DR HOOK – "When You're In Love With A Beautiful Woman"

A good rollicking record, highly enjoyable and hugely welcome at number one, although by no means their best (again a common theme).

My mum was a big fan of Dr Hook but never saw them live. In the spring of last year I found out that Dennis Locorriere was doing a solo tour and playing at the Lowry centre at Salford Quays, and had the idea of treating Mum to a night out. I’d thought of springing a surprise on her, but decided to ask her about it. Having by now endured two years’ worth of dialysis taking up three days of each week, and needing a wheelchair to get around outside the house, she found the idea too much for her declining energies. I still thought it worth trying to find a way around it… but in the end the gig took place three days before her funeral. So obviously this band is forever associated with the saddest of times for me.

But…

If Dr Hook’s records were a person, they’d be very loving, pretty good in bed and most of all you’d never be too far away from a belly laugh. Anybody who doesn’t know their earlier, more comic material should check it out. Much of it was written by the late Shel Silverstein – cartoonist, children’s author and the writer of not only their first hit “Sylvia’s Mother” but also “A Boy Named Sue” and the Junior Choice favourite “Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout (Who Would Not Take The Garbage Out)”.

Dr Hook announced themselves with titles like “You Make My Pants Want To Get Up and Dance” or “Don’t Give A Dose To The One You Love Most” and lines like “They got groupies for their bands / and all I got is my right hand” (“Everybody’s Making It Big But Me”) or “I got all this here money / but I’m a pretty ugly guy” (“The Millionaire”). It’s a sense of humour that prevents even their love ballads from getting too gloopy – “A Little Bit More” stayed at No 2 for five weeks behind Elton and Kiki in 1976, and this and many other Hook songs are among my guilt-free pleasures.

And my impression of them as people rests on some cracking interviews with the likes of Rolling Stone, Sounds and Record Mirror.
On a TV appearance where they changed behind a revealingly backlit screen: “I believe they use the expression “No big thing” – but hey, it was cold in that studio.”
On the whole band playing a gig with one guitar and one mic when the tour organisers had fouled up: “We had to stand there and say, “The equipment went to Helsinki. Yeah, it sounds a lot like Philadelphia y’know.”
On meeting the band of the moment on TOTP: “We didn’t know what to expect from a new wave band. I mean the Sex Pistols kept flushing people down lavatories and spitting at secretaries, and the Boomtown Rats isn’t a friendly name.”
On their attitude to success: “And we’ve had more fuckin’ FUN than any other band in the history of the universe. And you know why? When we had our first [US] Number 1 we sat down and talked and decided that if we had fifty Number 1s in a row there were still 900 million Chinese who didn’t give a fuck. The world is bigger than rock’n’roll!”

I always liked the cut of the Doctor’s jib – even if there are probably more Chinese who’d give a fuck nowadays.

Rosie, bear in mind the review at the time that read: “When you’re in love with a beautiful woman you don’t look like Dr Hook. Or if you do you may as well give up.”

Wow, there’s a lot I don’t know about Dr Hook. Thanks for a great post there Erithian, and for sharing the most painful part of your recollection of the band.

Were these early songs released as Dr Hook and the Medicine Band? It’s a name I’ve heard but the singles only ever seem to be credited to Dr Hook.

Funny you should mention the Sex Pistols. I have an episode of “So It Goes” featuring the Pistols doing “Anarchy” (the programme also has a riff of the month competition which appears to be deadly serious, although Peter Cook is introducing it, and an albums review which, commenting on the latest Wings’ LP shows a music paper review slaughtering the album, headlined “Five Die In Air Disaster”!)

Anyway, the programme ends with Dr Hook and his band driving away shouting “So It goes…”

As for the song, it seems out of place to me in the New Wave peak/New Pop dawn of Autumn ’79 among Numan, The Police and Trevor Horn, but it’s likeable enough, and more understated than I remember it.

I always get this one muddled up with Bellamy Brothers “IF I Said You Had A Beautiful Body…”

Same period, similar title, similar country-ish vein.

The good doctor’s humour wasn’t lost on Terry Wogan – at least not the title’s pay-off line. When you’re in love with a beautiful woman, it’s hard. ‘Tel’ helped to push this one to the top, with much sniggering. From memory, it was getting airplay some time before it charted.

I also remember high placings on the Smash Hits disco chart (possibly BMRB? Something well respected I’m sure) for this and its two sequels – Better Love Next Time and Sexy Eyes (with its charming Latin/flute/Nashville segment on pop’s Venn diagram).

Shel Silverstein?? Cheers Erithian. Even though I love his childrens books I’d never put the two together. In fact I mentally confused the Dr Hook songwriter with southern soul label owner Shelby Singleton. Sometimes I think my brain is full.

Number 2 watch: Two weeks of one of the few Queen singles which I really really like, ‘Crazy Little Thing Called Love’ – Sun Sessions Elvis crashed into FM rock with glorious results.

Re #8, Waldo my Guinness Top 40 Charts book which lists each Singles chart up to 1991 (the edition I have anyway), places this at Number 1 for the w/e 10 November, with Lena at No. 2.

The same week Abba are at Number 3 with a song boasting a memorable keyboard melody that will of course crop up in sampled form much, much later on Popular.

