“The City of New Orleans”
Most of you probably are familiar with the rousing and elegiac Americana classic “City of New Orleans.” It was a big hit for Arlo Guthrie in 1972, and has been covered by a great many people. It’s one of those songs that sound like they’ve always been around (or should have been) even though they haven’t.
Here’s a clip of Arlo Guthrie telling the story of how he came to know the song, and then singing a great version. I’d heard it before and liked it. Hard not to sing along (the story is good, but the music begins at 1:05):
Willie Nelson had a wonderful version of it, too. He’s got that authentic-sounding voice, and the music has a bit more of the train rhythm than Guthrie’s version.
So there we have it, right? Great song, and especially poignant to hear in 2021.
But no, we’re not quite finished with it yet, because – due to the magic of YouTube – there’s also a clip of Steve Goodman (the man who wrote the song) performing it live in 1976. I only heard of Goodman recently, through a commenter on this blog, and had no idea he wrote the song and certainly had never heard his version at all.
Goodman was ill with leukemia for his entire adult life and died at the age of 36, but he put out some glorious music while he was here. By all accounts, he was a great and unique guy, and I think you can see that in his performances. He looks a bit like a cross between a young Paul Simon and a young Cat Stevens, with a slow curving smile as though secretly mildly amused at the vagaries of life.
In contrast to the multi-instrument and personnel arrangements of “City of New Orleans” in those clips of Guthrie and Nelson, Goodman stands alone and just plays an acoustic guitar when he sings it. He was a diminutive guy – I read that he stood about five feet tall – but he’s a giant on that instrument. I think he gets more sound – more dynamics, more feeling – out of that single guitar than the more lushly-instrumented versions do, and he gets it while singing. And how he sings! His voice has a bit of Pete Seeger, a smidgeon of Phil Ochs, some John Denver, and a whole huge bunch of Steve Goodman, otherwise known as “Chicago Shorty”.
For all those reasons and more, I find Goodman’s version the most mesmerizing as well as the most exuberant. His liveliness, his head-shaking when he’s intent on doing something especially forceful on his guitar, his bouncing with the rhythm of the guitar-simulated train, and his transcendent delight in the whole enterprise is something to behold. When Goodman gets to the line “Mothers with their babes asleep/Are rockin’ with the gentle beat…” it’s sung with such tenderness and love, along with the guitar simulating the chugging of the train and Goodman’s body doing the same – that for me the song enters the territory of the transcendent and never leaves that realm.
Have you ever ridden a long-distance train? I have, many times, though not in many years. I once made a train trip from Boston to Pittsburgh, then to Chicago, then Denver, and then LA, briefly visiting friends with each stop. And that wasn’t the only long train ride I took, all by myself when in my college years and early twenties.
Even back then the rails were a dying throwback, but very evocative. In my childhood my family had taken a train from New York to Chicago (which is Goodman’s native city) – the Twentieth Century Limited – and I slept in a berth way up with my face just inches from the ceiling. I still remember the lulling, rocking feeling, and the mystery – as well as a little fold-out toilet that came with the room.
RIP Steve Goodman, man of music.
[NOTE: I found the following online in some YouTube comments to one of the renditions of the song. It’s a poem supposedly written by singer/songwriter Tom Paxton soon after Steve Goodman’s 1984 death:
Chicago Shorty would write you a song,
Then he’d play the damned thing all night long,
Make you coffee, fry you an egg,
Tickle your funnybone, pull your leg,
Talk your head off, laugh at your jokes,
Kiss your sister and charm your folks,
Lend you his house, lend you his car,
Give you the strings from his last guitar.
Stevie’d let you name the place,
Meet your plane and carry your case.
Chicago Shorty loved his life,
Loved his children, loved his wife.
He was a joy for me to know,
And I miss the little bastard so.]
Willie Nelson is still alive.
Yes Willie was quoted lately concerned about what this generation was going to leave he and Keith Richards.
