ON THE COVER OF THE ROLLING STONE

Back when I was in Jr. High, I used to hang out with this girl. Her name was Sadie. Sadie was pretty cool, at least I thought so because she was always nice to me and growing up in rural Carnegie Oklahoma, if you didn’t play basketball and you weren’t Kiowa, you weren’t exactly popular. I didn’t play basketball and I am Comanche. Sadie was a really good basketball player.

I don’t know why she hung out with me. I certainly had nothing to bring to the table of friendship.

There was this one afternoon when Sadie and I were hanging out at her house. There weren’t any adults around, (so goes the story of Carnegie), and Sadie asked me if I wanted to smoke some weed. I obliged and we smoked a joint together. Afterward, we were being silly and giggly, jumping on Sadie’s bed, then she randomly asks me...

SADIE: Have you ever heard of Dr. Hook?
ME: Dr. Hook? You mean like…Captain Hook? Peter Pan?
SADIE: (Laughing) No, no, no.

Then Sadie leans over the bed and pulls out this stack of vinyl records and shows me an album by Dr. Hook. It looked pretty weird and backwoods to me.

SADIE: Dr. Hook is the best band of all time!

I smiled, and took her word for it, but that wasn’t enough for Sadie. She conjured up a record player from underneath the mounds of clothes piled all over her floor and put on one of the records. I continued to smile because I didn’t want to lose her friendship.

Now here I am years later, and I got a song stuck in my head the other day and I had to look it up. Turns out, it’s a song by Dr. Hook. I guess sometimes, it takes a while for things to develop, particularly tastes in music.

Anyway, coming back to that memory made me realize that Sadie was way ahead of her time.