Just about every children’s author wrote their books as an adult. That means the author had a full life of experience, which may include addictions, sex, marriage, divorce, lots of bad decisions, and (most likely) parenthood. But it sure is hard to separate the myth from the figure. Nowhere is the line blurrier than Shel Silverstein.

Silverstein, who died in 1999, published three of the definitive poetry books for children of the last century with Where the Sidewalk Ends, A Light in the Attic, and Falling Up. He wrote about 20 other books over the course of his career, with target audiences of all ages (The Giving Tree is arguably the most famous of them all, but Sidewalk won him a Grammy award in 1984). And while this is the thing he’s most famous for at this stage, it’s relatively common knowledge that he wrote the mega-famous Johnny Cash song “A Boy Named Sue.” You might even know that Silverstein wrote plenty of other songs over his career, but you most likely are not familiar with the raunchiest of them all.

That distinction likely belongs to the Album Sloppy Seconds by the band Dr. Hook & the Medicine Show, an album which Silverstein wrote in its entirety.

It is… borderline upsetting.

Dr. Hook & the Medicine Show was an American rock band, which managed a handful of top-10 hits in the 1970s, though they seem to have fallen down the memory hole a bit. Their first big hit was a song called “Syliva’s Mother” off their debut album, which reached #5 in the U.S. and #1 in four countries (Australia, Ireland, New Zealand, and South Africa – it also reached #2 in the U.K. and Canada), which led quickly to a second album, penned by Shel Silverstein. Sloppy Seconds’ hit single was “The Cover of Rolling Stone,” but the rest of the album had some absolutely bonkers songs, a couple of which I will dig into here.

Bear in mind that these lyrics were all written by one of the handful of greatest/most renowned children’s authors of the 20th century.

The Raunchy Songs of the Sloppy Seconds Album, Written by Shel Silverstein

The album kicks off with a song called “Freakin’ at the Freaker’s Ball,” and let me tell you something, this album does not ease into things. “Freakin’” – the opening track – features references to weed, whips, masochism, homosexuality (in some colorful language), junkies, incest, body butter, and – you guessed it – necrophilia.

And not a single crossover joke about a giving tree.

They’re not all grotesque tracks, but there are definitely a few of them. Sadly, they don’t all reference “white ones, black ones, yellow ones, red ones – necrophiliacs looking for dead ones,” but the gems are out there.

Right when you think you might have leveled out, the fifth track is called “Get My Rocks Off.” The opening verse is:

Some men need killer weed, some men need cocaine
Some men need some cactus juice to purify the brain
Some men need two women, some need alcohol
Everybody needs a little something, but lord I need it all…
To get my rocks off

It’s really in the exact same vein as his classic “I’m being eaten by a boa constrictor” poem or “ickle me, pickle me, tickle me too.” You could see this sliding in comfortably on the 30th page of Where the Sidewalk Ends, couldn’t you?

To be fair, people contain multitudes. Everyone is a person. The flip side would be to consider someone whose job is to make adult films but they have a charity for kids or a family of their own and spend a lot of time helping out altruistic causes; goodness knows people like this definitely exist. Having conflicting interests and skills is what makes people compelling. Shel Silverstein, if nothing else, was compelling.

At any rate, Silverstein’s music is not all drugs and sex, as there are plenty of thoughtful, somber ballads mixed in as well. He even teamed up with a country music group that featured Waylon Jennings in the late 90s.

But once you’ve seen the track listing for Sloppy Seconds it’s hard to forget that the bonus track is called “Lookin’ for Pussy.”

The post Let’s Take a Look at Shel Silverstein’s Raunchy Songwriting appeared first on America Is Weird.