Ev'ry morning I want you to wake up early,
cook me a great big T-bone steak
Serve it to me in bed, go out on the street and hustle,
Bring me back all money you make
Rub my body with sweet-scented oil
Cool me with a[n] electric fan
And then run to the church, get down on your knees
Say, "Lord, I wanna thank you for that man."
And I call that Truuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuue Love ...

There were three more verses, each more outrageous and less politically correct than the last, and when he'd finished, I was on the floor. "I can't sing that," I said. "I'll get killed!"

Books by Shel Silverstein

"Uh-uh," he said pointing over at Frazier, our model-handsome bartender. "If he sang it, he'd get killed. You look like a math teacher. You sing it and people are gonna laugh." His comedic instincts were infallible. I've been milking that tune for 30 years.

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Shel Silverstein is best known for his award-winning children's books, which is ironic, given his lack of patience for children themselves. (His gift was that he never lost touch with what it felt like to be one.) But most of his financial success, I believe, came through songwriting. Everyone knows his tunes even though they may not be aware that he was the tunesmith. One of Nashville's premier songwriters in the '60s and '70s, he got his start in New York's Greenwich Village folk music scene. His country and pop million-sellers include Johnny Cash's "A Boy Named Sue," the Irish Rovers' "The Unicorn" and Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show's "Cover of Rolling Stone" and "Sylvia's Mother."

In the summer of 1972, you couldn't flip on the radio without hearing the plaintive voice of Dr. Hook's Dennis Locorriere begging Sylvia's mother for the chance to say one last goodbye to her daughter before she went off to marry some other guy. Presumably one with a real job. The names had been changed a little to protect the guilty, but the hit song was actually a thinly veiled bit of Shel's autobiography: Shel never had much use for a real job. He was an artist, a poet, a cartoonist and a humorist. He lived on his talent, wit and charm, and he was over-supplied in all.

I first became aware of him in the mid-1950s, long before I met him, while surreptitiously thumbing through my uncle's Playboys. Shel was Hugh Hefner's best friend, and he was part of the original brain trust that turned Playboy into a cultural phenomenon. His cartoons, rhymes and satirical travelogues were easily the second best part of the magazine. So in 1969, when he started coming by this little Sausalito, Calif., bar to catch my band, I was knocked out and flattered. It didn't matter to me if it was because he'd had his eye on the pretty brunet who played bass for us. This was a guy who was famous for knowing where the hip scenes and cool people were, and here he was spending Sunday afternoons with us.

He and the bassist didn't last long, but I got a friend out of the deal. After gigs I'd run into him at Pat & Joe's, the only all-night restaurant in the area, and pick his brain for tips on living cool. First and foremost, I had to know why women followed him around in packs. Shel was not handsome. He had a shaved head, a hooked nose and a scraggly beard, and he never dressed up. Even in the artistic circles of the '60s, when sex was just an emphatic way of saying hello, he had vastly better luck than the rest of us. Maybe it was his eyes; they would twinkle and pierce simultaneously, giving you the impression that he knew something you didn't. For whatever reasons, women hit on him constantly. And hard. Tall ones, short ones, redheads, brunets, that unforgettable set of leggy blond twins from Denmark. They just kept coming. He made no promises or apologies. Yet, they'd all speak warmly of him afterward. He even had a framed needlepoint on his wall that read, "Shel Silverstein made me make this for him." It was signed by a Playmate of the Year.

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