soul of the Dr. Hook aesthetic. Do you, I posed, think being a rock star comes out of being naturally clumsy?

"For some people," Ray laughed. "I'd hate to think we'd have to do it the other way."

"Yeah," gasps' Dennis, still laughing and squeezing tears out of his reserve tank, "if we hadda say, "Okay, right here, you gotta fall down and crash yer head into the microphone stand and have it come down and hit me in the ear." If you just go..." And then he .spilled his drink, and you really began to wonder if it was on purpose or not. "There was a time, first couple of concerts, where you'd just come onstage and strap on your guitars and you .didn't exactly know what the people wanted you to be, so you'd ASSUME A ROLE, MAN, and then you'd have to worry about did I play as good tonight as Eric Clapton did the last time I saw him... but we had to drive in cars sometimes ten hours to get to the next gig, and we would just rap in the cars and say ridiculous things like we're doing now, which is what we do 24 hours a day if it's possible, STUPID THINGS MAN - " and'sud-

denly he and Ray broke into song as if by invisible cue and precisely at the same instant: "Bahdeedle-dee-umpdump, bahdeedle-dee-ump-dump, there's a little midget girl..."

"Its much easier to knock something over if you do it all the time."

"It's much easier to knock something over if yoq do it all the time," clarifies Ray.

So perhaps it was inevitable that some of this lurching mucous would creep into their music, which it did in a big way. Sloppy Seconds was only a moderately successful album, but its single, "Cover of the Rolling Stone," was such a stroke of Silverstein genius that it became almost as big a hit as "Slyvia's Mother" and did far more to establish Hook as a recognizable name with a firm identity. Every hippie wetback gitpicker's Cheapest fantasy, it hit home and vaulted the charts. One of the nicer things about it was how genially amoral (in terms of conventional countercult wisdom) it was, totally indiscriminate with regard to both sex and drugs:

We take all kindsa pills

To give us all kindsa thrills!*

Dr. Hook will almost certainly never join Batdorf & Rodney & Judy Collins & even Alice Cooper in making one of those Don't Take Downers Kids radio spots, because Dr. Hook obviously do not promote drug use as a mildbrowed means to "enlightenment" or a "better world"; they promote getting fucked up! And then ripping off yer togs and rolling around preferably With a pen fulla yer brothers and sisters in all the grease you can find. First destroy your mind with . drugs, then destroy? your body with mass-assgrab sooie sex:

Brother with sister, son with mother

Smear my body up with butter

And take me to the freakers" ball*

"Cpver" entrenched them forever in a Bardahl-clotted frontal lobes ,of the unsung bison record buyers of MidAmerica, who loved Dr. Hook most probably for the same reasons as. cognoscentos despised "em. Still, though, you gotta wonder how in thjs day and age of outrage pushed through the wall, Dr. Hook could even begin to be considered controversial. T asked them how they felt about being pinned down as a grossout band, and they seemed not to know what the hell I was talking about.

"Grossout?" soft shoeflied Ray, scratching his head.

But Dennis was quicker. "Maybe! Last night we were just startin" playin" a ballad and some cat kept yelling out, "Play somethin" dirty..." "

Yeah, I led on, people take you like a whoopie cushion. But, true to form of any other tureen of aspirant artistes, they resisted the pidgeonhole. "Mebbe we'll put out a whole album of Italian wedding songs and get really soppy: MW AAA LUHHHA LA LAAAAAA.... pizza falling..."

Word falling, photo falling, breakthru in grey room! Huh? Oh well, I guess we can't all get away with off the wall jokes. But Dr. Hook have demonstrated

"You can't be outrageous, no matter if you came onstage with feathers and a snake down your throat. .. "

they know exactly which yuckeroo it pleaseth the rabble to have them hit, because their new album, Belly Up, is just what the title promises: more than ever of that patented sweatlipped leer: "Acapulco Goldie" (which rhymes "puta" with "cuter") and "Penicillen Penny" (sort-of sequel to their television smash "Don't Give a Dose To the One You Love Most"). I said that people expected-them to sing about clap and crabs and stuff, and Jay said: "Well, we gotta sing about penicillen so that'll take care of that..."