Eva Marie:
Thanks, fixed! That’ll teach me that I should check every single thing even if I think I know something. I added that at the last minute, and I realize what I did was to substitute Willie Nelson for Kenny Rogers, who recently died. John Denver also did a version (slightly different lyrics in his version) and of course he’s long gone. Johnny Cash (deceased) did a version too, and died quite a few years ago. I listened to their versions last night, too, but in this post I only put up the ones I think are best.
Steve Goodman also wrote what he called ‘the perfect Country & Western song’ and it was a big country hit for David Allen Coe (he’s a piece of work!)
‘You Never Even Called Me By My Name’
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_qfujQ_jTQ
It’s a great song especially from the 3:00 mark on.
My favorite Steve Goodman song is one he didn’t write — The Dutchman. It only gets more powerful every time I hear it. https://youtu.be/CmYvGW4QxXk
The Willie Nelson version is the best. Willie is such good stylist. No one sounds like him.
My favorite Willie Nelson song this one he wrote. Great song especially if you’ve ever been that guy.
‘Angel Flying Too Close To The Ground’
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C3PB1jWO3_E
Have you ever ridden a long-distance train?
I took a 24 hour train ride in Argentina. That’s 500 miles in 24 hours. Oh, the joys of government-owned enterprises. The government-owned telecom took a year to install your landline, and charged you $1000 for the privilege. As that was 4 decades ago, a guesstimate would make that $6000-$7000 in 2021 dollars. For a landline.
Most of my train trips have been along the BosWash corridor.
jack
Yes Willie was quoted lately concerned about what this generation was going to leave he and Keith Richards.
Guess those 2 are the poster oldsters – too old to be poster children- for “Better Living Through Chemistry.” 🙂
Back in the day, my roommate dated a woman whose mother had rented a house to Willie Nelson. She evicted him for nonpayment of rent. Apparently in the days before Willie made it big. Willie left the house with wall-to-wall beer cans.
Gringo,
Willie was so hard up for cash the he sold or tried to sell a bunch of his songs including ‘Family Bible’, ‘Night Life’, ‘Hello Walls’ and a couple of others. This was in the mid 60s. He didn’t have any major commercial success as a singer until 1975 and he had been around for over a decade.
Steve Goodman gone since 1984, somehow it seems longer than that to me. I became most aware of him with the emergence of John Prine from the Chicago scene in 1970 and 1971, Steve was a mentor and partisan of the then unknown John Prine. Sadly we lost John early in the Covid outbreak last year.
John Prine’s first album pretty much stunned the music world when it was released, such a unique talent with amazing songs. Each live show I saw in the early 1970’s with Prine he always, always mentioned Steve Goodman and it was clear that he had a lot of respect and affection. I never got to see them perform together, but heard from those who did that those were very special shows.
“Even back then the rails were a dying throwback”
so I Imagine that back then you also had the sense of the disappearing railroad blues?
Neo, thank you for posting that Youtube video of Steve Goodman. Never heard of him before and the man who wrote that song deserves to be remembered.
Curious how the railroads inspired so many great songs: “Wabash Cannonball”, “Hear that Lonesome Whistle Blow”, “Casey Jones” to name a few.
This introduced me to John Prine … Sam Stone
https://youtu.be/OLVWEYUqGew
Liked him from then on.
Well, that Goodman song was really something. I’ve never been down the Mississippi Valley (yet – on the bucket list, for sure), but this song seems to contain bits of that whole stretch of country. I don’t feel the rhythm much, but I’ll take your word for it that it’s there.
As for the 20th Century Limited, I used to ride that back in grad school to get from Kalamazoo to Albany. Changeover in Toledo. Somebody tried to steal my carry-on bag once while I was asleep on the part of the overnight stretch between Cleveland and Erie. The police came aboard and took him off the train; I got my bag back and didn’t lose any of my somewhat meager possessions. (I still remember the officer rather unceremoniously plopping the bag on the seat next to me without so much as a by-your-leave. But they were busy escorting that weirdo away, so it’s understandable. It appeared from the conductor’s reaction, when I first brought the thief to his attention, that they’d run across the guy before.)
