Dr. Hook and The Medicine Show – Life Ain’t Easy

Later compilations credit Shel Silverstein alone, but the 1973 single label carries a second name: the man in the eye patch.

Read the label on a 1973 CBS pressing of Life Ain’t Easy and the writing credit names two people: R. Sawyer and Shel Silverstein. Released thirty years later, the Columbia/Legacy anthology The Essential Dr. Hook & The Medicine Show lists the song under Silverstein alone. It is an easy slip to make with this band, whose two biggest records were entirely his. It also erases the one thing that set this single apart: the man in the eye patch had his name on it.

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Silverstein had been the band’s engine from the start. The cartoonist, children’s author and songwriter heard a demo by the New Jersey group, recruited it to record his material, and supplied almost everything on its 1972 debut and all of Sloppy Seconds. Sylvia’s Mother reached No.5 on the Billboard Hot 100 and The Cover of “Rolling Stone” reached No.6, both his songs, both produced by the band’s manager, Ron Haffkine. Before Dr. Hook, his biggest success as a writer had been Johnny Cash’s A Boy Named Sue.

Ray Sawyer was the band’s face without being its lead voice. Born in Chickasaw, Alabama, he lost his right eye in a car crash in Oregon in 1967, and the patch he wore afterward gave the group its name, a nod to Captain Hook. Dennis Locorriere sang most of the leads, while Sawyer took the spotlight on The Cover of “Rolling Stone” and in the band’s lore: when fans asked which of them was Dr. Hook, the members would point at the bus driver. By 1973 the group wanted more than a Silverstein songbook. For Belly Up!, its third album, the band wrote most of the material itself, and Life Ain’t Easy sat right at the seam, a Sawyer and Silverstein co-write chosen as a single.

Where the money ran out

The timing worked against it. The band had grown disillusioned with CBS after the sudden exit of label president Clive Davis, its main champion there, and guitarist Jay David had left, replaced by John Wolters. Columbia released Life Ain’t Easy in the US in 1973 as the follow-up to Roland the Roadie and Gertrude the Groupie, with the single version remixed by Roy Halee, the engineer behind Simon & Garfunkel’s records, and trimmed to 2:43. It stalled in the lower half of the Hot 100. Belly Up! sold poorly too, and AllMusic’s Steve Huey later read the album’s title as an accidental prophecy. The band was soon broke, and it named its 1975 Capitol album Bankrupt.

CBS also issued the single across Europe, in the Netherlands, Germany and Greece among other markets, with The Wonderful Soup Stone on the flip side. Dutch television’s TopPop broadcast the band’s performance of Life Ain’t Easy on October 5, 1973. The clip, now preserved in the official TopPop archive, catches Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show in the Belly Up! season, before the money ran out, performing a song that carried one of its own members in the credit.

That is why the missing name matters. Silverstein wrote the songs that made Dr. Hook famous, and the shorthand of later compilations treats the whole early catalog as his. Life Ain’t Easy is the record where the band began taking part of that job back, with its most recognizable member on the label beside the man who had written its hits. The single stalled and the album sank, but the band kept writing, and when it recovered under a shorter name, its records no longer came from one man’s notebook. The credit on the 1973 label is an early page of that story, and it deserves to be kept the way it was printed.