OBITUARY

SHEL SILVERSTEIN

One of the most original lyricists of 20th century, and certainly one of the wittiest, is Shel Silverstein. I tried to arrange an interview a couple of times, but without any success. Dennis Locorriere told me, “Shel loved talking, but he’d talk to you about anything but his songs.” I wrote his obituary for “The Independent” in May 1999 and it is reproduced here by permission. I was laughing as I wrote this obituary as snatches of his songs kept coming back to me: what a legacy to leave the world.

From The Independent, 24 May 1999

SHEL SILVERSTEIN

Shelby Silverstein, singer, songwriter and children’s author, b. 25th September 1932, Chicago: divorced, 1 son, 1 daughter, died 10th May 1999 Key West.

In his books, cartoons and songs, Shel Silverstein was known for his wry, humorous slants on life, and his own life was every bit as eccentric as the characters who peopled his work. Take the sorry tale of love not being returned in “Sylvia’s Mother”, an international hit for Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show in 1972. “Most of the time if you tell a true story, you beef it up to make it into a song,” says Ray Sawyer, the eyepatched singer from Dr. Hook, “but Shel had to bring them down. The guy that ran off with Sylvia in real life was a bullfighter from Mexico, and he couldn’t put that in the song.”

Shel Singleton was born in Chicago in 1932 and his talents as a cartoonist and satirist were first seen while serving in Korea in 1952 and contributing to the armed forces periodical, “Pacific Stars And Stripes”. Returning home, he established himself with “Playboy” and befriended the magazine’s owner, Hugh Hefner. Many of his songs reflect Playboy’s hedonist lifestyle and, as the record producer Chet Atkins remarked, “Ol’ Shel has probably got the worst voice of anyone alive, but he’s also got the run of the ‘Playboy’ mansion and I’m not knocking anybody with a deal like that.”

Shel Silverstein’s recorded “Inside Folk Music”, in 1962 and some of its songs are still performed: “The Unicorn”, “In The Hills Of Shiloh” and “The Wonderful Soup Stone”, which was based on an Irish legend. His first children’s book, “The Giving Tree”, was published in 1964 and has remained in print.

In 1969 he passed Johnny Cash a poem the day before his concert in San Quentin prison. Cash asked Carl Perkins to set it to music and the result was a million-selling saga of transvesities and barroom fights, “A Boy Named Sue”. Cash also sang his witty song about the condemned cell, “Twenty-Five Minutes To Go”, while Loretta Lynn topped the US country chart by telling of the restrictions of motherhood in “One’s On The Way” (1970). In 1970, he wrote several songs for the film, “Ned Kelly”, which cast, or rather miscast, Mick Jagger as the Australian outlaw.

Silverstein met Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show whilst working on a Dustin Hoffman film, “Who Is Harry Kellerman And Why Is He Saying These Terrible Things About Me?” (1971). The film was every bit as bad as its title but he realised that the outlandish hippies were the perfect mouthpiece for his material. Dennis Locorriere took the lead vocal on “Sylvia’s Mother”, which he performs to this day: “I imagine I’m 17 years old again and running out of coins in a phonebox and having my girlfriend’s mother telling me that she’s getting married to somebody else.”

Dr. Hook recorded 60 of Silverstein’s acutely observed vignettes of American life and the results equal the sketches which Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller wrote for the Coasters.. He parodied the group’s desire for success in “The Cover Of Rolling Stone” and “Everybody’s Makin’ It Big But Me”. Sample lyric:

“Elton John’s got two fine ladies, Dr. John’s got three,
And I’m still seeing those same old sleazos that I used to see.”

The group backed the bald-headed Silverstein on his outrageous solo album, “Freakin’ At The Freakers Ball” (1972), and the titles match the contents: “Polly In A Porny”, “I Got Stoned And I Missed It” and “Don’t Give A Dose To The One You Love Most”. “We turned that one down,” says Dennis, “We had enough problems with people thinking us a bunch of degenerates. We didn’t want them thinking we’d got VD as well.” The singer, Bobby Bare, once sang me a filthy, totally rewritten version of the country hit, “The Wild Side Of Life”. “Shel wrote that”, he remarked, “The wild side of life in the original was never wild enough for him.”

Shel Silverstein gave Dr.Hook a poignant song about the pressures of modern life, “The Ballad Of Lucy Jordon”, which was also recorded very successfully by Marianne Faithfull. Dennis Locorriere comments, “’The Ballad Of Lucy Jordon’ has a magical ending that never fails to excite me. His songs unfold as you sing them and he has made me so much more of a singer.”

Silverstein wrote of an older man’s love for his girlfriend in “A Couple More Years”, which has been sung by Willie Nelson and Bob Dylan, and of the difficulties of satisfying a partner in “More Like The Movies”, another hit for Dr. Hook (1978). He became a millionaire, but never owned a car and looked for bargains in flea markets. When he found an album by Bobby Gosh, he offered one of the songs to Dr. Hook, namely “A Little Bit More”, with the comment, “This is a great song even though no-one’s ever heard it.”

Taking up a challenge, he wrote an album, “Lullabys, Legends And Lies”, for the country singer, Bobby Bare in four days in 1973. The classic LP included a country hit about the witch queen of New Orleans, “Marie Laveau”, how you lose even when you’re “The Winner” and an eight-minute picture of grotesque characters in a late-night diner, “Rosalie’s Good Eats Café”. The album was immensely successful so Silverstein wrote two more albums for Bare in quick succession: an album of children’s songs, “Singin’ In The Kitchen” (1974) and “songs for the New Depression”, “Hard Time Hungrys” (1975). A child comments on her father’s unemployment in “Daddy’s Been Around The House Too Long” and times are so hard that even God is in “The Unemployment Line”.

Many other classic songs stem from the 1970s including Emmylou Harris’ portrayal of a barroom prostitute, “The Queen Of The Silver Dollar”, Tompall Glaser’s response to Women’s Lib, “Put Another Log On The Fire”, and Burl Ives’ touching look at old age, “Time”. He commented on the hypocrisy behind Nashville’s tributes to the bluegrass musician, Lester Flatt, in Bobby Bare’s “Rough On The Living”. (“They didn’t want him around when he’s living, But he’s sure a good friend when he’s dead.”)

A restless man, he tired of writing songs and returned to children’s books and cartoons. His books include “Where The Sidewalk Ends” (1974), “The Missing Piece” (1976), “A Light In The Attic” (1981) and his poems share the same anarchic views as Spike Milligan. “Oh, if you’re a bird, be an early bird, And catch the worm for your breakfast plate, If you’re a bird, be an early early bird, But if you’re a worm, sleep late.”

Many song lyrics appeared as illustrated poems in “Playboy” and were often much longer than the recorded versions. His epic poem about a bad songwriter making Faustian deals, “The Devil And Billy Markham” (1978), became an off-Broadway musical.

Shel Silverstein’s heart disease made him view death as a subject for popular songs. The remarkable result, the album, “Old Dogs” (1998), performed by Waylon Jennings, Bobby Bare, Mel Tillis and Jerry Reed, happens to be the funniest album for several years. Still writing exceptional lyrics, he wrote his own epitaph: “You’d better have some fun before you say bye-bye, ‘Cause you’re still gonna, still gonna, still gonna die.”

Spencer Leigh