Dr Hook’s Dennis Locorriere: Timeless Tunes (Interview)

Dennis Locorriere has been singing the songs of Dr Hook & The Medicine Show ever since he joined the band way back in 1967. Those songs…Sylvia’s Mother, The Cover Of The Rolling Stone, Sharing The Night Together…have become New Zealand family favourites for those brought up during the 1970s. Dennis and Dr Hook parted ways in 1985, but that hasn’t kept the distinctive vocalist from singing those tunes, many of which were penned by the legendary Shel Silverstein. With the release of a new Dr Hook compilation titlted Timeless, Dennis Locorriere is due to tour New Zealand for a 10-date run beginning in Auckland on April 29th. The 13th Floor’s Marty Duda spoke to Dennis Locorriere from his home in England to discuss the legacy of Dr Hook & The Medicine Show. Click here to listen to the interview with Dennis Locorriere:

Or, read a transcription of the interview here: MD: I’m curious why did you move to England 14 years ago? DL: I like it here first of all and I wanted to start touring with just the guitar and kind of down scale the whole thing and you can’t do that in The States. MD: Right. DL: In America you have to set yourself on fire in New York and hope somebody smells the smoke in Los Angeles. You just got a little out of hand for me and I lived here and I met somebody, I have a personal life. It’s nice, I like it. I always had a feeling when I was touring with Hook that I will probably wind up here. MD: Right. DL: But you never know. MD: Yeah. DL: I mean somewhere in the back of my mind, you don’t realise everything but that one actually came true. I’ll probably just stay here I like it. MD: Yeah. DL: I can get anywhere from here. MD: Exactly. They have airplanes and things so its very handy. DL: Yeah, yeah. MD: And the last time you were in New Zealand, was that about 2003ish? DL: I suppose, it was a while. It was a while ago and I’ve been there obviously with Dr. Hook several times. MD: Yeah. DL: And then I was there twice solo and it was, when I say solo, I mean not only without Dr. Hook but without a band. MD: Yeah. DL: Me and my guitar. This time I’m coming back and I don’t know, you go through cycles in your life and the way you think and it feels right to me right now for a lot of different reasons, to just concentrate on that Hook thing, I’m not the guy that wants to be congratulated for something I did yesterday over and over again. MD: Right. Dr Hook TimelessDL: Last year Universal Music, they’ve now acquired the catalogue, and they asked me here in the U.K to put out a, help them put together a double CD of Hook stuff, a Best Of as you were and I said okay, and it was interesting just to pick 40 tracks but even more interesting to have to listen to everything. MD: So what went through your mind when you heard these things cause there must have been stuff you hadn’t heard in years. DL: Yeah and there was stuff that I remembered I didn’t like but I still didn’t like. I mean really, that happens and there was stuff that I thought,  wow I should have paid more attention to that. MD: Right. DL: So it was interesting to go through it again. But then the next step was putting the album out here and it went top of the charts and I thought wow. MD: Yeah. DL: And then doing promo and interviews and talking to people and you know what I said to you when I started this little thing right here that I’m saying is that, it seems like it’s not current to me. MD: Right. DL: But everybody talk to me as if it was still there. MD: Yeah. DL: and had a place and it just opened my eyes. I never resisted it, I wasn’t a guy who walked away from my past. I’ve toured as the voice of Dr. Hook, I’m not stupid. MD: Right. DL: I don’t go out there with a mask. But I just didn’t do the glitz and the glamour and the big band and the bells and whistles. MD: Yeah. DL: For a long time and I did other things. I did some acting, I put out a book of poetry and cartoons and some other things because if you keep, like I said, if you keep getting congratulated on your past, you sit there and check your pulse every once in a while. MD: Right. DL: To make sure that the flowers aren’t going to start arriving. MD: Yeah. We just had this huge tour come through with the Eagles over the weekend. They did 2 big stadium shows and I guess it’s kind of the same process, you have to break up, you have to kind of do your own thing and then you come to terms with what you did in the past and realise that the two things can kind of coexist in some form or fashion. DL: Yeah and you know something, here’s the deal. After all this time if you ask me what Dr. Hook means to me I’ll tell you that in the old days it meant a bunch of guys, good friends that started as a bar band, got some breaks and we’re travelling around the world and we’re having hits and we’re in places we couldn’t even believe we’d ever be and we’re laughing and we’re having a pretty good time. MD: Yeah. DL: Really cool. If you ask me what Dr. Hook is today, it’s a sound. I mean, four of those guys are gone. MD: Right. DL: They’re dead and no longer with us. If you ask me about a Dr. Hook reunion it would have to start with a séance. MD: Right. DL: I mean four of my mates are no longer there and life goes on but the sound of it, It still seems to be appealing to people. We can’t all be, I mean I am in New Zealand, when I show up people think I’m 35, they’re going to call an ambulance. You can’t hold back the tides of time. MD: Well the good thing is as you get older, the audience’s eyesight starts to spade