Dennis, for once, was lipstiff and civically upright: "We figure if we take the responsibility and make believe we have the clap, they can at least check it out... I never had the clap..."

Aw, come on you guys. Luckily Jay saves it: "That's what A1 Capone used to say..."

Besides, I said, jumping on another line of attack, you still gotta live down the fact that you're the last of the homo bands. They do make a big point of insisting in every show that "We're bigger fags than the fag bands!"

What would you do, I threw in, if Gay Liberation came up and said, "Well brothers, glad to hear you're with the cause and behind us ajl the way"?

"Better'n them behind us!" hollered Dennis. "I stand behind "em all the time, man, at least I can see which way they're pointin"... When did queers start, in the Fifties? They can't listen to anybody they can't blow: "I like the way he sings, but I can't feel nothin"." "

All right, so you guys ain't queers you insist you're not consciously out to gross people thru the window — what the hell good are you then? What's your claim to voltage?

Dennis sounds almost tired: "You

can t be outrageous, no matter if you came onstage with feathers like this and a snake down your throat with just his ass stickin" out and sittin" and screamin" and they'd say: *?????" and if you come out just in jeans they say: "Whatta you tryin" to pull?" ... Some cat said to us, "Your whole stage act is falling apart." And I said, "Good, if it?s' gonna fall apart ,let it fuckin" fall apart, man!"

* * *

Dr. Hook & the Medicine Show are f playing Uncle Sam's in Dearborn, Michigan. This club is classic: three bucks to get in, where they gotta raised plasticoated dancefloor in colored stripes with lights under the plastic that flash in time to the diseo music, they show psychedeelite'slides all along the walls, and you can buy Boone's Farm wine by the bottle with plasticups to drink it outa.

It's a long way down from whatever Dr. Hook's pinnacle might be, and I'm interested to see both if they'll put out for a dreggo gig like this and whether their verbal no-nos will be. Bowdlerized in this atmosphere which is more dike a sock hop than your typical arena rock raunch plain. They pull through like champs on both counts. The thing about much of Dr. Hook's humor is that, even if you don't have to be stoned to split ribs over it (though it certainly helps) you do have to accept the prevailing attitude and atmosphere of the band, which is simply the blanket 'conviction that all of this is funny. Sidesplittingly funny. And the weird part is that even though it almost never is commensurate with its own self-hype, it feels that way. Which may be Dennis" and Ray's real talent. In any case, the audience is with Dennis and the band in spite of a slow start, I'm watching 18 year old greaser chicks with fashionable dyke haircuts and black leather jackets gaze up at this bushy snaggletoothed hippie's antics, and their eyes are wide and their mouths are open in loving appreciation... he stutters or raises an eyebrow or drops his pick, and they laugh.

Dennis plays "Sylvia's Mother" to the hilt:

Slyvia's father says,

"Sylvia's pregnant,

And you went and made her that way."

Sylvia's father says,

"You motherfucker —!"

And the whole club ROARS.

".. .I'm gonna kill you someday."

From now on every time he says "fuck" he gets a mass horselaugh. They're all in on the jokes — pot, dirty doodies, the kaboodle. Gotta watch close, though, you might miss it when Dennis drops Hook aphorisms like, TURN TO PAGE 72.

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 29.

"Yeah/we're a professional band — we sweat right on cue."

I believe you. But then he does into his best rap:

"Every time we play, someone shouts "Boogie!"; and it scares us, cuz they yell "BOOGIE!" when we're boogeying!" Gales of laughter. "It happens in Detroit, cuz we're close to Ann Arbor, and they says: "You gonna play a little bleeewwwzzzz.." in munghock-perfeck patois of downedout moron. "And we tell ?em we ain't a blues band, and they says, "Yeah, we know, but you can play a little blews for me, right?" And we say, "But man, we just ain't a blues band!" And they say, "Cooommme awwwnnnnn, do a li'l bleewwzzzz for us," and we say "We don't do blues" and they say "MAN you can PLAY a little BLEWZ tonight!!!!" And they says "Man" and they grabs me, and it pisses you off cuz you mayliave a coat on or something that you don't wanna get tore up with your spine and you know you're gonna have to play some blues. But we're not a blues band, remember that, or.,."

