My mom fell in love with Steve Goodman, his wife, and their kids. She would run into Steve at festivals, and when she passed through Chicago, she would visit the family. She wrote songs for his daughters. One was “Young Moon,” which she recorded as the B side of a single of “The Judge Said” that Steve produced for her in Chicago right after she wrote it in Wisconsin. It was their contribution to the downfall of Archie Simonson, the judge who let off some young rapists because the high school girl they raped was dressed “provocatively” in jeans and a turtleneck top. The other one is “The Rigatoni Song” about playing “a rigatune on my riguitar.” Steve recorded a song called “The Dutchman” written by Michael Smith, another Chicago songwriter my mother knew. It’s about an old man depending on “dear Margaret” to remember his youth for him. It was poignant for my mother and me because my father had had a stroke that wiped out a lot of his memory. The first time I heard Steve perform it live was at the Mariposa Folk Festival in Toronto. This festival had seven or eight stages going at once—plus strolling players and jam sessions. This was both wonderful and awful—wherever you were, you felt like you should be someplace else. The people I was with were all someplace else when Steve came on. The people around me were talking and laughing, which was annoying enough before Steve sang “The Dutchman” and I started crying. I have rarely felt so alone. I was simultaneously sad for my father, angry at the unheeding audience, and aware that I must look like a Chas. Addams cartoon. The last time I heard Steve live was at my mother’s memorial concert at the Berkeley Community Theater. It was to be a fundraiser for various causes she supported. I had given the producers a list of people who should be asked to perform: Steve, Pete Seeger, Rosalie Sorrels, Margie Adam and Country Joe MacDonald. I told them this was far too many people, my mother hated being on a program like that and wouldn’t want other people to be asked to be on one. I suggested they set a date, ask all of them, and just take whoever could come on that date. Without consulting me, they moved the date so Pete could come, saying “We just have to have Pete!” Well, no, they didn’t. He was organizing a memorial in New York for East Coast folks and didn’t need to fly out for the Berkeley one. So we had all of them. I also wanted the memorial at Zellerbach, where the lobbies were more comfortable to visit in, but no. Well, it was a rare balmy evening in Berkeley, so people stood out on the steps chatting till the last minute, and the Community Theater only had one door staffed for taking tickets. We pleaded with them to let us open a few more doors with volunteer ticket-takers, but they wouldn’t let us. So the concert started late, and was way too long. Pete was last, and exhausted. My partner, Carole, was in charge of the ushering. A couple who knew my mom chewed Carole out because the sound guy had set up in their seats and they had to be seated elsewhere. Carole was a tough cookie, but they made her cry. I welcomed people from the stage and gave a good introduction for Steven Fritchman, the Unitarian minister who gave the eulogy, and that was fine. The concert was proceeding well until Steve Goodman sang a song he introduced as something he had written for his wife, in which he addressed her as “my little girl.” A bunch of feminists took exception to this and started booing. To this day I regret not climbing up on stage and telling them that Steve was one of my mom’s favorite people and they should be kind to him at least for her sake. At the after party for performers and close friends and family at La Peña, I was complaining about the women who booed and the couple who were so nasty to Carole. Margie Adam said, “Oh, they were just mad because Malvina wasn’t there.”  If You Were Little ©1975 by Malvina Reynolds, renewed 2003 Malvina also wrote a song about Steve. He already had leukemia when she met him—he had it for years before it killed him. So she was feeling protective about him when she wrote “If You Were Little” The song of Steve’s that I listened to most was “City of New Orleans.” I had taped a Judy Collins album that had that on one side and “Lovin’ of the Game” on the other, and it just happened that on the tape they were back to back so I could play them one after the other over and over without rewinding, driving across the country in my van. Of course Steve’s song was a song of love and farewell to the train, The City of New Orleans, that used to run between Chicago and New Orleans, but now it could be a song of love and farewell to the city itself, which will never be the same. © 2007 by Nancy Schimmel http://www.stevegoodman.net/http://www.wku.edu/~smithch/MALVINA/mr280.htmhttp://www.wku.edu/~smithch/MALVINA/mr084.htmhttp://www.wku.edu/~smithch/MALVINA/mr142.htm
Cover of the “new” Goodman CD made from rediscovered tapes, available at Music Fans Direct. http://206.188.194.245/index.asp?PageAction=VIEWPROD&ProdID=118
Saturday, January 13, 2007
IF YOU WERE LITTLE