One person’s view: “[Dennis Locorriere] was a horrendously unappealing vocalist on every conceivable level, and he pretty much single-handedly tanks the song with his pitifully half-hearted performance.” – Nic Renshaw @ Pop Goes the Year
The public’s view: 2.83 / 5.00 or 2.68 / 5.00, depending on the version of the single
It was exciting when my homeroom teacher at St. Joseph Elementary decided that our class should have a weekly newspaper and that I should be the editor. I had big dreams for this periodical. I planned to provide dazzling entertainment features while also assigning reporters to investigate matters of public interest. I envisioned an exposé about what was behind the mysterious door labeled “Faculty Room”, a column with recipes for making explosives and corrosive acids, and a word search puzzle of “Things St. Joe Students Have Found in Their Cafeteria Food”. The teacher wanted each edition to include a profile of one of her pupils, and I welcomed the chance to interview my peers and ask hard-hitting questions. (“Kathy, you seem fairly smart and well-behaved. Why did you get put in this class with all the fuck-ups?”) I figured I’d have a Pulitzer by the time the school year was over.
As we know from the recent debacles at 60 Minutes and the Washington Post, however, there are always powerful forces seeking to steer journalists away from the truth. My teacher believed that her primary role at the Class Classic was to censor most of my contributions and replace them with vacuous content that appealed only to the elderly and enfeebled. She deleted my thoughtful literary assessment of the profane graffiti on the school’s dumpster and substituted some blather about a phony holiday called “Catholic Education Week”. The profile of my classmate Eddie no longer mentioned his career ambition of leading an anti-government militia, instead offering sycophantic lines like “Eddie has a beautiful smile” and “Eddie is talented with watercolors.” All of this embarrassing drivel appeared under my name, which was on the masthead as editor-in-chief. The publisher should have been listed as William Randolph Worst.
Most of these revisions were made behind my back, but the teacher confronted me directly when I tried to print a list of Billboard’s top 10 songs in our newspaper. I thought she was going to lecture me about the sanctity of Billboard’s copyright, but no. She was upset over the titles of the songs on the chart. First, she decreed that Rod Stewart’s “Da Ya Think I’m Sexy?” was not to be mentioned in our publication. I actually understood her concerns. “Da” and “ya” were misspellings, and “sexy” was the type of naughty word that some ne’er-do-well might spray-paint on our dumpster. I offered to salvage the column by listing Rod’s song as “Do You Think I’m Stinky?” My teacher said that would be insufficient, because another record in the top 10 was even more objectionable: Dr. Hook’s “Sharing the Night Together”. It was then that I realized I should be paying more attention to Dr. Hook. If they were angering authority figures, then maybe they weren’t as dull of a band as I had thought.
Dr. Hook made their living mostly from soft rock music targeted at the female demographic aged 25 and up. However, they weren’t fully committed to the genre and seemed to be doing a subversive parody of it. Once you picked up on this, you could easily spot the meta jokes throughout their discography. There was singer Dennis Locorriere’s hilariously overdone weepiness on “Sylvia’s Mother”. There was the funny video for “A Little Bit More”, in which Locorriere started getting intimate in the woods with his bandmate Ray Sawyer. There was the obvious erection pun in “When You’re in Love with a Beautiful Woman”, which didn’t stop the single from earning heavy play on AM radio. “Sharing the Night Together” was perhaps the finest example of Dr. Hook’s humor. In that song, the singer approaches a random stranger and immediately asks her to go off somewhere and have sex with him. The request is too laughable to be offensive, and it is made even more comical by Locorriere’s delivery. He has as much masculine bravado as a Care Bears cartoon. My teacher was horrified by the title’s implication of a one-night stand, but most listeners understood that “Sharing the Night Together” was not really about sex. It was an amusing story of a pathetic guy humiliating himself in public.
“Sexy Eyes” was the last of the group’s top 10 singles. It begins with a funky disco beat, and then Dennis Locorriere starts singing about sitting in a disco by himself while voyeuristically watching couples dance. We can tell immediately that this song was obsolete before it ever got out the factory door. It was released in January 1980, right after everyone had abruptly tired of disco and had mulched up all of their Donna Summer records for use as goldfish food. Most of the discotheques in the U.S. had just been converted into video game arcades or fitness clubs, and the rest were now being rented out as meeting halls for supporters of charismatic presidential candidate John B. Anderson. “Sexy Eyes” was a relic of a bygone era many days or even weeks in the past.
The singer is unhappy about his lack of a dance partner, but then a woman walks over and asks him to shake his groove thing with her. Her defining attribute is her “sexy eyes”, even though female eyes do not biologically differ from male eyes in any noticeable way. A lady can be equipped with pretty eyes, freshly polished elbows, or a gorgeous spleen, but none of these organs can ever be sexy. Thus, “Sexy Eyes” is not merely outdated; its entire premise is outlandish. Dr. Hook has once again made a mockery of serious adult contemporary music.
This doesn’t mean that the people of 1980 were rolling on the floor in laughter. Dr. Hook’s clever self-referential humor was obvious in records like “The Cover of ‘Rolling Stone’”, but in “Sexy Eyes” it is almost too subtle. It’s only mildly funny that the band waited to put out a disco record until after the fad had ended. It’s mildly funny that the singer gets turned on by a lady’s eyeballs. It’s mildly funny to imagine the woman’s reaction when this cute guy in the disco opens his mouth and out comes the voice of a castrated Muppet. Unfortunately, it’s easy for the entire gag to go right over a listener’s head. When that happens, we’re left with a song that is pretty much just run-of-the-mill yacht rock. The disco bass line may be out of step with its time period, but it happens to be the best feature.
My rating: 5 / 10
Note: Portions of this review were first published in the Arts & Leisure section of the March 7, 1980 St. Joseph Elementary Class Classic, under the heading “Stinky Eyes”. The original is available on microfiche at your local library.
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