And straight into their very best song, scribulated solely by the collective talents of the boys in the band, and it's every draggy rockin" blues riff you ever heard, and the lyrics bear quoting at length inasmuch as they representDr. Hook at their finest:

I'm a high flying eagle, baby And I don't give a shit for you I shit on the mountains And I shit on the plains On an ocean liner On a choochoo train...

I was shit in your ice cream soda And in your cup of tea I'll shit on a monkey's knuckle [uncle?]

Sometimes I shit on me I'm high as a pie fly tie I fly so high Waaaaaaahhhhh...

I can play harmonica...

He snatches a harp from his zipper vestpocket, rams it in his maw and huffs so hard he hoots it out, it clatters to the stage floor boards. Picks it up, it's broken (shades of the Who — a breakaway harp, maybe?), falling to pieces: "Look at that — two bucks." So he flings it into the audience, who snap at it greedily (shades of Alice Cooper).

I'll fly into your bedroom And catch you makin" love I'll spread my wings wide open And drop my blessings from above*

The first time I saw them do this

song I could not believe what I was hearing. I simply could not accept that anybody could have the> gall to actually get on a stage and sing something like that. Well, actually I could, having seen the Frut and heard tell of the Fugs (not to mention Frank Zappa or Iggy), but it was a nice thought anyway. And you couldn't miss the way the crowd was eating up every dollop of that thirdgrade lavatory scatology.

"We're glad that you like sick material like that," said Dennis, "cuz sometimes they take us the right way..."

Suddenly there's a blast of feedback from the amps. "Did you hear that? Jesus, I almost got killed!... Speaking of almost getting killed, we gotta new album coming out called Belly Up: It's our most disgusting album to (date. Not that we're working hard at being disgusting — man, the shit just falls that way. So we might as well be truthful about it." Suddenly he lurches and a mike falls over. "We don't mean to be breaking all this stuff. We're sorry whoever owns all this..."

The Boone's Farmers love it, but I keep thinking of breakaway harps, breakaway guitars, breakaway amps, breakaway mikes, breakaway clubs and concert halls... The big climax occurs in "Cover of the Rolling,Stone," when after the second quacking of the chorus line they take it all down for a moment of high drama. "Okay," mutters Dennis, "you people wanted to hear some blues, here's some rock "ji" roll..."

George starts to grimace, jerks sideways and shoves his guitar violently against his amp, which emits an expectably teeth-jarring feedback screech. Then he looks around at the rest of the band, who are cowering in cartoon quavers, he glowers and seethes and ASSAULTS them, lunging cross the stage jutting his guitar like a weapon, tearing the strings out, vomiting Pompeii feedback.

I love it, the crowd loves it, except I want more, I don't want it to stop. One of the greatest things about Dr. Hook is that they literally can't do anything that's not part of their show! Technical squawks, guitar torture, minor fowpuzz, pukadelics, broken legs... and their fans love "em for it because they too know what it means to be clumsy, they've all paid their dues as stumblebumble dolts and far as they're concerned it might as well be them up there, i.e. DR. HOOK IS THE REAL GRAND FUNK!

Be all those wonderful sociology-ofrpck feces theses as they may, however, I realized all at once that night in Dearborn that Dr. Hook are riot prepared to go as far as I'd hoped, I want them to be totally fucked: "I'M FUCKED AND I'M PROUD!" I want them to be beyond reclamation, and

give their adoring li 1 supplicants a transOafishness worth really aspiring to. I want them to destroy the audience, melt the dancefloor, and level the club. Hell, I want them to be Iggy &' the Stooges, But they insist on pulling back way short of the carnage I envision. The cling to the legit, bittersweet, love-lost folksio-ballads ("Life ain't, easy/ And nothing" comes free" •**& why not?) that they probably think justify all this other tomfoolery — when actually it's exactly the other way around!

Oh well, you can't have everything. You just gotta settle sometimes for a broken microphone and hope * it's not just a prop. "We're sorry about that microphone," leers Dennis. "They finally put us on the cover of Rolling Stone, y'know. It wasn't a real picture, though, it was just a cartoon. We posed naked for Zipper in L.A., though. We gotta lotta class."

Evil Eye Music (BMI)