Top Ten Shel Silverstein Songs: On the Cover of the Music City News (#10)

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JJ? CALM DOWN. We’ll get to them later in the countdown. Heck, you might not have known that this cover of a Dr. Hook song existed!! For the rest of you, HI! Welcome to the start of a look at the late, great Shel Silverstein. He wore many hats in his life. One of the things he did (which is far more in line with his personality than the children’s books) was draw cartoons for Playboy magazine. Yeah, that and The Giving Tree go well together. He also wrote songs, and I’ve picked ten of them. Let’s start with one you may know….sorta. #10: On the Cover of the Music City News - Buck Owens Shel Silverstein and Dr. Hook & the Medicine Show were sort of inseparable. Sometimes I think they covered Sam Cooke’s “Only Sixteen” in 1975 to prove they could do a song by someone other than Silverstein. One of their big hits was the tongue-in-cheek ode to rock stardom, “The Cover of the Rolling Stone.” All the stereotypes were there: the cocaine-fueled groupie, the riches, the adulation, and everything…. but something’s missing. They want to be on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine. (Side note: they DID make the cover after this song came out.) Now, Silverstein had more than a few people in country music doing his songs. Buck Owens thought that this song needed a little cleaning up for a country audience (no country singer would ever have “a freaky old lady named Cocaine Katie,” right? ). And, it just so happened, that country music had its own “definitive” magazine: Music City News. Faron Young started the paper because there weren’t any country-specific magazines back then. So here comes Buck (and son Buddy Alan) and the Buckaroos to do the country rendition of wanting the “holy grail” of superstardom: being on the cover of a magazine. Either way you go, rock or country, this is a pretty funny song. On the Cover of the Music City News Written by Shel Silverstein, Buck Owens, and Jim Shaw Recorded by Buck Owens From It’s a Monsters’ Holiday, 1974 (Original version “Cover of the Rolling Stone” by Dr. Hook & the Medicine Show, 1972) A closet full of Nudie suits: