Chords for Steve Goodman discussion. Lyle Lovett, Jackson Browne and Arlo Guthrie

I found out about Steve Goodman really through the City of New Orleans.
I started playing in clubs when I was 18 [N] and played other people's songs,
and City of New Orleans was one of the first songs I learned.
And it was a song that I played regularly.
In 1978, he was touring with Steve Martin
and came through College Station, Texas, where I was going to school at Texas A&M.
And I was well aware of Steve Goodman at that point
and was very excited to get to see him.
He was so engaging with the audience.
_ His personality was just huge.
And the show was very energetic,
which I'm not telling you anything you don't know already,
but I was just knocked out at how personable he was and how energetic the show was.
He was out there by himself,
playing to 5,000 people who had come to see Steve Martin.
And he was just so strong.
It was just the way he approached the crowd
and just the way he won everybody over.
That was very inspiring.
He was such a great storyteller.
And all the stories in his songs are so real.
I never knew him, but you feel like you're hearing the truth when he tells you a story.
I was doing shows with Linda Rohn.
In fact, I did this show with Linda and her band
at a place called The Brown Shoe or something.
And after that gig, we went to go see John and Steve at the Royal Volk Town
and some other guys, Fred and Ed and some other songwriters.
There was a whole scene here that I really liked.
I had a scene in California that I came out of [D] that was a coffeehouse,
that sort of songwriter group of friends that all knew each other's songs
or played their songs for each other and encouraged each other.
And we were kind of a school.
So I came out of that, and it seemed to me that [F#] this Earl of Old Town scene
was real similar to the scene I was from.
He was very [Dm] funny.
Steve was very funny.
He'd come right up to you and tell you.
[D] He was not shy, and he [A] was funny.
He had a way of establishing contact with you right away.
[D] He might do something that in [G] itself was_
He might greet you or introduce_
He might have introduced himself to me in a formal or almost a _ [D] standard,
traditional way, but within a very short time,
he will have sort of touched on certain [N] subjects or made jokes
that sort of established who he was and let you know who he was
and how he related to you.
He was a very outgoing, funny guy, very funny guy.
A fantastic performer.
It seemed to me that he embraced_
He took as part of his lore and his learning
the basic tenets of entertainment, of how to capture your audience,
how to really deliver the goods.
He was great at that.
You took him personally.
It wasn't something you viewed from a distance and sized up or anything.
It was always too late for that.
I think everybody that met Steve, he liked him and just became friends.
Another time, he invited me to sing on the record,
that John Prine record that he was performing.
I was honoured to be asked, and I was in New York
and I was doing various things there.
We arranged for me to come to Chicago at a certain time
and I sort of went on a tear the night before I was supposed to come.
I didn't show up.
I was simply missing.
I didn't get there.
I'm not sure when I called him.
I'm sure I must have at some point called him a day late
and said, OK, here I come, I'm coming.
He didn't take me to task or anything.
He came and got me and we did the work that [C#] needed to be done.
I don't think he let small things or strangest things get in his way
because he was so used to dealing with really big obstacles,
the big barriers, the big barricades.
[Dm] You see these pictures, even this childhood picture here.
There's a serious little dude in there.
He's serious.
He was a serious guy and he was seriously funny.
He was used to throwing down,
and in songs, his songs always contained a great deal of philosophy,
a great deal of what's important and what's not in a way.
He was a great example of what [D] to take seriously and what's life.
I met Steve Goodman back around 1971.
I was playing in a club at the time on Belmont called Quiet Night.
[G] One night after the show, I was walking out with my guitars,
going home to the hotel or something,
[C] and the owner of the place, a guy named Richard Harding, stopped me.
He said, Arlo, before you go, a friend of mine wants to sing you a song.
So I said, [G#] oh, come on, man, I don't want to hear no songs.
[Bm] I don't like songs.
I was tired.
I said, I don't even like my songs.
Why should I listen to other people's songs?
So around the corner comes this little guy, and he's smiling at me.
He says, Arlo, I just want to sing you one song, man.
So I says, okay, I'll tell you what, man.
Buy me a beer, [C] and I'll sit here and drink it.
As long as it lasts, you can do whatever [G] you want.
So he says, that sounds like a good deal.
I says, it does.
It turned out to be one of the finer beers of my life.
I met Steve Goodman that night.
We sat down, and he played a bunch of songs.
He gave me a tape of some of his stuff and some lead sheets.
I took them home, [G] and within about six months or so,
we had recorded City of New Orleans.
We tried it upbeat.
We tried it this way.
We tried it slow.
We tried it sideways.
We [C] tried it bluegrass.
We actually recorded it from scratch seven times.
[G] I don't mean just trying to fix an old way.
Actually, just worked it, worked it, threw it out.
Worked it, worked it, threw it out.
On the seventh time, we ended up with just this very simple plaintiff,
little piano, little guitar, little squeeze box.
We had some wonderful singers, the Blackberries and a group of guys
that could really sing.
Between the simple [C] tune and the instrumentation and the vocals,
it just became an anthem in and of itself.
[Bm] That's how it ended up.
[E] Some people you know you have to really work at getting to know who they [C] are.
You didn't have to do that with Steve Goodman.
[Am]
[N] You knew who Steve Goodman was just by looking at him,
and that was a very nice feature.
He wasn't hiding anything.
He was who he is.
He had the kind of face and the kind of eyes that just sort of was bigger than life.
He had a lot of life.
For somebody who was sick, he had an awful lot of life in him.
He had a boundless energy, almost like too much,
and he put it to the best use I've seen with people with too much energy.
He played so well, and he was such a great entertainer,
and so quick, and so just right there all the time. _
_ He was that kind of guy.
He's not like everybody else.
He was really different.
You know you can say that about everybody to some extent,
but when you put them all in a room somewhere,
and you just go through the line of who's looking like,
you could always pick out Goodman.
I think it's amazing that now it's so many years
after this guy was walking around this city,
and really had the energy to be playing in the clubs or whatever he was doing,
that this should happen.
I think that's a tribute to this town,
that you could fill a hall with 4,000-plus people
paying big ticket prices for two unique things about this town.
One is the Old Town School of Folk Music, and the other is Steve Goodman.
And _ I'm just smiling.
I don't know how to put that into words,
but I'm feeling good about being in Chicago right now,
and I didn't always used to feel that way.
But I feel that way now, and that's a real tribute to this town.
Not that I feel good,