Freakin' at the Freakers' Ball

Pull up a stool, Zoo Freaks, because the Zoo Crew just dropped the needle on a record that still makes program directors sweat. Dr. Hook & The Medicine Show cut "Freakin' at the Freakers' Ball" for their second album, Sloppy Seconds, and the thing landed like a hand grenade wrapped in a party invitation. Shel Silverstein wrote every track on that record, the same wild-eyed Playboy cartoonist and poet who had already handed Johnny Cash "A Boy Named Sue" and the Irish Rovers "The Unicorn." Silverstein did not hand the boys a polite country weeper this time. He handed them a roll call of every outlaw appetite he could stuff into one room, and the band sang it like they had already been to the party and brought the whips home.

Silverstein cut his own version first, on a Columbia album that carried the same title and came out around the same stretch of 1972. Producer Ron Haffkine sat in the chair for both projects, so the family resemblance was no accident. Dr. Hook's take opens the Sloppy Seconds LP, Ray Sawyer and Dennis Locorriere trading lines like two bartenders who have seen everything and still find it funny. A Rolling Stone piece from that year caught the band in the studio working on the cut and noted the obvious joke. The album was built to stay out of the hands of the folks who had bought "Sylvia's Mother" and thought they understood the band. Columbia even shipped radio copies with a letter warning stations that the record held objectionable material. Diligent jocks who actually screened the disc before airing it got as far as the title track and realized the warning was not a suggestion. AM radio mostly left it alone. FM freaks played it until the grooves went gray.

The lyric is a carnival barker gone off the rails. Grease your lips, grab your hat, bring your whips, roll something up to take along. Leather folks, sadists and masochists yelling at each other, FBI agents dancing with junkies, straights swinging with the funkies, brother with sister, son with mother, somebody asking to get smeared in butter. Silverstein had already written the piece as a poem in that same gleeful, rule-breaking voice he used when he was not writing sidewalk rhymes for kids. Country singer David Allan Coe later said the Silverstein album pushed him toward his own underground comedy records, the ones that made radio managers reach for the dump button. Up in Whistler, locals borrowed the title for actual costume blowouts in the middle of the decade. One regular turned up as a flasher with a camera flash wired under a trench coat. Another year a guy in a gorilla suit danced down a long table until somebody recognized him. The song did not invent the party. It just gave the party a name and a chorus you could shout without sheet music.

That is the medicine-show trick in one cut. The band could sing a broken-heart phone call one minute and a room full of forbidden dancing the next, and both felt like the same bunch of guys. Sloppy Seconds also carried "The Cover of the Rolling Stone," the satire that actually got them on the magazine cover a few months later, drawn as a cartoon because the joke had already written itself. The album climbed the charts on the strength of that single while the title song stayed the one you played when the request line got rowdy. Australian gold and a solid run on the Canadian charts told the story. People wanted the dirty laugh even when the hits were the ones that paid the rent.

The crew that sang it did not come out of a boardroom. George Cummings, Ray Sawyer, and Billy Francis had already knocked around the South in a band called the Chocolate Papers, working Mobile and the road. Cummings headed for Union City, New Jersey, around 1968 and called Sawyer up to join him. Sawyer wore an eye patch after a bad car wreck, and Cummings, stuck for a name one night when a club owner asked what to put on the sign, reached for Captain Hook and tacked on The Medicine Show because the times were full of tonic and trouble. Dennis Locorriere, a New Jersey kid, sat in on guitar one evening and was in the band before the amps cooled. Jay David took the drum chair after an early member headed back to Alabama. They played the rough bars, leaning on country because that is what the rooms would stand for, until producer Ron Haffkine heard a tape and pulled them into the Dustin Hoffman film Who Is Harry Kellerman and Why Is He Saying Those Terrible Things About Me? Silverstein had written the score. Haffkine liked Locorriere's voice, became manager and producer, and locked the band to Silverstein's songbook. The debut album gave the world "Sylvia's Mother," a phone-call heartbreak that a lot of listeners took straight and that Silverstein insisted came from a real call, last name changed so the line would scan. Sloppy Seconds was the nudge in the ribs that followed, the record that proved the Medicine Show could be tender and filthy in the same set.

Locorriere carried the lead voice on so many of those sides, the one that could sound like a heartbroken kid or a man inviting the whole county to misbehave. Sawyer's eye patch and cowboy hat made the front of the stage look like a pirate who had wandered into a honky-tonk. The band later shortened the name, chased softer hits, went bankrupt, came back, and kept the songs alive on the road for decades. The official camp still keeps the story posted for anyone who wants the long version. You can find the touring history and the band's own word at the Dr. Hook official website, along with the official Facebook page, the official Instagram, and the official X account. Fans who want a room to trade stories have gathered in the Dr. Hook Fan Page group, a place built for sharing the records and the road tales without the sales pitch.

Over here at THE ZOO, the Zoo Crew still treats a cut like this the way a good bar treats a regular who shows up with a story. We do not sand the edges off. We let the whips and the butter and the FBI stay in the lyric, because Silverstein wrote them that way and the Medicine Show sang them that way. Sloppy Seconds remains the album where the joke and the heart sat on the same barstool. "Freakin' at the Freakers' Ball" is the invitation on the door. If you have ever wanted a room where the straights and the funkies share the floor, this is the record that already threw the party and left the lights on. Pass the request along. The Zoo Freaks know the words.