Girls Can Get It

Dr. Hook's Late-Career Momentum and the Making of "Girls Can Get It"

By 1980, Dr. Hook had completed one of the more improbable commercial transformations in the history of American rock music. The band had begun the 1970s as a shaggy, satirically inclined outfit whose early recordings for Columbia Records, produced in association with songwriter Shel Silverstein, carried a countercultural irreverence that made them critically interesting if not reliably commercial. Their trajectory from that beginning to the slick, adult-oriented pop of their Casablanca Records era was by any measure a dramatic stylistic journey, and "Girls Can Get It" arrived as a product of their most commercially accomplished if creatively transformed period.

The group had been founded in New Jersey and initially cohered around the songwriting partnership with Shel Silverstein, the celebrated poet, cartoonist, and songwriter whose eccentric and often satirical material gave the early Dr. Hook recordings their distinctive character. "Sylvia's Mother" had reached number five on the Hot 100 in 1972, and "The Cover of 'Rolling Stone'" had been both a commercial hit and a cultural moment, a knowing satirical comment on the machinery of rock stardom delivered with enough genuine wit to make it one of the period's more enduring novelty records.

The move to Capitol Records in the mid-1970s had represented a stylistic pivot away from Silverstein's eccentric material toward a more mainstream pop-rock approach. "Only Sixteen," "When You're in Love with a Beautiful Woman," and "Sharing the Night Together" had all demonstrated that the reconstituted Dr. Hook could generate substantial pop hits with the kind of polished, radio-friendly material that their countercultural early years had largely avoided. The move to Casablanca Records in 1980 continued this commercial trajectory, placing them on a label that was at the height of its influence as the disco era gave way to the early 1980s pop landscape.

Casablanca Records in 1980 was an organization in transition. The label had achieved extraordinary commercial success through its association with disco acts and with KISS, but the disco collapse of 1979 had disrupted its commercial model and the label was navigating considerable uncertainty about its direction. Signing Dr. Hook represented a bet on proven commercial appeal in the adult contemporary and pop-rock markets that remained viable even as the disco format retreated. The partnership would prove to be one of the label's more reliable relationships during this transitional period.

"Girls Can Get It" entered the Billboard Hot 100 on November 1, 1980, debuting at number 80. Its chart climb was gradual and consistent over 14 weeks, reflecting the airplay accumulation model that had characterized Dr. Hook's recent commercial pattern. The single reached its peak position of number 34 in mid-December 1980, a solid result in the context of an unusually competitive end-of-year chart period. The song performed particularly well on adult contemporary radio, where its polished production and straightforward lyrical content aligned well with format expectations.

The production values of "Girls Can Get It" reflected the state of the art in mainstream pop production circa 1980: clean, bright, and built for radio with considerable technical expertise. The arrangement avoided the excess that sometimes characterized late-disco-era productions while embracing the polished sheen that AOR and adult contemporary formats expected. Ray Sawyer and Dennis Locorriere, the most recognizable vocal presences in the band, brought their characteristic combination of ragged expressiveness and pop discipline to the recording, creating a performance that was simultaneously familiar to existing fans and accessible to new listeners encountering the band through radio.

Dr. Hook's Dennis Locorriere, who had emerged as the group's primary lead vocalist during the pop era, possessed a voice ideally suited to the kind of emotionally direct pop material the band was producing in this period. His delivery on "Girls Can Get It" was confident and unaffected, communicating the song's lighthearted message with the assurance of an artist who had found a reliable commercial register and who understood how to operate effectively within it. The recording demonstrated that whatever the cultural critics thought of the distance the band had traveled from their Silverstein-era origins, the commercial instincts they had developed were genuinely impressive.

The band's Casablanca period would be cut short by the label's eventual collapse and absorption by PolyGram, an institutional disruption that affected all of the label's roster regardless of individual commercial performance. Dr. Hook continued as a going concern after the Casablanca chapter, but the momentum of their late 1970s and early 1980s commercial peak was difficult to maintain without the promotional infrastructure that a functioning major label provided.

"Girls Can Get It" stands as a document of Dr. Hook at their most commercially optimized, a band that had successfully reinvented itself for the mainstream market and that was delivering on that reinvention with genuine craft and professional assurance. Whether one prefers the countercultural irreverence of their early Shel Silverstein period or the polished pop of their later commercial peak is ultimately a matter of taste, but "Girls Can Get It" demonstrates that the latter chapter of their career was produced with no less skill than the earlier one, simply applied to different ends.