It’s funny that I only really remember the eastbound journeys on that line, not the westbound. Actually, now that I think about it, that’s really strange. I honestly don’t ever remember what it was like to pull into my hometown going westbound. That bothers me a little. I might have to do something about that. Get on the train, go west just for the heck of it, back to the old homestead just to remind myself of what it felt like.
Boy, that Goodman song and a couple of glasses of wine… what it’ll do to a Midwestern man… no telling sometimes. 🙂
In Free to Choose, Milton Friedman touches on how government regulations destroyed the railroads. “If the ICC had never been established and market forces had been permitted to operate, the United States would today have a far more satisfactory transportation system. The railroad industry would be leaner but more efficient as a result of greater technological innovation under the spur of competition and the more rapid adjustment of routes to the changing demands of traffic. Passenger trains might serve fewer communities but the facilities and equipment would be far better than they are now, and the service more convenient and rapid.”
Which reminds me: Where are the Milton Friedmans of today?
I’m so glad you found Steve Goodman, Neo.
I discovered Steve Goodman in the 1970s after David Alan Coe released the Goodman/Prine hit single, “You Never Even Called Me By My Name”, and through Goodman I discovered the late, great John Prine. Prine was probably Goodman’s closest friend and the measure of that was when John refused to let Steve include him as a co-writer on the song. Prine knew Goodman was getting too sick to tour and needed the royalty money. Wonderful men and wonderful music.
I’ve loved Steve Goodman for years.
“City of New Orleans” is a classic, and “You Never Call Me By My Name” is a major crowd pleasure. I love them both. “The I Don’t Know Where I’m Going, But I’m Goin’ Nowhere in a Hurry Blues” is another great tune from the same album.
“Affordable Art” had some of my other favorites: “Vegematic,” “How Much Tequila,” and”Dying Cub Fan’s Last Request.”
Anybody who spent any time in Chicago in the seventies and eighties really appreciated “Lincoln Park Pirates” from “Somebody Else’s Troubles,” another fantastic album. (Bob Dylan, Dave Bromberg, and Maria Muldaur are on some of the tracks.)
Steve Goodman was an incredible artist with a wicked sense of humor. Gone way, way, way too soon….
Steve Goodman is a musician everyone should know about. A brilliant songwriter, performer, and one heck of a funny guy, he crammed several lifetimes worth of fun into his short stint on this earth. Oh, and after he was diagnosed with the disease that would ultimately take his life, he referred to himself as “Cool Hand Leuk”.
In November 1997, my wife – a Goodman fan who had the amazing good fortune to have seen him up close and live at the Earl of Old Town pub – and I attended a benefit for the Old Town School of Folk Music that was staged in the form of a Steve Goodman tribute at the old Medinah Temple on the North side. The performers in order were Iris DeMent, Todd Snider, Kathy Mattea, Lyle Lovett, Arlo Guthrie, the always-luminous Emmylou Harris, Jackson Browne, and John Prine. The show was as good as it sounds. Of course Guthrie played “City of New Orleans”, but he brought the house down with a rendition of “All Along the Watchtower” sung in a perfect imitation of Bob Dylan’s voice. It was hold-your-sides funny. Goodman’s old buddy Prine was magnetic and powerful, one of the best musical performances I’ve ever seen. So a few years later when some friends who were Prine fanatics asked if I wanted to drive up to Milwaukee and catch him in the old Pabst Theater, I jumped at the chance. He was again masterful. Imagine these two giant talents writing songs together and laughing through the night.
