A Conversation With Clay Eals, Author of ‘Steve Goodman: Facing the Music’
By Steven Brodsky
Note to readers: Steve Goodman: Facing the Music is now available in an updated 6th printing.
Clay Eals’ book Steve Goodman: Facing The Music, in an updated fourth printing, was released earlier this year by ECW Press. This impressive and massive work, 800 pages, originally published in 2007, is nothing short of awesome – drawing upon interviews with more than 1,100 sources. Among those are John Prine, Arlo Guthrie, Jimmy Buffett, Kris Kristofferson, Willie Nelson, Steve Martin, Bonnie Raitt, Jackson Browne, Emmylou Harris, Randy Newman, Judy Collins, Studs Terkel, Carly Simon, Rosanne Cash, Doc Watson, Paul Anka, Loudon Wainwright III, Pete Seeger, and Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Clay interviewed Hillary Clinton about her memories of Steve Goodman. She and Steve knew each other in high school. Steve, Hillary Clinton said, “was someone you wanted to know.” People still do; readers of Steve Goodman: Facing The Music get to know about his indomitable spirit, life and creative/performance output. Read this biography and you’ll likely be very glad to have gotten to know Steve Goodman, who passed away in 1984. Most of you know his song “City of New Orleans,” with its chorus of “Good Morning, America, how are ya?”
When and why did you first consider writing this book?
The seeds were sewn when Steve died. He underwent a last-ditch bone-marrow transplant and died at University of Washington Medical Center in September 1984. I was editor of the West Seattle Herald at the time, and I wrote a tribute/obituary on him for our chain’s entertainment section. Later, in 1995-96, a deeply satisfying project – a biography I wrote and self-published on Karolyn Grimes (Zuzu in “It’s a Wonderful Life”) – let me cut my teeth on that genre.
I just felt that Goodman deserved a book, that it was a crying need. Why write the 50th book on Elvis? Publishers generally don’t want us to know anything about anyone we don’t already know about, because they think it won’t sell. Fortunately, after I received 75 rejection letters from other publishers, ECW Press bucked the trend and not only took a chance on Goodman but also gave all of us the definitive book that he merited.
I also somehow came to understand – through themes specific to Steve but also with universal appeal – that I had to do this book before I myself died. So now I feel fortunate to have accomplished a mission singular to me.
How familiar were you with Goodman’s “story” at that time?
I had all of Steve’s albums, I had seen him in concert twice (in 1977 when he opened for Randy Newman and in a 1981 solo show, both times in Eugene, Oregon) and had sent tapes of his songs while courting my wife. Must have worked. We just celebrated 35 years of marriage.
Beyond Steve’s recorded music and the two shows, my knowledge of his personal life was cursory. I did, however, perceive that an account of his life would shed valuable light on a musical underdog who, in spite of his peerless skills as an entertainer and visceral appeal to millions of fans, never became a household name.
Did you envision that your research would be nearly as exhaustive as it turned out to be?
Not at first. The project just grew naturally, fueled by the sentiments of those I interviewed who kept referring me to others, and I chased down all the leads I was given. There is irony in my having created an 800-page book about a man who lived just 36 years, but Steve was gregarious to a fault and had a galvanizing effect on everyone he encountered. It was tremendously gratifying that nearly all of those I could locate were eager to talk about him.
I also was driven by journalistic curiosity and motivated by the quest of putting together a book about someone who was not already the subject of a book. It was plowing new ground. It became clear to me early on that this likely would become the only biography of Steve. It was a one-shot deal, so I wanted to do it right, which, to me, meant a comprehensive approach.
Did writing Steve Goodman: Facing the Music emotionally affect you differently than what you’ve experienced in other writing projects?
Well, sure. My wife at times said she didn’t know if the book constituted a mission or an obsession.
Certainly this project is more massive than any other I have undertaken. The fact that I could not talk with my biographical subject meant that I had to piece together the story from other sources, which included more than 1,000 clippings, some 250 concert tapes, more than 1,100 fresh interviews, in person, on the phone and even via e-mail, and the research help of another 1,110 people – and all of these folks are listed in the acknowledgments.
The project ended up taking eight years, and with each step toward completion I realized anew that I was living the life lesson of Steve himself – that we are not meant to be hermits, that whatever you believe about how or why we got here, we are meant to connect with, engage and inspire others.
