Shel Silverstein was a true triple threat. Though most remembered today for his children’s books, he was also a Playboy cartoonist and a songwriter.
Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show was a North Jersey bar band hired to perform Silverstein’s music for a 1971 Dustin Hoffman movie about a pop songwriter, “Who Is Harry Kellerman and Why Is He Saying These Terrible Things About Me?” That earned them a recording contract, and they stuck with Silverstein — he wrote all but one of the songs on their first two LPs, “Doctor Hook” and “Sloppy Seconds.”
As the title of their second album indicates, the band had a raunchy stage act, and Silverstein’s tunes like “Freakin’ at the Freaker’s Ball” and “If I’d Only Come and Gone” fit right in. Understandably, then, fans thought their first Billboard hit (No. 5 in 1972) was being played for laughs. During live shows they would throw change when lead singer Dennis Locorriere reached the refrain, “And the operator said 40 cents more for the next three minutes.”
But the song’s story was no joke — it was taken straight from Silverstein’s life. He didn’t even change the woman’s first name, though he did change her surname from Pandolfi to Avery.
“I just changed the last name, not to protect the innocent, but because it didn’t fit. It happened [in the mid-’60s] and was pretty much the way it was in the song. I called Sylvia and her mother said, “She can’t talk to you.” I said, “Why not?” Her mother said she was packing and she was leaving to get married, which was a big surprise to me.
The guy was in Mexico and he was a bullfighter and a painter. At the time I thought that was like being a combination brain surgeon and encyclopedia salesman. Her mother finally let me talk to her, but her last words were, “Shel, don’t spoil it.” For about ten seconds I had this ego charge, as if I could have spoiled it. I couldn’t have spoiled it with a sledgehammer.
Somebody tracked down both Sylvia and her mother a few years back. Sylvia had retired from a longtime post as a museum curator in Mexico City. Her mother, by then in her ’90s, still lived in the Homewood, Ill., where she answered Silverstein’s phone call.
This version, filmed on Silverstein’s houseboat in 1972, strips away the melodramatic production of the single, and Locorriere doesn’t ham up the vocal as much. It also features Silverstein himself on harmonica.
