Car accident turned singer into instantly recognisable pop star
One night in 1967 Ray Sawyer was slouched in the passenger seat of a friend’s Corvair, sleeping off the effects of a bibulous evening out.
They were driving through Portland, Oregon, where Sawyer was working as a lumberjack, when the car hit a guard rail by the Columbia River. When he awoke, his eyes were full of blood and the right front wheel of the Corvair had pinned him to his seat. He had to be cut out with a blowtorch and spent a year in hospital before he re-emerged with only one eye and a steel brace on one leg.
The accident was the making of him. Donning the eyepatch that was to turn him into an improbable pop star, he shot to the top of the charts singing with Dr Hook and the Medicine Show on hits such as Sylvia’s Mother and The Cover of Rolling Stone.
The group was named after JM Barrie’s piratical villain in Peter Pan,
with the one-eyed Sawyer as the visual magnet. As fellow Dr Hook singer Dennis Locorriere put it: ‘‘If you put six donkeys on stage with a monkey, it’s the monkey who’ll be the star. Put the rest of us out on the street and we’re just a bunch of hippies. But everyone recognises Ray.’’
With their novelty songs and endless sending-up of everyone and everything, Dr Hook used sardonic wit and risque humour more effectively than almost anyone else in the business. Song titles included I Got Stoned and I Missed It and a disco pastiche You Make My Pants Want to Get Up and Dance.
Sylvia’s Mother was, according to its writer Shel Silverstein, based on a true story of ringing a girlfriend and being told by her mother she could not come to the phone because she was marrying someone else. It was delivered with such camp melodrama that it was impossible to treat Dr Hook’s version as anything other than a knowing parody.
The Cover of Rolling Stone had Sawyer taking the lead vocal on an amusing tale about a group of rock stars with ‘‘blueeyed groupies who do anything we say’’ and ‘‘a genuine Indian guru teaching us a better way’’, frustrated about not getting their picture on the cover of America’s premier music magazine.
A few months later Sawyer and the band did make the cover. By then they had also posed naked for a gay magazine, though none of the band was gay. Sawyer kept his eyepatch and battered cowboy hat on.
He left the band in 1983, complaining that he had become ‘‘a product with a patch and a hat’’. In later years he performed as Dr Hook featuring Ray Sawyer, while Locorriere toured with a rival version of the band. The two had not spoken in several years, but denied there was any enmity between them.
Sawyer retired from the stage in 2015 after falling and breaking his arm while on his final tour of Britain, where Dr Hook retained a nostalgic following and had first toured in 1973, with Bruce Springsteen as their support act.
He is survived by his wife Linda, whom he married in 1969, and their son Casey, a drummer who began playing in his father’s band at the age of 13.
He was born Raymond Sawyer in Chickasaw, Alabama, and grew up listening to country music. ‘‘I got an old guitar and started banging around on it just like any kid, but I knew at the age of 11 or 12 what I wanted to do,’’ he recalled. High on the list was getting out of the rural backwoods of Chickasaw County. He made a withering assessment of the local job opportunities, which he claimed consisted mostly of potato picking. ‘‘It’s really a desolate looking thing . . They make just enough to come into town at night and get drunk.’’
After a spell as a drummer in a hillbilly band, he fell under the spell of rock’n’roll. Moving to Chicago, he became the only white member of a soul band, sporting slicked-back hair and heavily hooded eyes, the result of an addiction to ‘‘uppers’’ that found him staying up for days on end and playing games of pool in which the stakes were packets of Benzedrine tablets known as ‘‘tootsie rolls’’.
After watching a John Wayne film one drugged-up night, he decided on a whim to give up music and grab a taste of the rugged outdoor life by moving to Oregon, where he became a logger.
After recovering from his accident, he moved to New Jersey, and started playing in the band that was to become Dr Hook in rough and often violent bars. ‘‘Motorcycle gangs would come on in and get really juiced. Then they’d fight,’’ he recalled. He sang sentimental, cry-inyour-beer country songs to try to soothe their belligerence.
The band got their break when they recorded two songs for the 1970 movie
Who Is Harry Kellerman and Why Is He Saying Those Terrible Things About Me?
Both were written by Silverstein, who had also written Johnny Cash’s A Boy Named Sue.
It proved to be a perfect partnership; Silverstein wrote most of the group’s early hits, including Sylvia’s Mother and
Cover of Rolling Stone, the lyrics of which he dictated to Sawyer over the phone.
In Britain, the BBC banned the song on the grounds that it was advertising a commercial product. Radio 1 circumvented the ban by having its DJs shout
‘‘Radio Times’’ – the BBC’s TV and radio listings magazine – over the offending words.
Despite having huge hit singles, by 1974 the group had filed for bankruptcy. ‘‘If we were in the black when we finished a tour, we’d party into the red,’’ Locorriere explained. They returned to the road to pay off their debts and scored further hits with A Little Bit More, Sharing the Night Together and When You’re in Love with a Beautiful Woman.
Over the years, Sawyer’s whiskers grew bushier and turned white, but the eyepatch and battered hat remained constant, as if welded to his head.
‘‘It was a rollercoaster,’’ he recalled. ‘‘I’ve done pretty good considering our lifestyle was so wild and crazy.’’ – The Times