We all know the cliché that a product is no good without a good process. Well, in the process of creating this book, I was fortunate to make many wonderful new friends, even some who died before the book was published. I cherish memories of the times I spent with people on this project – including 65 post-publication reading/music events – in all corners of the country and everywhere in between. The kindness that I experienced from countless people associated with the project brings tears to my eyes to this day. In fact, I likely have plentiful grist for an affecting “making of” book.
Very fine writing supported by meticulous research fill the pages of the book. (It’s as large as a major city’s phone directory.) What were some of the major challenges you faced in completing it?
Thanks for the compliments. On the surface, the biggest challenge was access to Steve’s family. From the beginning, I had the participation of Steve’s oldest daughter, Jessie (who died in 2012), as well as a dozen other more distant family members. But for six years Steve’s manager, Al Bunetta, would not agree to an interview, and several key family members — Steve’s mom, Minnette (who died in 2012); Steve’s widow, Nancy (now remarried for 25-plus years); Steve’s brother, David; and Steve’s younger daughters, Sarah and Rosanna — never did allow themselves to be interviewed. I don’t know their reasons (perhaps I was seen as an outsider, and perhaps some of their memories were too painful), but I respected their decisions.
Why did Bunetta (who died in 2015) relent? A growing chorus of musical sources — unbidden by me — kept calling Al and asking him to participate, and those voices probably had an effect. But Al was between a rock and a hard place, wanting to aid a serious biography of Steve but also wanting to respect Nancy’s wishes. Al finally agreed to talk, and I interviewed him for eight hours over three days in 2005 in Nashville. As he told me, “I figured the book wouldn’t be any better without me.”
It’s important to note that while I was not able to interview Minnette, Nancy, David, Sarah or Rosanna, they are far from absent from the book. They are captured in many comments and stories from others, as well as in material quoted from other printed sources. Some of the most revealing and touching anecdotes and insights directly involve these people, and I couldn’t have done justice to Steve’s life without them.
Another challenge, perhaps equally daunting, was to bring the project to a close, which included the transcription of endless cassette tapes, harnessing a mountain of material into a dynamic narrative, caring for my mother in her final, post-stroke years and maintaining our finances and household equilibrium after having quit my day job to finish the book. Suffice to say, I am lucky that I am still married.
What drove you to complete the book?
Probably journalistic ethics and practice, instilled in me at the University of Oregon School of Journalism and via 15 years of work as an editor, reporter and photographer for four newspapers. Dan Rather said it well in his memoir The Camera Never Blinks: a story’s no good unless you get it out. When you start a project and engage so many people, your credibility is on the line.
Plus, somehow, in my mind’s eye, I could see the completed book – not exactly how it would look, but rather the mere fact of the book and the impact it could have on people. This stemmed from a belief in the worthiness of the subject and an instinct that while it may sound trite, Goodman people are everywhere.
To develop that belief and instinct, another cliché kicked in: “You had to be there.” The best Goodman was always live Goodman, and I was fortunate to experience him twice. All it took was once. He ruined me for other musicians. No other musical performer could so completely capture an audience with songs that were by turns romantic, funny, socially conscious or all three combined – both his own songs and the countless others in his encyclopedic repertoire. It may sound odd, but I almost felt I owed it to Steve to finish the book.
You know what is really odd? After the second time I saw Steve in concert, the woman who accompanied me swears that we went downstairs to the dressing room and met Steve. But I don’t remember that. What I recall was his stage show.
If you had it to do all over again, how might the writing process be different?
That’s a potentially interesting question given the project’s mammoth dimensions. But the truth is that, sure, while I no doubt made some mistakes along the way, I have no regrets. It wouldn’t trade any of it for anything. It was a profound learning experience for me.
The biggest lesson of all lay in the title of Steve’s final song on his final LP before he died: “You Better Get It While You Can.” I am convinced that in the verb “get” he didn’t mean “acquire” but rather “understand” or “do.” As his lyric states, “If you wait too long, it’ll all be gone, and you’re be sorry then.” I didn’t wait. I did it (with a lot of help) while I could. What an energizing lesson. My primary emotion about it all is gratitude.
