Sometimes you have to try and manifest your wishes by speaking them aloud, putting them out into the universe and hoping the universe responds. And sometimes the universe responds surprisingly quickly.

In 1968, after the breakup of their band Chocolate Papers (chef’s kiss for such a perfectly 60s name), Ray, George, and Billy packed their bags and moved from Alabama to New Jersey, hoping to find their musical fortune among the Yankees up north. The trio soon recruited a few more members and started a new band.

Displaying the quirky sense of humor the group would soon become known for, they named the fledgling endeavor Dr. Hook & The Medicine Show, making a pirate reference because singer Ray permanently sported an eyepatch after losing an eye in a car accident the previous year. Their audition for the president of CBS records involved dancing on his desk while percussion was played on an overturned wastepaper basket, and the combination of irreverence and audacity scored them a record deal.

Now, it so happened that Dr. Hook shared a manager with poet/songwriter Shel Silverstein, who had recently provided Johnny Cash with his biggest hit ever, “A Boy Named Sue.” Gen X kids (and anyone younger) know Silverstein almost exclusively through his weird and wonderful “children’s” poetry books, but prior to that fame he spent years as a freelance cartoonist for newspapers and magazines, and for two decades served as a travel writer for Playboy, in addition to releasing a dozen or so albums of his own songs, mostly during the 60s.

For their debut, Dr. Hook & The Medicine Show recorded an entire album of Silverstein’s songs, one of which, “Sylvia’s Mother,” became a surprise Top 5 hit. For their second album, the band figured “why mess with success?” and again used Silverstein as their exclusive songwriter. The first single from the album flopped, but the second, released in October of 1972, a comic song called “The Cover Of ‘Rolling Stone'” about a band that leads the “correct” rock & roll lifestyle but still can’t get on the cover, peaked in the Top 10.

It’s hard to remember now, but in the early to mid-70s, Rolling Stone magazine was the absolute cutting edge of cool, primarily when it came to music, but also movies, fashion, politics, and culture in general. If you were honored with appearing on the cover, then it meant you had impacted the nation, if not the world. (Or you were about to, with the coolness now bestowed upon you.) It was a consummation devoutly to be wished.

Dr. Hook & The Medicine Show probably didn’t ever expect to make the cover. They sang funny songs and most definitely did not qualify as cool. But after “The Cover Of ‘Rolling Stone'” proved to be a hit, the band’s manager called up Jann Wenner, the founder of the magazine, and exuberantly pointed out how much free publicity his boys had generated for the publication. In March of 1973, Wenner put them on the cover, one of the unlikelier artists ever to appear there. Thanks, universe!

So get all kinds of thrills… with Dr. Hook & The Medicine Show.

Once the hits started to dry up in the mid-70s, the group shortened their name to Dr. Hook and reinvented themselves as a soft rock band. And the hits resumed, even scoring a UK #1 in 1979 with “When You’re In Love With A Beautiful Woman”: