Penicillin Penny

The Zoo Crew is back on the boards at THE ZOO, and the Zoo Freaks are getting a dose of something they did not pick up at the drugstore. The record spinning is "Penicillin Penny," cut by Dr. Hook & The Medicine Show for the 1973 Columbia album Belly Up!. Shel Silverstein wrote it, Ron Haffkine produced it, and the band laid it down at CBS Studio in New York City. It sits second on the side, right after "Acapulco Goldie," which tells you plenty about the neighborhood this album lives in. Silverstein was not writing greeting-card romance. He was writing barroom cartoons with a guitar under them, and this one is drawn in thick ink.

Penny is the queen of the Sunset Strip, and the warning comes before the second line is finished. If she ever gives you any, you had better see your doctor real quick. The picture Silverstein paints runs from the back seat of Cadillac cars to the floor of men's room bars. She has had so many that she hands out numbers instead of names. The singer still calls her hun. She calls him 1001. Then comes the punch line the whole room waits for: if you ever let her in your door, it takes 20 million units or more to cure the love that Penicillin Penny is going to lay on you. That is not a metaphor you have to squint at. In 1973, penicillin was still the first thing a clinic reached for, and twenty million units was the kind of number a guy heard when the nurse stopped smiling. Silverstein, the same writer who handed Johnny Cash "A Boy Named Sue" and later filled children's shelves with The Giving Tree, had a mean streak for grown-up jokes, and the Medicine Show was the band built to sing them with a straight face and a crooked grin.

Belly Up! landed in the fall of 1973, and the title turned out to be a little too honest. The band had come off Sloppy Seconds and "The Cover of the Rolling Stone," the song that actually got them on the magazine, drawn in caricature for the March 29, 1973 issue. Expectations were high. The record that followed was looser, funnier, and harder to sell to a radio programmer who wanted another Sylvia. "Penicillin Penny" never chased the charts the way "Sylvia's Mother" did. It stayed a deep cut for the people who bought the album and wore it out, the kind of track a club would request when the night got long and the crowd wanted the band to stop being polite. Live, they stretched it. A 1974 show in Denmark, later passed around by fans who kept the Medicine Show years alive, catches them leaning into the gag, Ray Sawyer out front in the eye patch, the room laughing at lines most stations would not have touched in daylight. On the studio take the ad-libs push it further, little asides about the clap and a doctor who had better not slip anybody a dose. It is a medicine-show pitch turned inside out.

Dennis Locorriere later summed up the business side of those years in one line that still gets repeated: if they were in the black when a tour ended, they partied into the red. By 1974 the band had filed for bankruptcy, kept touring anyway, and in 1975 shortened the name to Dr. Hook. Belly Up! is the last full album under the long Medicine Show banner, and it sounds like a group that knew the joke was on them and decided to tell it first. Silverstein still had a heavy hand on the writing, the way he had on the first two records, but the band was also slipping in its own songs. "Penicillin Penny" is pure Shel, credited to Evil Eye Music, and it belongs to that run of character pieces where the title is the whole plot. Acapulco Goldie, Roland the Roadie and Gertrude the Groupie, Monterey Jack. You can hear the album before you drop the needle.

The bunch that sang it did not come out of a Hollywood office. George Cummings, Ray Sawyer, and Billy Francis had already knocked around together down south, around Mobile, in a group called the Chocolate Papers. Cummings called Sawyer up to New Jersey in 1968. They were working the rough bars around Union City with no name worth printing on a poster until a club owner asked what to put on the sign. Cummings looked at Sawyer's eye patch and reached for Captain Hook. Sawyer had lost the eye in a near-fatal car wreck in Oregon in 1967, and the patch did the rest of the advertising. Drugs were the talk of the rooms they played, so Medicine Show got tacked on, and for a while the full billing was Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show: Tonic for the Soul. Dennis Locorriere, a Jersey City kid born in 1949, sat in one night on guitar and was asked to stay before the evening was over. He started on bass. Fans who pointed at the patch and asked which one was Dr. Hook got the same answer every time. The whole band pointed at the bus driver.

The break did not come from a talent show. In 1970, producer Ron Haffkine heard a demo and needed a band for Shel Silverstein's songs in the Dustin Hoffman film Who Is Harry Kellerman and Why Is He Saying Those Terrible Things About Me? They cut "The Last Morning" and "Bunky and Lucille" for the picture, and you can catch them on screen. Haffkine became manager and producer. In 1971 they walked into a meeting with Clive Davis at CBS. Jay David kept time on a wastebasket. Billy Francis danced on the desk. Sawyer, Locorriere, and Cummings played and sang. They walked out with a deal. Silverstein wrote every song on the 1972 debut. "Sylvia's Mother" took a second push and then sold a million. Sloppy Seconds followed, with "Freakin' at the Freaker's Ball" and the Rolling Stone song. By the time Belly Up! showed up, they were a known quantity who still looked like the house band from a joint that did not check IDs very hard.

Locorriere carried most of the lead vocals. Sawyer took the ones that needed that weathered bark, including the Rolling Stone hit, and he was the face people remembered from across a room. The patch, the grin, the way he leaned into a dirty joke like he was letting you in on it. That is the spirit "Penicillin Penny" was written for. Not a sermon about the Strip, and not a love song either. A tall tale with a prescription on the end of it, sung by a band that got its name from an eye patch and a pirate, and that made a career out of sounding like they were having more fun than the contract allowed. Sawyer left in the early eighties and later toured under his own license of the name until he retired. He died on the last day of 2018. Locorriere kept the trademark and the songs on the road for years after that, under the banner that still lives at the official site.

If you want the band's own door, the official site is Dr Hook Official. The official Facebook page is DR HOOK Starring Dennis Locorriere, the Instagram is @drhookofficial, and the X account is @DrHookOfficial. Fans still swap stories and old photos in the Dr. Hook Fan Page group. Put the needle back on side one. Penny is still out there on the Strip, and twenty million units is still not enough if you open the door.