Let’s get a few things out of the way first. The late Ray Sawyer was not Dr. Hook. He was not even the lead singer (despite his bravura vocal performance on “Cover of the Rolling Stone”). But he was the face of Dr. Hook, thanks to his trademark eye patch and cowboy hat.
I should also note that Sawyer lost his eye in a logging accident, or rather, in an automobile accident on the way to his first day on the job as a logger. Sawyer (which, ironically, means ‘person who saws wood’) never sawed wood in his life. Instead, he returned to rock ’n’ roll, which he’d given up because:
“I must have played all the clubs from Houston to Charleston, until I decided I was going insane from too much beans and music, and I gave it up. I saw a John Wayne movie and then proceeded to Portland, Oregon, to be a logger, complete with plaid shirt, caulk boots, and pike pole. On the way, my car slipped on the road, and the accident left me with the eye patch I now wear. When I recovered, I ran straight back to the beans and music and vowed, ‘Here, I’ll stay’.”
That out of the way, Dr. Hook specialized in zany songs (most of them penned by genius children’s book author Shel Silverstein, who wrote some of the weirdest and most perverted songs of his time). Dr. Hook (originally Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show) was similarly Janus-faced—the same band that gave us the polymorphous perverse “Freakin’ at the Freaker’s Ball” and doper anthem “I Got Stoned and I missed It” also gave us the parents-approved “Sylvia’s Mother” and other tradpop ballads like “When You’re in Love with a Beautiful Woman.”
It should be added that they were a crazed bunch live. They once dressed in glam garb, pretended to be their own opening band, and promptly got booed off the stage. That’s funny. Robert Christau saw them once and wrote that they couldn’t finish “Cover of the Rolling Stone” because they were laughing so hard.
Finally, I should add that, while “Cover of the Rolling Stone” is not on 1975’s Bankrupt, it features the greatest guitar solo ever played by a human being or any other living thing, and I’m including cats as well as aliens from other galaxies, all of whom (I’m sad to report) learn guitar by playing along with Yardbirds albums. Don’t expect to hear any great music from Planet Zirklon any time soon.
Bankrupt is an excellent album that showcases both Dr. Hook’s humorous and softer, more traditional sides. Unlike some of the earlier LPs, Silverstein did not write all of the songs on Bankrupt. In fact, he wrote only four of the LP’s 12 songs, which puts his batting average at .333. Enough to make the MLB all-star team nowadays, but (I’m switching baseball metaphors here, and you can’t stop me) hardly a perfect game. But here’s the thing. Some of the songs Silverstein didn’t write (see “Levitate”) are hilarious, proving Dr. Hook could be funny all by themselves.
The Dr. Hook sound is country rock for the most part. They don’t have as much country in them as fellow funny folks like Roger Miller and Jim Stafford—they have too much freak in ‘em. And they weren’t afraid to dabble in R&B and funk. Lead singer/guitarist Dennis Locorriere has personality galore, although his voice isn’t as distinctive as Sawyer’s. But what really makes Dr. Hook so great is the infectious ad-libs that go back and forth during songs. I direct you to “Cover of the Rolling Stone” and “Levitate.”
Which brings us to Bankrupt and opener “Levitate,” an honest-to-god funk goof that has a bit of both Archie Bell & the Drells’ “Tighten Up” and Lionel Richie’s “Dancing on the Ceiling” in its DNA, and features Locorriere trying to teach the band (and us) a new dance that is, well, physically impossible, although Locorriere can do it!
There is so much hilarious give-and-take that I can only truly do the song justice by quoting it in full, but who’s got the time? So suffice it to say it’s funny from the very start, when Loccorriere comes in saying, “Alright, now everybody say hello to the bass,” and somebody else says, “What are you yellin’ about?”
After that, Loccorriere explains his new dance, and it’s a doozy:
“OK now, this is the way you do it, first you take your hand put it on your elbow
(I got it)
Then you take your knee and you put it up there too
(Oh wait a minute)
Then you take your head and put it down between your knee
(I can’t do that)
And when you feel it, then you flap your ears and float on up here with me
(Oh wow)
And Levitate
(Where are you going?)”
My favorite lines go,
“Everybody get up on your right foot (c’mon everybody let’s do it)
Alright, now raise your left foot (OK)
No no no no don’t put your right foot back down…”
The song’s Covid-contagious, funny, and outrageous, and the part where he tells everyone to put their ankle on the floor is, shit, I can’t think of a word that rhymes. Maybe the best song on the album. Certainly one of the greatest dance craze songs ever. Reminds me of the Dictator’s cover of “California Sun,” where Andy Shernoff reels off a list of dance crazes and ends it by saying “and I’d shistaboobah” and somebody says “And I’d WHAT?”
“Let Me Be Your Lover” is a grits and groceries pop honky tonker with slide guitar and lots of get up and go, and a chorus that will take up permanent residence in your head. Nothing great, mind you, but solid.
Dr. Hook’s cover of Sam Cooke’s “Only Sixteen” is a simple pop song that will also stick in your head, but it’s diminished by Locorriere’s vocals, which can only be described as smarmy. That said, it was good enough to become a hit single and revitalized the band’s flagging fortunes.
“I Got Stoned and I Missed It” is S. Silverstein at his best, Locorriere at his best, and a song that should be covered by every country artist in the world. Locorriere talks his way through it, sounding down in the mouth, and the Dixieland horns and fiddle hoedown of an interlude adds texture, and it’s just as funny as you’d expect.
And it gets even funnier when Locorriere takes his voice to exotic places no human voice should go, leading somebody to cackle at the end and say, “You can’t sing like that condition.” Does he mean “in that condition”? Frankly, he sounds too stoned to know WHAT he’s saying.
