Sawyer's immediate priority, once he'd finished a conversation in which he ruminated on a 60-year career as a professional musician, was to watch the launch of the space shuttle Discovery from the Kennedy Space Centre at Cape Canaveral, not too far from his home north of Daytona Beach, Florida.
"I live close enough that I can see it. It's going up at 4.50pm here. It's a beautiful day. I'll be able to see it really well," the 74-year-old said as he was preparing to take a more modest flight of his own, packing his bags for a one-off New Zealand concert at Gibbston Valley Winery today.
Performing under the tag Dr Hook (he is the only remaining member and licenses the name from fellow founding member Dennis Locorriere), Sawyer continues to tour regularly, the Queenstown gig part of a programme that extends to Scandinavia, Canada and his United States homeland.
"I've slowed down quite a bit but we still go out and do quite a few shows during the summer," Sawyer explains, adding that audiences could be assured of hearing all the songs that earned Dr Hook and the Medicine Show 60 gold or platinum albums around the globe.
"We have to do those songs, otherwise the audience would kill me. We'll throw some new stuff in, too."
A quick inventory produces the following key singles, several of which reached the United States and United Kingdom top 10s as well as charting elsewhere in the world: Sylvia's Mother, Cover Of The Rolling Stone, Sharing the Night Together, When You're in Love With A Beautiful Woman, Sexy Eyes, Baby Makes Her Blue Jeans Talk, Walk Right In and a rendition of Sam Cooke's Only Sixteen.
"We had a couple of songs that went into three or four different charts," Sawyer says, referring to other influential listings such as the United States' country and adult contemporary charts.
"I believe that was a key to the longevity of the band."
Raised in Mobile, Alabama, where he was exposed to a gumbo diet of rhythm and blues, jazz and country, Sawyer says he has always had a love for music.
"In first or second grade there was a preacher who would come to the school and get us all to sing songs. I loved that.
"Later on, we would go roller-skating with the guys and girls; we were 13 or 14 years old ... well, one day I was walking home and I saw this big double-sided harmonica sticking out of the water of a creek. I shook it in the water, blew it then shook it some more and finally got it to a point where it would play so I could play the song Old Black Joe on the way home. I thought, 'that was easy'. It just came naturally to me."
So naturally, in fact, that by the age of 14 Sawyer was gigging professionally, playing drums in a Dixieland band that performed at sock-hops, so named because audiences were required to wear socks in the gymnasium venues.
"The kids would come and stand around and listen to the music. But this one day we were playing and there was a microphone there, so I went over and tapped on it and it was on. I asked [bandleader] Mr Sonny Bill if I could sing a song, My Baby, by Little Willie John. I pulled the microphone over to my drums, we played it and the kids started dancing instead of standing and talking. I thought, 'uh-oh'.
"That's where it started."
A car accident in 1967 left him without sight in one eye. Yet it also sharpened his focus. A year later, Dr Hook and the Medicine Show formed in Union City, New Jersey, when Sawyer met singer-songwriter Locorriere (the duo shared lead vocals) and teamed up with a few of Sawyer's former Chocolate Papers band-mates.
"It's amazing how when something bad happens it can turn into something good. I had that car wreck in 1967 and it was very bad... I lost my eye and chose to wear a patch."
Concentrating on country music, Dr Hook and the Medicine Show began playing some of the roughest bars in the New Jersey area. Sawyer and company got a key break in 1970 when they performed on the soundtrack to the Dustin Hoffman film Who Is Harry Kellerman (and why is he saying those terrible things about me?).
The songs on that soundtrack were penned by Shel Silverstein, a Playboy cartoonist and children's author who was recruited into the band and became a catalyst for its early success.
"Shel was very significant," Sawyer says. "When we were first introduced to him he had just started writing songs; he had written A Boy Named Sue for Johnny Cash and The Unicorn for the Irish Rovers.
"When he got with us, he'd write with me or someone else in mind to sing the song. It was a blessing to have someone like him doing that. The whole first two albums were Shel's songs."
The group's first single, Sylvia's Mother, a parody of teen heartbreak, prefaced a series of songs with humorous content.
Although the song initially flopped on the release in 1971 of the band's self-titled debut album, greater promotion the following year put it into the US top 10, its success promptly chased by Cover Of The Rolling Stone, on which the band expressed a desire to feature on the prominent magazine (a wish it was subsequently granted).
Sawyer recalls those heady days of extensive tours involved plenty of laughs and no small measure of hard work.
"All musicians dream of that and we were lucky."
However, having grown both weary and wary of the music business, Sawyer left the band in 1983 and the group officially disbanded two years later.
"I had always said if it ever becomes like a real job, is not fun, then I want out. That's what happened," Sawyer recalls.
"In the beginning we played our own tracks but as it went along we starting getting some studio musicians, then some more studio musicians... Finally, by the end, when I called it quits, we came in off the road and perhaps six tracks had been recorded for us by the studio musicians and all we had to do was put vocals on. I said, 'no - this is the last time'."
It wasn't easy turning his back on a heady lifestyle, albeit one that involved constant travel and more than a few relocations (from New Jersey to California to Nashville then Florida, were he has lived for more than 20 years).
"You kind of lose yourself in those six guys, you know? I didn't really know who I was any more, so I had to recapture that. It took a bit to do that.
"I was writing a bit and just hanging. Then I thought I'd put another band together and go out and have some fun," he says in reference to the formation in 1988 of a new Dr Hook line-up, in which his son Cayce plays drums.
Although his Dr Hook vehicle might still take him places, Sawyer finds himself firmly rooted in America's South. Late last year he released his first bona fide solo album, Captain, on which he returned to his first loves: rhythm and blues and a little bit of soul.
"I've already got another one planned. A lot of it is in my head," Sawyer enthuses.
"I feel really good, man. I'm not old and decrepit. We were just over in Ireland doing a tour. When we get back from New Zealand we'll do a tour in Canada then a few shows in the States, then go back to Scandinavia.
"I'm also doing my biography. That is in the early stages... it's gonna be good. I'm going put down the truth."
In the meantime, he has a shuttle to catch.
See them, hear them
• Dr Hook, featuring Ray Sawyer, performs at the Gibbston Valley Winery Summer Concert today.
• Also on the bill is Creedence Clearwater Revisited. Launched in 1995 by original Creedence Clearwater Revival band members Stu Cook and Doug "Cosmo" Clifford, it will perform hits such as Bad Moon Rising and Have You Ever Seen the Rain?.
