I dont know whether life was easy for the boy named Shel, but he had this triple-threat set of talents that were used to address different audiences, and they were generally kept quite separate from each other, which could seem a little schizzy. Happy results of two of his sides are brought together on this disc the acerbic, sometimes loony, hip songs he wrote for both country music and rock n roll, huge hits among them, and the often quite sweet fantasy confections he worked up as best-selling kids stories, and then recorded himself.
You might wonder the track line-up that fans of his own record I Got Stoned And I Missed It would necessarily want to hear bits from Where The Sidewalk Ends and A Light In The Attic, which at their most Christopher Robin poesy-like might tend to make lovers of the purely dark and over-adult want to, in Mrs. Parkers famous words, fwo up.
But no! This works! The whimsy of the Irish Rovers hit The Unicorn is suddenly tied to his kids story about dragons and zebras. (The man liked interesting animals.) Bored kids ruminations on what life could be if they were grown up and in a rock n roll band segue to Dr. Hooks Cover Of The Rolling Stone and the continuation of rock fantasies from kidhood to charthood is seamless. The creepy Halloween tales of Light In The Attic give way to Bobby Bares hit version of Shels ballad about the New Orleans witch queen Marie Laveau.
Silverstein was also a charter member of the edgy, triumphant semi-outsider school of country songwriters that included Tom T. Hall, Kris Kristofferson and Roger Miller and from that experience we get Kriss The Taker here which sounds like he could have written it himself, but Shel helped Waylon and Willies A Couple More Years, Dr. Hooks version of Shels Queen Of The Silver Dollar, and, naturally Mr. Cashs A Boy Named Sue.
Yep; this CD is a great introduction to a special mans work. Maybe Columbia should have just taken it all the way and made it one of those DualDiscs, so they could add on Shels third career and talent too all of those ribald adult cartoons he did for Playboy. Apparently, the commercial and corporate mind boggled before the notion of that sort of combo. Shels never did.
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