Along about eighth-grade graduation, had I been asked to list my top 50 songs, four of them would have been: 'Master Jack,' 'Dead Skunk,' 'Cover of the Rolling Stone,' and 'Sylvia's Mother.' The first two of those haved resided in my CD collection for a couple of years. I bought a best-of Dr. Hook & the Medicine Show at Wal-Mart yesterday. That provided the other two on my list.
'Cover of the Rolling Stone' brought the same goofy grin to my face that it did all those years ago. There is a downright ugly guitar solo, followed by the voice of Wolfman Jack saying, "Man, that was beautiful."
The band had a wide range, because 'Sylvia' is a deeply moving song with some lovely vocal glissandos (my term, and I'm sticking with it). The lyric is present tense, in the form of a phone call. The singer is pleading to the mother of his ex-girlfriend to put the girl on the phone before she drives off to marry another man. "And the operator says forty cents more for the next three minutes, ohhh-ohhh please Mrs. Avery, I've just got to talk to her..."
