"So what’s to tell, he used to hang around the house and you taught him how to play the guitar": my Mom, telling me about a phone call from Clay Eals, Steve Goodman’s biographer. I met Steve early freshman year at Main Township H.S. We were in the dean’s office waiting to be disciplined for our smart mouths. We were both dressed like Wally Cleaver by our moms. Steve’s family had just moved out to Niles from the city. When he found out my name he said "wow". His parents had told him to look out for me. Maybe I’d give him some guitar lessons. His folks were swingers and they went out drinking at Riccardo’s, the restaurant-night club where my dad played for decades with an accordion player named Bobby Rossi. My dad didn’t teach little kids perhaps I could help. Steve was new in the neighborhood and a nice kid. Plus he was smaller than me, and I was pretty small. He naturally fell in with the crowd I was in. We played cards. Went to B’nai B’rith mixers and socials. School dances. Played ball: basket, soft, foot etc.

MTHS mug


Hummingbird

Steve was about five two. Probably weighed one twenty. He was a year younger than me ‘cause he’d skipped a grade. He was thick bodied and burly. Had a much heavier beard than I and was already pretty hairy. He already had the voice. He’d been classically trained in the Shul. I might have charged him for his first lesson or two. After that we spent a good amount of time playing together for close to the next two years. Pretty much everything Steve learned at this time he learned from me. I had been playing and taking money for it from about the time I was ten or eleven years old. I knew some Blues, and Standards; some Dixieland that I picked up by ear or that my dad showed me. He also showed me some chord melodies for "Basin St. Blues", "St. James Infirmary", "Don’t Blame Me" and some blues chops that my dad had picked up along the way. I had a very few formal lessons with jazz monster Jim Harris, but he was teaching me to read out of the Alfred book. It sucked. He did, however, have his own music and charts for all the cool Ventures, Dwayne Eddy, Al Caiola, Surf type stuff. I ate that. My dad taught me a cool version of "Misty", which was quite popular then. Dad’s is in C. Super easy chord melody. That’s what knocked Steve out.

Batwing

I remember going over to his house. He lived with his mom, Minette; his dad, Bud; his brother David; and his grandmother Mary. They were living in a townhouse in Niles waiting for their new house to get finished. Steve had a little Harmony Sovereign with a pick-up at the bottom of the finger-board. Probably the nicest flat-top you could get from Sears. I was playing on a giant Epiphone Blackstone "f"-hole and hating it. Steve could play "Michael Row the Boat Ashore". I hit him with "Misty". His eyes opened up like plates of chocolate pudding. Steve learned everything I could show him, as fast as I could show it to him. In a little while his parents got him a Gibson Hummingbird. After a while I put him in my band, the Jesters, and his folks got him a sweet little Batwing, double pick-up Epiphone solid body. Just like my S.G., that I got with my Bar Mitzvah gelt. I don’t think the rest of the guys were all that happy about it. Between my freshman and sophomore years, my dad walked out on us and my life got a little confusing. By the end of my second and last year at Main Township, Steve and I had stopped playing together. He felt he wanted more of the spot-light and I felt he was kind of uppity. We parted as friends. I moved to a new high school and got the Knaves going pretty soon afterwards. It wasn’t until after the Knaves broke up in early ‘67 that I renewed my friendship with Steve. We remained mutual admirers until Steve’s untimely death at age thirty-six after a valiant and superhuman struggle against leukemia. His body of work is a tribute to his existence as a musician. I learned an incredible amount from Steve, aside from the few chops he showed me that he’d picked up here and there. Watching his shows at the Earl enlightened my sense of pace. His theatricality, i.e. being a huge ham at times, was was par excellence. I miss him always. Many thanks to Clay Eals for kindly sharing his photo archives with me.