Neo – you are so fortunate to come across Goodman even late in life, he was one of a kind. My favorite Goodman song is “That’s What Friends Are For”. Unfortunately it is no longer on YouTube. A heartbreaking song about the unrequited love a fellow has for a woman who thinks he is just her friend, it is enlivened with a masterful mid-song instrumental break by Jethro Burns on mandolin and Chicago jazz legend Johnny Frigo on fiddle. It is on Goodman’s album “Words We Can Dance To”. If you can find this song, give it a listen. It is simply wonderful, one of the best songs about love and heartache ever written.
And of course, every Chicago Cubs fan knows Goodman’s classic “A Dying Cub Fan’s Last Request” – this one is on YouTube. If you want to see a guy near the end who is laughing right in the face of the Grim Reaper, this is it.
RIP Steve and John Prine too.
About long distance train rides:
As a very young kid, were took the Santa Fe Super Chief from Southern California to Chicago. I have vague recollections: the bar, our cabin. Me and another little kid would hang out, sitting at the bar, drinking Shirley Temples and drawing and coloring…
I remember the cabin: I think my sister and I slept up top, because my mom could lift me up there better than she could climb up there. (My dad had driven ahead: were were moving from Southern California to the Midwest.)
I also remember the toilet, but so much because of the toilet, but because of the song. My mom sang us a snippet of song during trip, and for years afterwards:
“Passengers will please refrain
From flushing toilets while the train
Is in the station
And when passing through a town…”
I was in my middle age years when I learned that that was (mostly) a real song.
It doesn’t get better than Steve Goodman. He didn’t get much time, but he lived every last second of it. Faced the end with his eyes wide open.
Just watch this:
Dying Cub Fan’s Last Request
Very glad to read this post and the comments, and to hear this song. Especially as sung by the man who wrote it. Such a talent; such joy; such generosity.
Thanks.
The rhythms of railroads form a large part of the spine of Bluegrass music, which was basically birthed by Bill Monroe and his Bluegrass Boys (from Kentucky) in the late 1950s and survives as a strong musical form to this day. See Sirius Channel 62 (24/7/365!). The Chuff-Chuff rhythm and the train whistle were inspirational to the very rural musicians in their Kentucky “hollows” who took to this and imitated it on their banjos, guitars and (!) mandolins.
There are many bluegrass railroad songs! “The Wreck of the Old 97” is one. Many songs of trainmen trying to make up for lost time and ending up wrecking.
Before the many railroad mergers, there was the Southern Rail Road, whose motto was “The Southern Serves The South”, and for 20 years I could hear the Southern’s whistle though I lived in different Southern towns, Charlottesville and Durham among them.
On another note, leukemia is a large, complex group of diseases. Goodman had a “chronic” form, undoubtably, in an era where there were a few good drugs for same. But to attribute longstanding chronic fatigue to an eventual diagnosis of leukemia is a leap. “Acute” leukemias were fatal in a few weeks back then.
Wiki says of Goodman, “In the early spring of 1967, Goodman went to New York, staying for a month in a Greenwich Village brownstone across the street from the Cafe Wha?, where Goodman performed regularly during his brief stay there. Returning to Chicago, he intended to restart his education but he dropped out again to pursue his musical dream full-time after discovering the cause of his continuous fatigue was actually leukemia, the disease that was present during the entirety of his recording career, until his death in 1984.”
That is 15+ years, a damn good survival with a smoldering leukemia, probably CML.
Cicero:
Actually, I listened to an interview with Goodman himself, and he had acute lymphoblastic leukemia, diagnosed in January of 1969. He talks about it here starting at around minute 9:30.
Some really memorable comments here — thanks to all. And thanks to Neo for introducing me to Steve Goodman. I’ve known City of New Orleans for a long time, but didn’t know it was written by Goodman.
As for train rides, if you count two-day overnighters, I’ve done Nairobi to Mombasa, New Delhi to Madras, and Washington D.C. to Athens, OH. Not epic trips, but all memorable. Especially New Delhi to Madras, which had two environmental settings: stifling hot and humid with the window closed, or tolerable temperature with the window down if you could tolerate the coal ash that flew in the whole time and stuck to sweaty skin.
