Hook as anything other than what they were: a down-and-dirty Jersey bar band whose tunes more often than not crossed the line into novelty rock, an outlet for the pop-lyrical efforts of countercultural humorist and children's author Shel Silverstein, and, later, a banal disco band specializing in workmanlike ballads such as "When You're in Love with a Beautiful Woman." ![]() Furthermore, I promise to make no attempt to paint Dr. Hook, which is possibly the most unpretentious rock music ever recorded. A strained case could be made I guess, but to make such a case would involve a kind of pretense that is the direct antithesis to the music of Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show anywhere remotely near its creative center. I want to explain why to you but, before writing another word, I'd like to promise you something: At no point will I make any kind of postmodern bid to revise the 1970s rock canon to place Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show: Live, and that none has so consistently reminded me what playing music onstage should, at its very highest point, feel like. What I am saying, though, is that none of these films has provided me with the same feeling of entertainment verging on sheer life-affirming joy as has Dr. I'm not saying this little live DVD by a largely forgotten band is better than the abovementioned films by the likes of Scorsese, Godard, Pennebaker, and Bogdanovich. Hook and the Medicine Show doing a live-for-German-TV performance sometime in 1974. To varying degrees, I enjoyed all these films, but if you asked me to tell you my very-favorite-ever cinematic document of a rock and roll band, I would have to break down and admit that it's a 10-dollar import DVD of Dr. I have seen David Bowie's cocaine skeleton doing Burroughsian cut-ups on the floor of a luxury hotel in the difficult-to-find TV special Cracked Actor. slowly drinks himself nearly to death in a darkened swimming pool enclosure and Ozzy pours the orange juice all over the counter. I have seen the movie where Chris Holmes from W.A.S.P. I have seen that double-DVD Tom Petty documentary. (It was only okay.) I have seen The Great Rock and Roll Swindle as well as The Filth and the Fury, Julien Temple's two different documentaries about the Sex Pistols. I have seen the Maysles Brothers' documentary about the Rolling Stones, as well as Jean-Luc Godard's semi-documentary about the Rolling Stones and Robert Frank's notoriously unreleased documentary about the Rolling Stones, which legend has it you're only legally allowed to watch in the presence of both Jagger and Richards. I have seen Don't Look Back, Eat the Document, and No Direction Home. But I don’t think a lot people get an experience like that."ĭr Hook's Gold album is released on November 20.I have seen Woodstock and I have seen The Last Waltz. "And then we kept in touch a little bit, but drifted apart. And she was lovely, she was great, and it was lovely for me because she called Shel, who wrote the song, Shel Silverstein, she called him Shelly! "This is a legend to me that I’ve been singing about for years. I thought, 'Really? Do I want to have lunch with Bigfoot?' You know what I mean? ![]() He continued: "And I got an invitation through someone else to meet Sylvia because she was coming over to London for something, for work. ![]() "And now I’m looking at her on this film that they’d gone and made, and she’s in her 90s, and she’s still disputing the song, and she’s still going, 'Well, I don’t think I was that rude!'." And as it turns out, someone in their crew knew someone in America who knew Sylvia’s mother. And what I didn’t know was before they played the song, they showed this little film. "So I went and I did the show and it was live. And ‘Sylvia’s Mother’ was in there somewhere, so they asked me if I would come to Holland, do the show, and that they had a surprise for me. "After the song had been a hit for years, there was a Dutch television programme that was doing one of those year-end wrap-ups, ‘The 100 Greatest Singles of All Time’, or whatever. Speaking about the famous song, Dennis revealed how it felt to meet the real people he had been singing about for decades. Silverstein wrote the song about an unsuccessful attempt to revive a failed relationship with Sylvia Pandolfi, who would later become engaged to another man.ĭesperate to continue the relationship, Silverstein called Pandolfi's mother, Louisa, but she told him that their romance had come to an end. Hook & The Medicine Show ~ "Sylvia's Mother"
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |