“This hotel room got a lot of stuff
A laundry bag and a shoe shine buff,
Thirty-two hangers and a touch-tone phone
With a light that comes on when I’m not home.
I ain’t home, I ain’t home
You better leave a message cause I ain’t home”

This Hotel Room -Steve Goodman

Finding out about Steve Goodman was similar to the way I did when I discovered Stan Rogers and Duane Allman - after he had died. Steve Goodman died in September 1984 and I never started listening to him until later that year. If you never knew it before Goodman wrote The City of New Orleans and other gems.

Steve Goodman

Goodman was like a cerebral Jimmy Buffett in that he could elevate a song past its melodic and lyrical appeal and reveal a comical irony. He wrote a song called The Lincoln Park Pirates in a rollicking sea shanty beat that tore strips off the tow truck industry in Chicago. The companies literally pounced on motorists within seconds of their infractions and the hapless car owners paid huge fines to take their cars out of the impound centers. He also wrote This Hotel Room, a song that Jimmy Buffett featured on his Margaritaville album, about just sitting around in a hotel room and looking at the stuff that was lying about. Under it all was an implied loneliness and a decision that had to made whether to stay on the road or go home.

The demon that lurked in Steve was leukemia. He even made friends with the illness and called himself “Cool Hand Leuk. ” First diagnosed with it in 1969 he knew he was living on borrowed time. A die-hard Chicago Cubs fan when he passed away some of his ashes were scattered at Wrigley Field.

My connection to Goodman was his was of making things unfunny seem funny in song form. Buffett was good at it too but I think Goodman invented the genre. But his genius was that he painted pictures with his words:

“All along the southbound odyssey
The train pulls out at Kankakee
Rolls along past houses, farms and fields
Passin’ towns that have no names
Freight yards full of old black men
And the graveyards of the rusted automobiles”

The City of New Orleans - Steve Goodman