Steve Goodman was diagnosed with leukemia at age 20. At that time, treatment protocols and survivability were not as good as they are today. Receiving that kind of news then was enough to very much weigh down most people. For the most part, it didn’t affect Steve that way. How did he respond during the more than 15 years he survived post-diagnosis?
Throughout my interviewing and other research, I found evidence in Steve for all of what we know from author Elizabeth Kübler-Ross as the typical stages of grief – not in any orderly sense, but in spurts that came and went just as did his leukemia. Most impressive to me was Steve’s ability to make others comfortable in his presence, largely with humor. For instance, he nicknamed himself “Cool Hand Leuk,” and in talking of his beloved Chicago Cubs, he once said that if the team made it to the World Series, it would be a “coronary event.”
Two years before he died, Steve’s leukemia became public, which forced upon him frequent entreaties to extemporize about his disease. One such example, among many quoted in my book, came in an NBC-TV interview about a year before he died: “There’s nothing like having to deal with a problem to get you out of yourself. You have to just be objective suddenly and take care of business – or roll over, and I don’t have that in my personality. … I guess there is some kind of rage underneath all these jokes, some internal boiling going on, but I tried to use that energy and that anger to deal with the situation.”
Steve was drawn to music from a young age. Tell us about this.
This clearly drew from his role as a grade-school-age soprano star at his temple, where he often sang solos for bar mitzvahs. The diversity of music on Chicago radio stations that reached his ears via the radio was another factor, as was the influence of friends who taught him guitar and goaded him, in testosterone-fueled competitiveness, to succeed. Certainly musical performance was a way for a tiny teen to excel in the eyes of his more normal-sized peers. All of this is detailed in the book.
What were Steve’s first experiences visiting blues clubs like? What did he learn from those visits?
He and a high-school friend, without their parents’ knowledge or consent, drove on frigid winter nights to the Chicago South Side blues clubs to soak up their down-to-earth music and atmosphere. Neither of the two had girlfriends, so this was their activity for a time. There is no question that Steve, like a sponge, picked up lyrics, technique and stagecraft from these clandestine visits.
Steve had a remarkable ability to remember music and lyrics. How did he put this to good use?
He had what one source called a phonographic memory, and at concerts and informal gatherings he became known for pulling obscure tunes from out of nowhere to dazzle his audiences. As Bonnie Raitt told me, he was “an irrepressible, impish jukebox of songs and energy. He literally could play anything.”
Did Steve ever learn to read music?
Not that I became aware of.
Do you know if he ever tried?
I don’t think so. He relied on his eyes and ears, rather than written music, to learn songs. Steve also constantly played records for others and implored them, “Listen to this! Listen to that!”
Does this strike you as odd, as music was an important part of his life from a young age?
Not really, given his intellect and, more important, the praise he received throughout his life for his phenomenal memory. Learning from sight and ear became a self-reinforcing method that worked for him.
How tall was Steve?
5-foot-2.
Was he self-conscious about his height?
Self-aware is more like it. He joked quite a bit about it. For instance, he said he would need to buy stilts to open for Randy Newman at a time when the headliner had his hit with “Short People.”
Onstage, Steve’s height didn’t matter because, as John McEuen said, “His eyes hit the back of the room.”
In the book, there is a vivid, edgy and profane anecdote about his height that sums up how he coped with his size – and life in general. But I will leave your readers to find it in the book itself (on page 554).
His parents were also short. Does your research indicate that they modeled self-confidence to Steve?
Steve’s mother modeled steely pride, and his dad modeled the gift of gab and not taking things too seriously. That’s a good combination for self-confidence.
Many people got to know of Steve’s father, Bud, as a result of hearing the moving and biographically accurate portrayal of the father-son relationship in the song “My Old Man.” Bruce Springsteen, your book reveals, met Steve in the lobby of a West Hollywood hotel. Springsteen, in response to Steve introducing himself said, “That song about your old man – great song!” Springsteen’s relationship with his own father enters into some songs and has been an issue that he’s addressed with audiences, interviewers, and written about in his memoir, Born to Run. “My Old Man” is powerful. It’s understandable why Springsteen took notice of it and acknowledged it as he had. Please tell us about this song and why an “imperfect” first take in the recording studio resulted in the decision that no more takes were necessary.