None of those trips broke any speed records, but Nairobi-Mombasa was so painfully slow I actually saw a fly exit one window and enter another further toward the front of the train. I thought if we’re only moving at the speed of insects, we’ll be here a long time.
With the greatest respect to Steve Goodman, Arlo Guthrie, and Willie Nelson, my favorte version of this song is by The Seldom Scene. https://youtu.be/ISFAXoD5LsU
It may have been the David Allan Coe cover of “You Never Even Called Me by My Name” that alerted Neo to Goodman. I know it was in the last few months someone posted a youtube link to the Coe cover pointing out Goodman, but I can’t remember if it was here at Neo’s place. Of course, that version of the song with the additional lyrics to make it a perfect country song is a classic on any country music radio station, and Coe names Goodman in the performance there and did so in live shows as well (I don’t know if he is still performing, he is 81 these days).
Neo,
I enjoyed the Arlo and Goodman version of “City of New Orleans”. That song is in my range, and I have sung it before during Karaoke night at the local lounge. Good fun.
You asked if I’ve ever taken a long-distance train ride. Made me smile. Yes, I did. In 1970, I went down to South America to visit my Aunt and Uncle and their eight children in Aracatuba, SP Brazil. I flew from Detroit to Miami, onward to Panama City, down to Lima, Peru and over to La Paz, Bolivia. Flew from there to Santa Cruz, Bolivia and was finally able to spend a couple days there and get some sleep (31 hours without sleep–you can do stuff like that when you’re 16 years old and you’ve had two years of high-school Spanish). Turns out my Aunt was going to be in Corumba, and I could meet up with her there. So, I climbed on the Ferrobus in Santa Cruz and headed off on a 2,222 mile cross country ride to Puerto Suarez (border town between Bolivia and Brazil). Took somewhere in the neighborhood of 14 hours. Once there, I took a bus across the border to Corumba, Brazil where I met my Aunt. Then we got on the Brazilian train and headed for Aracatuba. Another short 11 hours train ride and we arrived in Aracatuba, a measly 560 miles. (Mileage complementary of Duck,Duck,Go.) So, yeah, I took a long-distance train ride. Only in retrospect did I realize how reckless that whole trip was. Anyhow, great memories. I want to say those were wood-burning locomotives, but I’m not sure. I remember stopping at every train stop and asking “Quien tienes Tatu?”, and paying a peso for a chunk of Tatu meat. Not sure what a “Tatu” is, but I was told it was a large armadillo or some sort.
Waidmann
Yancy Ward:
This was the song that was my introduction to Goodman.
Thank you for sharing Goodman Neo.
I’ve always loved trains too. Took the Crescent City from Birmingham, AL to Washington DC for the Army Navy game years ago. Smoked cigarettes and drank beer in the bar car all night with the most random people… a Navy guy on the way to propose to his girlfriend, a stripper, a business guy on the way home from Florida to NC who for some reason took the train, some guy on a quest to visit every NFL stadium in the country and his completely drugged out brother in law, the big guy from Brooklyn with knife scars on his cheek who whipped out a chess set and challenged everyone. These are the moments in your life who really make you who you are
When my brother and I were in elementary school–going on seventy years ago–my father took us on a train from Detroit to Toledo so we could have the train experience. He was figuring it was an unlikely proposition in our future. Don’t remember much.
Next time was 73, helping my wife chaperone some students. We arrived in Brussels, took the train to Paris. Had a day there and then off to Madrid. I was on the standing side–aisle runs on one side and compartments on the other. Seems every third–or second–station we passed in Belgium and France on the way to Paris was the name of some fight or another. Caesar up to my father. Had to explain to the kids, who were studying Spanish, what “reservee pour mutilee aux guerre” meant. And why, at the Spanish border there was a crane operation which lifted the car compartments off the chassis on the French side and put it on a different set of wheels on the Spanish side. Different gauges, to handicap invasions.
