's illustration of Dr. Hook & the Medicine Show on the cover of Rolling Stone #131 (March 29, 1973)]]Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show was a pop-country rock band formed around Union City, New Jersey in 1968. There the band's earliest incarnation played many small clubs around the 'Transfer Station', an area of bars and restaurants, all advertising 'live' music.
History
The founding core of the band consisted of four friends--George Cummings, Dennis Locorriere, Ray Sawyer, Billy Francis--who had played up and down the East Coast and into the Midwest, ending up in New Jersey one by one, with invitations from founding band member George Cummings. Told by a club owner that they needed a name to put on a poster in the window of his establishment, Cummings made a sign: "Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show: Tonic for the Soul." The name was inspired by the traveling medicine shows of the old West. To this day, frontman Ray Sawyer is mistakenly considered Dr. Hook because of the eyepatch he wears a
Source:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr. Hook