anyway, so you’re kind of all on the same page. DL: I guess that that’s a plus. Fortunately for me, I kind of look like the same guy. MD: Right. DL: We all get older but I don’t walk out on stage and everybody just thinks, who the hell is this. MD: Right. DL: So that’s cool. I can still sing those songs and I got a great band and so I thought if I’m going to do this and it is all about the sound because they bought that album in droves, that double album and that was a sound. MD: Yeah. drhookbandposeDL: That wasn’t a look or a bunch of people, it was just a sound that people liked and remembered and I thought, well, we can do that, I can do that. I was the lead singer on almost all of it, so I can recreate that faithfully and it kind of went from a little bit of a resistance to almost where I feel like it’s almost my duty to myself to go out and do this little world tour and the Timeless album came out here, it’s coming out in New Zealand. MD: Yeah. DL: And I’m kind of following it when it comes out. It’s nice, it’s really nice because I guess when you’re younger you feel like if you’re freeze somewhere you’re going to get stuck there, but to tell you the truth, this is just me, whoever the heck I am now singing those songs. MD: Right. DL: It doesn’t freeze me anywhere. MD: I have a feeling when that album comes out in New Zealand, it’s going to do really well. I was in The States in the 70s when you guys were doing your thing. So I was curious to know whether or not New Zealanders were even aware of Dr. Hook, but couple of weeks a
go, my daughter, who’s name by the way is Sylvia brought one of her friends over during their late 20s early 30s and I had this huge record collection and the first thing her friend asked me was if I had any Dr. Hook albums because her parents listened to them all the time while she was growing up and you guys made a big impression down here. DL: That’s the thing, right there. First of all, we didn’t get to New Zealand or Australia, that part of the world, till a little later in our career. MD: Yeah. DL: Probably 77’, 78’ when we started having those mainstream hits. MD: Yeah. DL: We got there a little later and then people have a look back at our old photographs and go oh Dennis used to look like Big Foot with a guitar. Some other places, some he looked like that and watched me get my haircut. So it was a little later, but the funny thing about, well the true thing about what you just said is my audience now is the people that remember the band and the people that loved what their family used to listen to. MD: Yup. DL: I meet people, I meet people man and I’m right in the middle of their lives. They walk up to me, they don’t even say hello, they walk up to me and they say, you know when I was a kid we used to go camping and my dad loved Dr. Hook, we used to sing Dr. Hook songs all the way there and all the way back and my dad passed away and we played a Hook song at his funeral and man it’s breath-taking. I’m like right in the middle of somebody’s life. MD: Exactly right, yeah. DL: You can’t dismiss that. MD: Yeah. DL: Even if you don’t really feel in the mood for it, right there you have to suck it up because that’s the moment that you would not want to be the, I would not want to be the guy that stuck a pin in that. MD: Yeah. DL: I really would not, no matter what it meant, so it’s cool. MD: Yeah. DL: It means more to people than I knew it did, if you want to know the truth. Ray & DennisMD: I guess you have a certain responsibility to fans at a certain point when you make an impression like that. I mean, this girl knew, she knew the hits but she knew the album tracks as well, it was pretty impressive. DL: Yeah, that’s great. That’s so cool man, because it really is those families and then they grow up and they go… You get this thing where there’s people that are into the band and then they have families of their own and they fall out of music for a little while and they don’t know where anybody wound up and then in the later years when the kids are a little more grown and they maybe have a little more disposable income, they go hey, Hook, this guy is still there, do you remember, the kids do you remember this guy, he’s still alive, let’s go see him.  And they bring their kids and it’s not uncommon for their kids to bring their kids. MD: Yeah. DL: It’s really freaky man, it really, really is freaky. But the album is called Timeless but the music may be timeless but it takes a 100 years to find that out. MD: Yup. DL: Nobody’s new album is called Timeless. How arrogant. MD: Now there’s one thing I’m kind of curious with the band is how the relationship with Shel Silverstein emerged. I mean he was almost an extra member, he wrote a lot of the songs along with you and Ray. DL: Oh yeah, yeah. MD: So it’s an interesting relationship I guess you guys must have had because he was an accomplished songwriter. I think he wrote A Boy Named Sue if I’m not mistaken. DL: Oh yeah. I kept a relationship with Shel right up until the day he passed away. MD: Yeah. DL: Maybe 15 years ago or something. When I was a kid I was a Shel fan, I used to listen to his music and he used to sing these really heart-breaking songs or these serious songs and then something totally ridiculous. MD: Right. DL: Like Bury Me In My Shades and I love the fact that he had that dual personality and could very easily pull it all off and I saw him in the street in New York one time when I was about, I don’t know, 18 and I didn’t have the nerve to talk to him cause’ he looked very gruff. MD: Right.