“My Old Man” is a perfect example of the core characteristic of Steve’s songwriting – specificity that becomes universal. In painting this detailed picture of the relationship he had with his father, Steve allowed anyone listening to the song to identify with it.
Ray Frank, a singer/guitarist who connected with Steve in his early performing years, put it well: “It’s a perfectly done story song, a portrait that with such concision points to so much about a person’s life and what that life meant to somebody else. The genius is that you feel that way about your old man, I feel that way about my old man, and everybody does. He was able to talk about the conflicts between them as well as appreciate him. What genius!”
Obviously, the song was intensely personal for Steve, and he recorded it so soon after he wrote it that in the studio, in the middle of the final verse, at the point where he was about to describe the first time he cried over his father’s death, he broke down and couldn’t continue singing. But he kept strumming softly, and six measures later he finished the song.
“That’s take one and take last,” he said later. “I just went in there and sang it, and somethin’ aired out there. … We’re human, that’s how it goes. That’s the way the eggs look sometimes. Sometimes they have little spots on them. I can’t help it. I can’t help thinkin’ that Venus had a couple of pimples, y’know. I’m not making any comparisons. I’m just sayin’ that anything that’s really good to me has something about it that’s just a little askance so that you can see the rest of it.”
How was Kris Kristofferson helpful to Steve?
Kris and Paul Anka – opposites in the entertainment limelight – simultaneously “discovered” Steve during a week in spring 1971 at the Quiet Knight club in Chicago. Later, Kris triggered Steve’s first LP recording sessions in Nashville, and Paul managed Steve for a time. In different ways, they were equally helpful to Steve. But most important was the fateful initial week, and in the book I have exploded those nights in 10 pages of description because it is arguably the key story of the book. The story illustrates Steve’s genuine generosity of spirit, and the beneficiary was his musical compatriot, John Prine.
Tell us about Steve’s altruism for his friend John Prine.
At the risk of oversimplification, I think it is fair to say that without Steve there would be no John Prine in the public consciousness, and John knows it. He told me that “with everything that he did, onstage, offstage, through a lot of different situations, he would work his butt off to do his best, and if he liked you, he would shine that light on you. He was not at all anywhere close to a selfish person, even unconsciously.”
How did John Prine assist Steve in the writing of “You Never Even Call Me By My Name”?
When Steve and Prine came to New York City after their fateful “discovery” by Kristofferson and Anka, Prine landed a record contract instantly, whereas for Steve it took more time. In that interim period, when they were staying at a swanky hotel on Anka’s dime, Steve began writing a mournful song, possibly about his neglect and possibly about his leukemia. His lyrics began, “It was all that I could do to keep from crying. Sometimes it seems so useless to remain.” Prine, returning to the hotel room from a jaunt to Greenwich Village, was feeling jovial. He told me that he decided not to put up with Steve’s mood and started teasing him. “I jumped up on the bed like I had an imaginary violin, like I was a weeper, and I was standin’ on the bed playin’ it, and I went, ‘You don’t have to call me darlin’, darlin’, but you never even call me by my name.’ And we both laughed and hooted and beat on the walls and thought it was the funniest thing.”
Prine disavowed his public connection to the song because he thought it unfairly poked fun at country music. Four years later, when David Allan Coe covered the song, turning it into a hit (while falsely claiming credit for triggering its triumphant final verse), Prine would not accept royalties, so Steve bought and delivered to Prine’s home a jukebox.
Describe the friendship of Steve and John Prine.
Deep friends. Friendly competitors. Mutual champions.
There is irony that Prine came to notice because of Steve and succeeded in all commercial measurements far beyond Steve. The irony deepens in the fact that Steve constantly promoted, performed and covered Prine’s songs, yet Prine rarely has performed or recorded Steve’s songs. When the two were often paired in concert, Steve was always the opener, Prine was always the headliner, and Steve always came onstage late in the show to help Prine play Prine songs and other songs but none of Steve’s songs. Steve even produced one of Prine’s most well-regarded albums. Since Steve’s death, Prine regularly has paid tribute to Steve in concert, but via his own “Souvenirs” rather than a song of Steve’s.
