Hector Swimming Pool Bangers: "When You're in Love with a Beautiful Woman," Dr. Hook
Side Two, Track Six
When disco arrived, bands had two choices:
- Make it The Enemy. Disco sucks, etc.
- Embrace the trend.
The former probably felt good in an "I'm going to fly the old state flag, harumph harumph" kind of way, but the latter was way more interesting, and didn't result in the Chicago White Sox forfeiting a baseball game.
The Rolling Stones, to name the most prominent non-Bee Gees example, were exceptionally good at it. "Miss You" hasn't left FM radio since its release and "Emotional Rescue" is even better. KISS, never one for missing a chance to cash in on something, gave us "I Was Made for Loving You," their second-best song. Rod Stewart dropped "Do Ya Think I'm Sexy." New Order ignored the backlash completely and became the best/only disco band of the 1980s. Even country bands dabbled in it, as we'll see next week.
(I wonder what Lynyrd Skynyrd would have done if 3/4 of the band hadn't bought it in a plane crash.)
And then there's Dr. Hook.
A genuinely weird (and weirder-looking) band, most people reading this likely remember them for their self-fulfilling prophecy of a hit, "The Cover of 'Rolling Stone'":
Still, that was the mid-'70s, and by decade's end, if you wanted to get on the radio, you better have a dance beat, a bass line, and some strings. A guy with an eyepatch will only get you so far when you don't have a construction worker, a traffic cop, etc.
The band traveled to Muscle Shoals, Alabama, and cut "When You're in Love with a Beautiful Woman," a song written by, and you're going to have to take my word on this, Even Stevens. It sounded unlike anything else in the Dr. Hook catalog, but it sounded exactly like what was getting played on the radio in 1979. Like "Rolling Stone," it went to #6 in the U.S. but was even bigger in the UK, where it went to #1. England's a strange place.
The Hook would keep pumping out the disco-ish jams in the first half of the '80s. They would hit #5 with the very Yacht Rock-y "Sexy Eyes" in 1980, and made their last appearance on the Top 40 in 1982 with "Baby Makes Her Blue Jeans Talk," about which the less said the better. You will incur significant psychic damage if you watch this video all the way to the end. You were warned:
The band broke up in 1985. Lead singer Dennis Locorriere and eyepatch guy Ray Sawyer each toured under variations of the Dr. Hook brand in subsequent years. If your county fair was big enough, odds are one of them played it.
Locorriere passed in May of this year. He was 76. Sawyer, the vocalist on "Rolling Stone," died in 2018 at the age of 81.
Bonus Tracks
Dr. Hook's most notable songwriting collaborator was author Shel Silverstein, who wrote all the songs on their first two albums, including "Rolling Stone" and the actually really good "Sylvia's Mother":
Silverstein is an interesting case, in that he wrote what is undeniably the greatest bummer of a children's book of all time and was definitely a huge perv--please observe the name of and bonus track on Dr. Hook's second album, or that by all accounts he spent more time at the Playboy Mansion than Hef.
Also, "A Boy Named Sue" is a Silverstein tune. That creep could roll.
Although "When You're in Love" was a solo joint, Even Stevens (real name: Bruce) is best known as the songwriting partner of one Eddie Rabbitt, and he co-wrote all of the latter's noteworthy songs:
There are maybe two people alive who remember the Britpop band Cecil, but I'm one of them, and they covered this week's subject effectively:
Finally, if you subscribe to HBO Max, you might enjoy the movie Normal, which stars Bob Odenkirk as the interim sheriff of a small Minnesota town (not unlike my hometown) that's under the thumb of the Yakuza (unlike my hometown). This week's song soundtracks a very violent/funny scene. I give it the Midwest Excellence Thumbs Up.
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