I love Sylvia’s Mother (partly because my mum loved it) and I prefer to think of it straight and not as some piss-take by a bunch of grizzled old hippies having a laugh at teenage pop songs. But this one never did anything for me, it’s like a horrible mash-up of slick LA session muso rock and disco, neither of which comes out of it well.

…that’s the Russian geezer not the Boney M record, which didn’t get to number one at all, of course.

Great post, Erithian. I also have a parentally derived soft spot for Dr. Hook: my late father and late step-mother both liked the band a great deal, and those two big 1976 hits (“If Not You” and “A Little Bit More”) remind me of the all too brief early, happy, honeymoon phase of their catastrophically ill-matched and destructive relationship. “If Not You” in particular was “their song”; my stepmother bought the 7″, and they often jokily quoted it at each other. (“Who’s going to iron all my shirts, and who’s going to kiss where it hurts?”)

As for “When You’re In Love…” – yes, I can well see how it could be legitimately interpreted as an example of dodgy gender politics, but I read it more as a breezy, light-hearted, shoulder-shrugging, somewhat self-deprecating skit on the perils of dating a few notches above one’s rightful station in the Hotness stakes. And as someone who was still carrying a massive torch for the athletic blonde hotty who popped my cherry in June (see the “Are ‘Friends’ Electric” post), with occasional long-distance re-matches still to be had, I related to this Big Time.

I played this again this afternoon, and found myself charmed all over again by its “Rock Your Baby” derived soft shoe shuffle, by its ridiculous innuendo – and especially by those fractionally overdone backing vocals, whose call-and-responses constantly teeter on the brink of absurdity, raising a smile every time.

A warm, fluffy, affectionate and unashamedly sentimental 7 from me.

#12 – yeah.

Interesting that their early days had them tied in with Shel Silverstein.

Later, lead singer was showing up at state fairs as “lead singer from…”

And that’s about it.

The “Rock Your Baby” beat continues to crop up in unexpected places. They’d lost the Medicine Show, Silverstein and therefore pretty well all of the humour, settling for anxious-sounding MoR pop. Indeed it’s noticeable that throughout such hits as “A Little Bit More” and “If Not You” Locorriere invariably sounds on the verge of a nervous collapse, or exploding, his tremulous counter-tenor of a voice never at ease.

99% of radio DJs gained cheap laughter from THAT opening line. And although it sees them belatedly attempt disco, the song is an exercise in sustained paranoia; she’s so beautiful that Locorriere can only feel insecure, as evinced by the dreadful emphasis that he puts on the word “’phone” in the couplet “You want to trust her/Then somebody hangs up when you answer the ‘phone” or the shivering triple moan he gives the word “lovers” in the phrase “faint-hearted lovers.” Thus it becomes a list song of all the arguments against falling in love – “You watch her eyes,” “You watch her friends,” “You look for lies,” and, finally and inevitably, “You go it alone,” because frankly, by the time the song ends, Locorriere sounds like (a) David Byrne and (b) a potential suicide bomber. Note the lack of citing of the Beautiful Woman’s feelings for him, if any. Musically, though, it drifts by as blandly and unquestionably as all of Dr Hook’s later works, and consequently my raising much enthusiasm for it is, as they say, hard. NEXT!

(still, props to the actual “Dr Hook” inventing Bez in the video)

Like DJP (I suspect), I was disappointed at Dr Hook’s evolution from purveyors of good, catchy, quirky, but most of all clever songs, to syrupy MOR pap like this and the two 1976 hits.

Listening to it even now, I can see what the writer is trying to do, but that’s because it’s signposted in thirty-foot-high letters; a little subtlety would not have gone amiss.

Hated it then; hate it now; one of these #1s that make you despair at the record-buying public.

This and the Lena Martell were proof that our mums and dads still had some influence on the charts. It’s like punk never happened!

I never knew that they had a singer other than the eyepatch guy!

Fun fact: their early seventies hit “Cover Of The Rolling Stone” was released in the UK as “Cover Of The Radio Times”. True!

There was also a Radio 1 spoof (Noel Edmonds might have been behind it) where the question in every line of “If Not You” was answered with a DJ’s jingle, viz: “Who’s gonna iron my shirts?” – “Dave Lee Travis!” – “Who’s gonna kiss where it hurts?” -“David Hamilton!” etc etc.

Magic Fly #20 – no, Ray Sawyer did actually lose an eye in a car crash in 1967. A friend of mine was helpless with laughter when he saw kids dancing to WYILWABW at a school disco by holding a hand over one eye and shaking imaginary maracas with the free hand.

Another favourite Hook quote I’ve remembered:
Q: “Why did you call your latest album “Bankrupt”?”
A: “Why did they call it “World War Two”? We didn’t have a dime.”

From what I recall the real reason for the drop down the charts was Pye’s crap stock control and hence insufficient copies of the single in the shops over the crucial weekend.

Anyone know who produced The Hook’s light-as-a-feather disco singles (WYILWABW, Sexy Eyes, Better Love Next Time)?

… BTW, this is my third post (I think) and I think that I may have flouted FT etiquette by not announcing myself as a first timer on my first(My Camera Never Lies). Hello!

Thank you muchly!

A tasteful enough slow groove from Dr Hook. 6/10 from me.