Prine chalked some of this up to his own performing limitations in the face of Steve’s stellar ability. He told me, “I’m not a very good harmony singer, and I’m not a guitar picker where I can just get up and pick on anybody’s song. Steve, though, was just the opposite. He could jump in the middle of any of my songs and sing the lead or the harmony or play the lead or background. If we could have figured a way for me to pick on Steve’s songs, we would have just done the whole thing as one show. But I wasn’t then and I’m not now that dexterous, and Steve always put a couple of really hard chords in his stuff. I didn’t write such simple melodies on purpose, like that’s all I knew, but Steve knew all the old standards like ‘Lady, Be Good’ and what I’d call nine-fingered chords, where you need nine fingers to hold ’em down. I didn’t know those things, so Steve would be the helper.”
Why was Arlo Guthrie an ideal person to cover and popularize Steve’s “City of New Orleans”?
As the son of the then-recently departed folk icon Woody Guthrie, Arlo was bearing a weighty mantle, so “City of New Orleans,” with its strains of tradition and mortality, was a perfect fit for him. Arlo told me that when he successfully covered the song, he went from being a fringe, hippie-like performer with limited appeal to a “train guy” who could play anywhere.
It also was a symbiotic match of songwriter and musician. Without Arlo’s hit version of “City,” there may have been no Steve in the mainstream consciousness. Similarly, without Steve, there may have been no Arlo in the mainstream consciousness.
Give us some background about Steve’s writing of this song.
The book is full of details about this. Suffice to say that the writing process wasn’t as simple as Steve made it out to be. He typically stated that “the muse” hit him during a 1970 trip on the train that he made with his new wife Nancy, from Chicago to Mattoon, to visit Nancy’s grandmother. He said he simply looked out the train windows and wrote down what he saw. He also said upon his return he wrote the song’s middle verse when prodded to describe what he saw inside the train.
This all happened, no doubt, but as the book documents, the true genesis of the song – indeed its anthemic chorus – sprang from a trip he made four years earlier, in 1967, all the way from Chicago to New Orleans, while bypassing and skipping classes at the University of Illinois at Champaign/Urbana.
The appeal of “City of New Orleans” lies in Steve’s journalistic songwriting approach, which, not incidentally, resonated with me, given my own journalistic work. As Steve put it to WGN-AM’s Roy Leonard in 1972, “Everything in the song happened. I wish I’d made it up, y’know, but I’m not good at makin’ up songs. I guess I’m not too good at fiction. I guess I can surround real events with some fiction every now and then to dress ’em up, but I don’t come up with fictional situations too often. I kind of have to see it first.”
“It’s just using your eyes, really,” he told L.A. Folkscene radio host Howard Larman the same year. “My big trouble is that I don’t use ’em well enough, because I usually filter what I see through my own set of experiences and stuff like that too much. It’s very hard for anybody around to take an objective view of anything – y’know, just describe it. Sometimes what you think is the best poetry in the world is just somebody using their eyes right and just tryin’ to describe what they saw rather than what they felt about what they saw. Then it makes the listener or the reader of the poetry do the work. … The good poets use the kinds of words that will help you paint the picture in your own head.”
Why does “City of New Orleans” resonate to people from all walks of life?
To answer this, I’ll cite quotes from three sources in the book. First, Hillary Clinton: “I really think ‘City of New Orleans’ is one of the great songs that came out of my generation. I love that song, and I think that his passion and narrative storytelling ability just struck a chord with so many people.”
Singer/songwriter Ellis Paul from Charlottesville, Virginia: “It’s a universal perspective, even though he is speaking from a train’s perspective. It’s a song about American manifest destiny and the glory of travel and the freedom of being a human being in a free society. It’s more than a train. It’s about America. He’s talking, really, about more than 300 million people, and he did it beautifully. You cannot listen to that song without feeling we’re lucky to be where we are.”
Darcie Sanders, co-founder of Amazingrace Cooperative in Evanston, Illinois: “It’s the best outsider anthem anyone has ever written for America. For people coming of age in the 1960s and 1970s, that’s how we all felt. We were the native sons and daughters, but maybe America didn’t know us or recognize us. … Who has not felt that their life is disappearing? It’s the questioning, the trying to get closer, and yet the train is speeding away, the sense of the lost moment. That’s how a whole generation felt about their relationship with America and themselves as Americans. … You can’t stop people from singing it. This goes beyond classic into something archetypal that hooks into people so deeply that they’re moved, and they join in. That’s an incredible test.”