Half an hour into Spain, slowed to pass a station with three guys with rifles–bolt action–and no uniforms on the platform with what looked like repaired shell holes in the wall. War’s been over for forty years.
Not so bad, living in a boring Midwestern farm town.
And the toilet flushed, to be charitable, onto the rail bed.
You don’t get the rhythm driving, but if you get off the interstate going across country, you might have some of the same views. My wife and I enjoy that part of travel.
Scott- thanks for the memories.
When my wife and I lived in Chicago from 1976-1980 we never saw Steve Goodwin, but remember The Earl of Old Town and we used to frequent a bar on Armitage Street called Somebody Else’s Troubles to listen to Fred Holstein. For a while I took guitar and banjo lessons at The Old Town School of Folk Music. When our kids were little I used to sit outside their bedrooms at night and sing them to sleep from the songs I learned there.
Maybe now that I’m retired I’ll pick up the guitar and banjo again.
Thanks Scott, and thanks for the post Neo.
Thank you for giving us this writer’s version of his song. I listened and thought maybe someone had sped up the video so I slowed it down to 75% of normal. Now I wish I knew was it sped up, or not. Whichever it is a wonderful song, I am so old and live on a peninsula with no hope of hearing a train in the distance. That was always my favorite sound in the night. Hearing that lonesome whistle blow always gave me a wanderlust to be on it.
Also, trains from Mainz to Munich for Oktoberfest; trains to Milan, Amsterdam, Paris. And the train ride from London to Aviemore… my first train ride that set the standard for all the rest. I miss riding trains
Chris B:
This bar?
Ruth Hoese:
Glad you enjoyed it. I don’t think it was speeded up at all. Goodman could play and sing fast if he wanted to (or slow if he wanted to). Here are two fast ones: this one and this one.
Another excellent post and comments.
I’m glad a couple of people also mentioned “A Dying Cubs Fan’s Last Request”.
Well done everyone.
Our family has taken a number of long train trips. Washington D.C.
Seattle
Grand Canyon – twice
My personal favorite was to Glacier National Park. Where the Lodge is within just a short walking distance from the station.
I’m not a morning person. Yet getting up before dawn, getting a coffee, and then sitting on your balcony watching the sunrise work it’s way up the mountains is (was) sublime.
The train journey to Glacier and back was simply amazing.
Thanks, neo, for introducing me to Steve Goodman. Wow!!!
Lee, I appreciate your mentioning the Goodman song, “Lincoln Park Pirates.” I used to love the song much more, until I became one of their conquests one winter evening.
Yes Neo, that must have been it, although I remembered it as having been on Armitage Ave. rather than on Lincoln. The bar was owned by brothers Ed and Fred Holstein.
My brother lived a few blocks away at the time. It was a small local place and all of us used to go there frequently to listen to and sing along with Fred. The folk music scene was popular then, and The Earl of Old Town was much better known than Somebody Else’s Troubles.
A few years ago I did a search and found out that Fred Holstein had passed away. Off the subject, but my older brother still lives in Chicago and when he retired bought an old drive-in movie theater in Wisconsin and still runs it in the summer. The rest of us show up in the fall and have a great time helping to close it down.
I haven’t yet read any of the comments above.
I personally like the Arlo Guthrie version because it has a sad, mournful wistfulness that the Goodman version lacks. His [Goodman’s] version, and his manner of play, seems too upbeat, too alive, for the nature of the song.
Your live-Arlo version seems to lack the sad quality I’ve always associated with it, too.
Here’s the recorded version:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvMS_ykiLiQ
Awesome version of a great song. Kudos to Goodman for writing it, and Guthrie for picking the right tone and tempo for it to make it truly a classic.
