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Shel Silverstein was a humorist, a poet, a cartoonist, and a musician who had a strong, if not especially obvious, influence on pop music through the late 1960s, up into the 1980s. Most people know him for his poetry books largely aimed at a children’s audience, but he also provided cartoons for Playboy Magazine, usually inserting a caricature of himself into the image:
And he’s also responsible for the dark, subversively comic Uncle Shelby’s ABZ Book, an alphabet book you do NOT want your kids to read (but you should, because it’s hilarious):
But Silverstein was a songwriter who had an especially strong relationship with Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show, and that led to a couple of their bigger hits, including a song that was essentially a parody of the rock star life, but it led to the sort of fame that only he could imagine:
You know the drill by now–Either you have the episode, or you’re looking to get it here:
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You will cover “Sarah Sylvia Cynthia Stout Who Wouldn’t Take the Garbage Out”? That one I do have a copy. I used to run it on my radio show.
Either that or “Stacy Brown’s Got Two”. But my intent is to move away from the goofier stuff for Part II in a few weeks.