Silverstein penned the jaunty and infectious “Bubblin’ Up” as well. The lyrics aren’t his best, but Sawyer picks up the slack, infusing the song with one-eyed soul as he sings,
“I used to be a prancer, a one-eyed song and dancer
But as for true romance, I didn’t even try
I’d get ’em and forget ’em, but I never could stay with ’em
‘Cause I thought my well of love had done run dry.”
But he was wrong! His love for his lady (he opens the song by saying, “Oh sweetheart, I really wanna tell you something, but I think you better sit down”) has transformed him!
I keep reading about how bizarro talk-fest “Wups” (which is sweetened by some nice vocal harmonies (“I get a different impression of you/Every time I do wups”) isn’t about uppers, but I say it is, and goddamn I’m right. I don’t know who’s talking, but his impossible-to-follow speed-freak spiel sounds like Neal Cassady on an amphetamine run. In any event, it’s one of the stranger songs you’ll ever hear.
Then there’s the quite likable up-tempo love-song-in-disguise “The Millionaire,” on which Locorriere sings about his shortcomings in the singing, dancing, and good looks (“I could get myself a nose job, I could diet for a year/But I’ll never be Robert Redford ’cause I’m much too fond of beer”) departments, but it doesn’t matter because his rich uncle died and now he has “more money than a horse has hairs.”
But! All the money in the world is no good unless his enamorata will help him spend it. And it’s quite charming, despite the cackling and Loccorriere’s interjections (at one point he says ironically, “That’s beautiful”).
Silverstein’s rollicking country-rocker “Everybody’s Makin’ It Big But Me” flips the script; Loccoriere ruefully names names (Presley, Dylan, Diamond, Cooper, Bowie, and more!) as he sings about how he seems to be the only rocker out there who isn’t rolling in money and neck deep in poontang. It’s funny the whole way through, but my favorite stanza goes,
“Well I paint my face with glitter
Just like Bowie does
And I wear the same mascara
That Mick Jagger does
And I even put some lipstick on
But that just hurt my dad and mom
And everybody’s makin’ it big but me.”
And I love the couplet “Well I hear that Alice Cooper’s got a foxy chick/To wipe off his snake, and keep him rich.” A wonderful song.
Songwriter (and Distinguished Professor of Criticism for the MFA Program in the Department of Art & Art History at the University of New Mexico!) Dave Hickey’s “Cooky and Lila” strays into John Prine territory—it’s a steel-guitar-powered good old country love song about redemption.
Loccoriere introduces a battle-scarred Vietnam vet (“…he traded in his foot, for a medal in the war”) and a love-scarred waitress (the trucker who “took her virtue” when she was sixteen unceremoniously dumped her in Denver) before singing “Cooky’s been to war and Lila’s been to Denver/And both of them are casualties of someone else’s dream.” It’s finely detailed and really quite affecting. And the song’s payoff comes when Hickey zooms out with the lines,
“Now as the nation rolls along, like a semi down the highway
Casting lonely broken bodies in the grass along the road
I’ve finally found a reason for believing in the future
Seeing Cooky and his Lila drinking coffee all alone.”
“Everybody Loves Me” is a country honk (complete with harmonica), an anti-“It’s Hard to Be Humble” (you know, the Mac Davis number) that has Loccoriere suffering an acute case of paranoia because, get this, suddenly everybody likes him. The opening stanza more or less says it all:
“Everybody must be on drugs, in this town
Or maybe there’s a strange new bug that’s been going round
‘Cause people are all smiling and waving as I go by
Everybody loves me but I don’t know why.”
And he gets more and more agitated as the song goes on, and by the end, he’s hitting some truly riled-up notes. Good stuff.
The Silverstein-penned “On the Way to the Bottom” is truly an oddball number for these stick-to-the-knitting country rockers. Loccoriere belts out the lyrics, real soulful like, but he’s singing to a funk beat punctuated by all manner of quirky electronic noises. It’s very modernistic. He may sound contentious, belligerent practically, tossing off lines like “Pass me another bottle and turn down the lights/Forget about tomorrow, babe, we’re gonna rumble tonight,” but he keeps coming back to the line, “And if we’re heading for the bottom, we’ll go laughing all the way down.”
Odd thing is that, unlike on most of these songs, there IS no laughter, which gives the song an odd tone. I wish they’d passed the song along to Randy Newman for a look-see and maybe a few editorial changes on the way to the studio. He’s a genius when it comes to setting the right tone—take a listen to “Naked Man” if you don’t believe me.
Closer “Do Downs” is a very short goof and anti-reds number sung a cappella to the melody of “Jimmy Crack Corn”—it’s all jollity until the band shifts gears into Wagner’s “Bridal Chorus” to sing, “Try not to die, try not to die/Try not to die, not to die, not today.” After which everybody cracks up, and somebody says, “We’ve been in here all damn day. What kind of album is this? Ben Hur?”
Robert Christgau, who reviewed a live Dr. Hook show in 1978, concluded it by writing, “Dr. Hook has never pretended to be anything but a bunch of bozos who consider the one thing they really do know, professional rock and roll, no less ridiculous than everything else. What a relief they are.” Is it lazy of me to conclude my review with the conclusion of somebody else’s review?
For sure.
So let me just add this. Bankrupt may not be a perfect album, and it may be more than 50 years old, but like Cooky and Lila, it’s a reason—and reasons are very thin on the ground these days—for believing in the future. Or at least not giving up all hope. Because people who believe everything is ridiculous are almost always the same people who practice kindness while acting like everything isn’t.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A-