Rode the City of New Orleans decades ago from Chicago to Champaign. It felt long and tedious, with monotonous scenery. Goodman’s song evokes the train well.
It’s still running: https://www.amtrak.com/city-of-new-orleans-train
Waidmann
I remember stopping at every train stop and asking “Quien tienes Tatu?”, and paying a peso for a chunk of Tatu meat. Not sure what a “Tatu” is, but I was told it was a large armadillo or some sort.
They told you correctly. I have a T-shirt with a silk-screened Tatú on it, but it no longer fits me. I believe Tatú is Guaraní ( Paraguay.)
Your being told correctly about the identity of a Tatú when in Bolivia reminds me that not every US teenager in Bolivia gets that treatment. Your command of Spanish helped. I worked in Argentina near the Bolivian border (oil field). A lot of my coworkers were Bolivian, from our Santa Cruz office. During one of my weeks off I went south to Córdoba, and met the son of a Bolivian coworker going to University there, and his wife and housemates. They told me that their high school in Bolivia had a US foreign exchange student. Apparently they took some liberties in teaching him Spanish. The foreign exchange student got told that “I am a North American (US) student” translated as “You soy un marico nortemericano.” ( I am a North American homosexual). As I never got the foreign exchange student’s side of the story, I don’t know how long it took for him to catch on.
My only train ride in Bolivia was from Yacuiba on the Argentine border to Santa Cruz. Train food in Peru was pretty good, such as stuffed rocoto peppers on the train to Machu Picchu, and roast alpaca between Puno and Cuzco.
}}} Curious how the railroads inspired so many great songs: “Wabash Cannonball”, “Hear that Lonesome Whistle Blow”, “Casey Jones” to name a few.
Well, they were the life’s blood of America for around a century. I don’t have a lot of experience with them, having lived outside the only major remaining passenger area (The Eastern Seaboard) and New England, but did ride one from Hartford to NYC when visiting up there.
It was not only planes but the Interstates which killed passenger rail. I seriously doubt there was any hope of saving them, longer-term, as they have the same flaws as light rail, for passenger service (i.e., inflexible as travel patterns change, very high initial costs compared to alternatives), and America became far far more dynamic, more “in flux” after the 60s. Only in congestion-problem-areas are they likely to succeed or prosper.
The most memorable train example I can think of is a minor one — Spencer Tracy getting off (and on) the streamliner in the excellent Bad Day At Black Rock, one of Tracy’s best films without Hepburn, and one of his best overall.
The train is largely irrelevant, except to drop Tracy into the middle of a situation.
There are other classic movies which are much more central around trains, too, though: Throw Momma From The Train is an obvious one. Murder On The Orient Express. The Lady Vanishes. Silver Streak. I’m sure there are others escaping my recollections
Then there’s the classic TV series, Supertrain.
Ha-ha, just kidding…
Richard Aubrey
When I was 7, my siblings and I took an 11 mile train trip from our grandparents’ Oklahoma town to the next stop up the line. We could see our parents driving parallel to the railroad tracks. Good we got that train experience, as that passenger train stopped running not long after. Up through 1959, my grandmother took the train from Oklahoma to New England to visit us. (And my grandfather, when he was alive.)
I once read that someone on the Republican (losing) side of the war said that Franco’s nearly 4 decades of dictatorship were necessary for a cooling off period. While Franco’s side may have done more killing, the Republican massacre of priests and nuns at the beginning of the conflict set the stage for a bitter-to-the-end fight.
I’m glad more people are discovering him.
OBloodyHell:
As my mother would say, that’s what makes horse races.
But I especially love the Goodman version for that upbeat quality you mention, that energy (like a train’s energy) combined with something sad, a very bittersweet feeling that has about 100 different shades in it. That’s in his voice and in his playing – and the meaning he gives the words, which are the words he wrote. For me, all the other versions lack that ever-changing dynamic quality.