One of the most well-received songs that Steve recorded and performed isn’t one that he wrote, just as it wasn’t for Arlo, with Arlo’s cover of “City of New Orleans.” Talking here about “The Dutchman,” written by Michael Peter Smith in 1968. Tell us about the song and Steve’s experience with it. What enabled him to interpret the song as effectively as he had?
That’s easy to answer. “The Dutchman” warmly and poignantly described the life and love of an elderly couple who were at least twice as old as Steve would ever become. This dichotomy became even more moving when Steve performed the song accompanied by ace mandolinist Jethro Burns, who was the age of Steve’s father.
Stories abound about “The Dutchman” in the book, including the startling tale of Steve’s performance of it at his father’s memorial service.
Steve brought audiences to a hush every time he performed “The Dutchman.” Occasionally, he bid audiences to sing along on its gentle chorus. You aptly draw the parallel between his cover of “The Dutchman” and its effect on Michael Smith and Arlo’s cover of “City of New Orleans” and its effect on Steve. Steve’s cover of “The Dutchman” made Smith’s career, and, reflecting an ultimate honor, Smith told me that Steve told him that “The Dutchman” is “the one that people talk about when they talk about me.”
We haven’t spoken of the sense of humor that Steve demonstrated on-stage and in song. What contributed to the development of his funnier side?
His dad’s used-car sales banter certainly was a model, but I think a greater factor was Steve’s disease and his gallows approach to it. To laugh at death is to disarm it and allow for a more joyful life. It’s one of Steve’s many life lessons.
Steve was the opening act for 200 shows with comedian Steve Martin. (Rolling Stone ranked Steve Martin at number 11 on its list of “50 Best Stand-up Comics of All Time.”) Why did this pairing work so well and what did those performances indicate about Steve Goodman’s abilities?
It boils down to Steve’s wit and personality that played well to stadiums full of Steve Martin fans and fanatics. I will let Steve Martin elaborate here. He told me, “The greatest thing about Steve was his nature. He was a happy, up guy. He didn’t assault the audience. They weren’t exhausted by the time I got onstage. It was a perfect match. … He was wry. It had to be a delicate kind of comedy to be compatible with me. It couldn’t be hit-’em over the head, because I was going to do that. He just was charming.”
The pairing of the two Steves was unique, of course, but it also revealed Goodman’s adaptability to most any circumstance. There was something about his keen awareness of life’s true value that gave him a universal appeal. Many seek such ability, but very few attain it.
The words that make up the title “Would You Like To Learn To Dance?” were first spoken to the woman who would later become Steve’s wife. Tell us about this.
It was September 1969, and Steve – then unknown beyond Chicago folk circles – was performing at the Earl of Old Town. Bustling between tables with a tray of drinks was a 5-foot-9-1/2-inch waitress. As she whirled around, Steve stepped off the stage, and — as he told folksinger Jim Post and others in later years — he “walked into her abundance.” Bartender Roger Surbaugh, who witnessed the collision, told me, “This could have been a terribly embarrassing moment for both of them, for everybody. But Steve just looked up at her with those big, brown eyes and a big smile on his face, just as innocent as a choirboy, and said, ‘Would you like to learn to dance?’ Everybody in the room just cracked up.” The waitress, of course, was his future wife, Nancy.
What are some of your favorite lighter songs of Steve’s?
“Video Tape,” certainly. “This Hotel Room,” no question. “You’re the Girl I Love,” absolutely. But all of them have a serious kick as well. That was the beauty of Steve’s songwriting. He could be serious and even socially conscious but also seamlessly weave in humor, and more often than not, the joke was on the Grim Reaper.
What is your favorite story song?
“A Dying Cub Fan’s Last Request” tells a story that appeals to not only baseball fans but anyone who has dealt with failure – that is to say, everyone. The song’s punch line is about having the ultimate last laugh. And like Steve’s best efforts, the song paints a movie you can see in your mind. He was a master at using concrete, sensory detail, at drilling down to specifics, to allow listeners access to his vision.
Steve was zealous to perform at his best. How did he master auctioneer patter on “The Auctioneer” (a song he covered but did not write), and how was this revealed?