Shel Silverstein
Shel Silverstein

DL: He had swarthy-shaped head, black beard but he was actually such a sweetie pie but he looked very gruff and I never had the nerve and he wandered off and somewhere within that next year, Hook who was a bar band had made some rough tapes and somebody got to hear them and all of a sudden they were talking about using us to do some songs in this Dustin Hoffman film and they said, listen to this tape and we listened to it and I freaked out because it was 2 songs by Shel. And the guy when he gave us the cassette he said don’t mind his voice he can’t sing, just listen to the songs. Shel had a very scratchy but I don’t know if he could sing but he certainly could get across one of his own songs. MD: Right. DL: Like gang busters, like nobody else and it blew me away. So we wound up being in this film, Who Is Harry Kellerman and Why Is He Saying Those Terrible Things About Me. MD: Yeah. DL: More a cult film now. They actually do cult film classes on this film and at the time it was just deemed a stinker or whatever and Dustin never even really spoke about it. But it kicked the door open for us and more importantly, it kicked the door open for a relationship with Shel and you were right, he wrote mostly everything on our first 3 albums but anything we did write, he was always there encouraging us to write. He said you don’t want to be just a mouthpiece for me and he loved the way we did his stuff but he, because that was the thing, he was going to write, he was going to hand me Sylvia’s Mother and Freakin’ at the Freaker’s Ball to sing. MD: Alright. DL: Because he knew that my character could handle both because his character could write both and it was really cool, it was really nice. I did a play of Shel’s in New York at Lincoln Centre cause’ he trusted me, it was like an hour long, one man thing. I got a 56 page poem that Shel had written called The Devil and Billy Markham, he called me one day and said how would you like to be on Broadway or Lincoln Centre and I went oh okay. Shel and I didn’t see each other a lot but whenever we did cool little things happened… MD: Sounded like you guys really connected. DL: Yeah and when he passed away, we actually had been talking about trying to record something together.  Go sat down in Key West somewhere, some of his, some of mine, write a couple because always used to talk about that stuff and it’s that big unrequited project that never was. I almost hate saying it because it’s almost like oh yeah sure, but it really was, we were talking about it. I sent him my solo album when It came out and he listened to it and he called me and he said, when did you get better than me.  This is not what happened, it has nothing to do with getting better. But he was very complimentary that way, he wasn’t possessive about, he was about his songs, I mean he didn’t want you to change a word. MD: Right. DL: Not a word, melody, he’d say you’re the singer, you can play with the melody If you want to, don’t need you to change any of the words. MD: Excellent. DL: Very specific about that because Shel’s songs, if you just read them to someone they make just as much sense as if you sing them. MD: Yeah. Well its quite a legacy you guys have left behind and thank goodness that you’re around still to bring it back here. So we’re really looking forward to seeing you. DL: Hey, I’m lucky, I’m really lucky. I’m lucky to be coming back to New Zealand. I’m really apprehensive about it because it’s like we had a good relationship, a real personal relationship with New Zealand and when you go back its like they haven’t seen an old friend for a long time, just thinking oh are we going to get along, do they still like me and then you get in the room and you start talking and you’re there together and hopefully those years melt away. Click here for more information about Dennis Locorriere’s New Zealand tour.