As a 21-year-old in his Chicago rental apartment, he hunched over a turntable and played an LP at 16-rpm half-speed so he could absorb all the words to this novelty song. I learned this from a temporary roommate of Steve’s, Ron Rosoff, who described the scene as if it were yesterday. This is one of countless examples validating the approach of chasing down all the leads that I was given. To quote a Steve song title, you never know what you will find behind “Door Number Three.”
Why was Steve Goodman not more commercially successful?
I asked this of nearly every one of my interviewees. Answers ranged all over the map. One of the answers that made the most sense, because it addressed Steve’s masterful eclecticism, came from Emily Friedman, editor of the Chicago folk magazine Come for to Sing. She told me: “None of those in acoustic music were ever able to figure out how you go big-time. In my cynicism, I think it’s because the people in this milieu are too good, because if you’re very good, you’re eccentric, and if you’re eccentric, you’re not pabulum, and if you’re not pabulum, they can’t sell 20 million of your work. You have to be nondenominational, whereas Stevie was every kind of denomination.”
It is imperative to note that Steve did achieve success far beyond that of many of his peers. He still has millions of fans 33 years after his death, and his songs are racking up untold new devotees every day.
I’ll close this answer by quoting from my book’s introduction: While many of the celebrities I interviewed “feel that Steve deserved more fame than he received, they also grasp implicitly that fame is a misleading measure of greatness – and that, as Steve exhibited, there is greatness in us all. That lesson emerges in Steve’s relentless gratitude.
“Though some friends and fans rail and weep at what didn’t happen for him professionally, Steve’s own assurances paint him as no victim. A year before his death, with no support from a major record company and no indication that any song of his, as performed by him, would ever be a hit, he still could summon a charming barroom analogy in saying he had been ‘grievously overserved.’ ”
Readers of Steve Goodman: Facing the Music have access to a tribute CD. How did the CD come about and how do readers get to hear it?
In my interviews, I kept coming upon musicians who had recorded tribute songs to Steve or songs that mentioned him prominently. At first I thought I would mention these few tunes in a final chapter that documented how Steve lives on after his death. But the number of songs kept ballooning, to a total of more than 25. So I decided to provide a bonus, and fortunately ECW Press agreed. The first two printings of the book included a CD featuring 17 tribute songs, and astonishingly, all of the artists gave me permission to use the song gratis, so eager were they to be associated with the project and with Steve.
Starting with the third printing, ECW Press wanted to reduce production costs (the book, after all, is 800 pages, including a 16-page color section), so the CD was eliminated and transformed to an online download opportunity. In response, one of the musicians, the irrepressible Jef Jaisun, cracked, “Are they crazy? Boomers don’t download!”
Your readers – boomers and those of all ages – may be pleased to know, however, that I’ve instituted a nod to the old school. If they order the latest printing of the book from my website, they will receive a tangible CDR with all the tracks, along with a signed postcard for use as a bookmark.
Steve was a huge fan of the Chicago Cubs. Tell us how this was reflected in his life, music and posthumously fulfilled wishes.
This is covered voluminously throughout the book. The Cubs, of course, were failures during Steve’s lifetime, and he embraced the Cubs in spite of – and perhaps because – of that, just as he embraced mortality. He wrote a few precursors, but his “A Dying Cub Fan’s Last Request” is a masterpiece. It presages a funeral at Wrigley Field, and as the book describes in the last few pages, a small portion of the cremated Steve actually wafted over the left-field fence and onto Waveland Avenue, just as in his song.
There was a renewed surge of interest in Steve’s music, particularly the songs “A Dying Cub Fan’s Last Request” and “Go, Cubs, Go” when the Cubs won the World Series. Please tell us what happened, why, and how you feel Steve would have felt had he been alive to witness his team’s victory.
“Go, Cubs, Go” is suffused with fun and irony. It is arguably the least complex song in Steve’s catalogue but the most infectious. It also is the most successful in that more copies of the 45-rpm single were sold in 1984-1987 than any of Steve’s LPs in his lifetime. And it wouldn’t exist without “A Dying Cub Fan’s Last Request.”
The latter song, which Steve wrote and released in 1981, was an affectionate valentine to the Cubs, but a fatalistic one, calling them “lonesome losers” and “the doormat of the National League.” So it was no surprise that Dallas Green, the general manager of the Cubs, couldn’t see beyond the joke and decided to ban Steve from playing it at Wrigley Field. The radio station that broadcast the Cubs games was frustrated by this and, in spring 1984, just six months before Steve’s death, WGN-AM’s Dan Fabian asked Steve to write a new Cubs song that could be played at Wrigley. Steve responded, “I’d love to do it. … It’s gonna be an anthem.”
What it also became was a phenomenon, played to sellout crowds at Wrigley that year and to millions of fans via radio, day after day. Starting in 2007, the Cubs have played it at the end of every home win, with 41,000 people standing and singing – even bellowing – along. (This itself is ironic given that the song’s lyrics say, “The Cubs are going to win today,” and it is sung after the Cubs already have won. Picky, picky, picky.)
Of course, as “A Dying Cub Fan’s Last Request” intoned, “the law of averages says that anything will happen that can,” so in 2017 the Cubs not only went to the World Series for the first time in 108 years but also won it. Immediately afterward, “Go, Cubs, Go” was heard in a massive rally at Chicago’s Grant Park and nationwide on TV’s “Saturday Night Live.”
What would Steve think of the Cubs’ success if he were alive? No question he would be delirious and giddy. But he also would have been forced to consider rewriting “A Dying Cub Fan’s Last Request,” which stated, “The Cubs haven’t won the National League pennant since the year we dropped the bomb on Japan.” The rewrite, including a change of tone, would have had to be massive. Perhaps Steve would have consigned the song to the dustbin. Who knows.
What I wonder at this point is whether the Cubs – by winning the World Series like any team eventually does – have lost their Sisyphus-like mystique. There is something virtuous about a ball club (or any individual or institution) eternally striving for success, however you define it, and repeatedly finding failure. The Cubs have now reached the mountaintop. Where do they go from here?
How has what you learned about Steve positively impacted your life?
What I have learned about Steve is innately and intricately intertwined with what I have learned from the book project itself. Each is easily a metaphor for the other.
For decades, the form of biography has fascinated me. I believe the most accessible and appealing form of history is biography, and I read once that if you are contemplating the research and writing of a biography, you had better warm to your subject because you are going to be living with that person for a long time. So true! I feel fortunate to have been able to choose Steve as a subject – particularly given that I was plowing new literary territory – and to have learned a great deal about him, warts and all. It is our flaws that make us human, and Steve’s story is all the more endearing and inspiring to me for his faults.
One of Steve’s life lessons is perseverance in the face of eventual doom. To move forward with hope, energy and humor. To seize and spread the joys. To, indeed, “get it while you can.” To tackle and complete this book project is a direct application of that lesson. I could not feel more grateful.
You never had an opportunity to interview Steve Goodman. Given what you’ve learned about his life and music, what are a few of the questions that you wish you could have presented to him?
Did you ever see the last few minutes of the Cameron Crowe film “Almost Famous”? The teen reporter, William, finally gets to ask the rock star, Russell, what he likes about music, and Russell replies, “First of all, everything.” That’s my answer to this question. The interviews of Steve would have taken days, weeks, months.
But it would have resulted in a different story – no less fascinating, but far different. And I wonder, had I the opportunity to interview Steve, would I have been driven to talk with 1,100 others about him? That’s an unanswerable question.
Over the years since 1999, when I started in earnest on this book project, I have had two vivid dreams involving Steve. The first has me waiting for him in a hotel lobby. We have an interview scheduled. He comes down a stairway, walks over to me, says, “I’ll be with you in a minute,” walks over to a different stairway and ambles down the stairs. I never see him again. I had him, but then he’s gone. My hands are seemingly outstretched and grasping at thin air, like Sisyphus.
The second dream has me talking with Steve somewhere, it could be a recording studio. He tells me of a song he has written and the LP he plans to put it on. I reply, “I’m from the future, and that song isn’t going to be on that LP.” It’s a funny construct (that “I’m from the future”), and it’s odd that I’m the one telling him something.
“What-if” questions are tough to answer, perhaps fruitless. Better to try to answer questions dealing with the knowable. Like Steve had to. Like we all have to. As Steve wrote, “It happens all the time in real life.”
Further information about Steve Goodman: Facing the Music is at: www.clayeals.com.
Posted 9-10-17, Updated 1-31-22