And Goodman’s guitar-playing is mindbogglingly good – the driving rhythm, the picking, the mournful change of key in what I think would be called the pre-chorus (I’m not too knowledgeable about music’s technical side).
I always thought Arlo Guthrie had written the song. Thanks for enlightening me. I’m very attached to that song. My father’s father was an engineer on The City of New Orleans.
As he got older, my father and step mother would take train vacations. All up the West Coast and across to Chicago. Over to the East Coast. And also through Canada. When they relocated from So Cal to Florida a few years ago, they went via train. At 90 he said flying was too uncomfortable. My husband offered to give them miles for 1st class but he preferred 5 days on the train instead! Reliving the past one last time.
My US train experience is many trips on Southern California’s Pacific Surfliner. Longer trips in Great Britain and Europe. Loved the luxe Eurostar ‘Chunnel’ trip. Loved them all, actually.
But what I’d really like is to time travel on the old Matson oceanliner ‘Lurline’ – San Francisco to Honolulu!
Lovely song. Whenever I listen to it I’m always struck by how it invokes a visceral sense of calming motion. I can’t think of another song that does that.
It also inspired a college friend to gather a group of us together to actually hop freight trains out of Denver back in the late 70s. Those trips, armed with a small backpack and a bottle of Thunderbird (of course!), are the most vivid memories of my life. There’s just something about trains . . .
One of the very first train passengers in history was the English actress and diarist Fanny Kemble, who rode the just-completed London & Manchester line in 1830. A vivid recollection of the experience:
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/13733.html
Dear Neo,
Will we, the denizens of your salon, ever plumb the depths of you? Your careful, often sobering, and always thoughtful analysis of “the issues of the day” fills us with rich food for thought. And in the next moment you draw back the curtain on (as my mother would say) “what tickles you.” This introduction (for me at least) to Steve Goodman as the writer of this immortal song is just such a gratifying, amusing and evocative moment. I swear, as I listened to the Guthrie, Nelson and Goodman versions of this song and read your comments and those of your readers I found myself with a smiling and appreciative lump in my throat. That’s partly from recognizing shared sensibilities, but mostly for what you do on this site every day. You are so “grounded” and yet you have made such an intellectual journey in your life — all the while discovering, preserving, enjoying and sharing the real and worthwhile things along the way — serious or amusing, heavy or light. (STRETCHED METAPHOR ALERT!) Keep moving, Neo, like the City of New Orleans. What we see along the way is vast and varied, and we love the trip.
dwaz
Spain was a tough case. It’s where “fifth column” came from as a descriptor.
We went back with more kids in the nineties. Much different. Traffic cops didn’t have automatic weapons.
One item I noticed was that when we showed up with our white-bread, corn-fed midwestern high school kids, we got a lot of attention. The young guys who thought themselves the lotharios of the world had been born in and grown up in the war and post-war deprivation and their growth had been affected. Their shirts had some kind of a thing–called a “gore”, I think–where fabric had been gathered in back so the shirts would gape open across their skinny, hairless chests.
They would be approaching our young women and bemused burly farm guys along with the occasional tight end or linebacker.
In the late nineties, that had changed.
We had a tour company run the thing and put together several groups to justify the guide and other expenses. About forty altogether. One railroad–Madrid to Valencia–trip took us past some hill/mountain terrain. I thought every third hill–my wife said every eighth–had some snags or remnants of some kind of fortification. We talked to the kids about how rocks prefer rolling down hill instead of up hill and making them do the latter indicated how serious the folks were. What was going bump in the night to demand that kind of labor?
Education and trains….who’d have thought?
Thank you Neo. I hadn’t thought of that song in years, not sure why. It was one of my favorites when it came out.
I just looked up the chords and lyrics…several variations in different keys. After several different tries, I ended up with the straight D-A-D-Bm-G. It was recommended with a capo, but I liked it without; and suited my voice better. Played it well first time around. The rhythm is so easy and intoxicating….you can just feel the gentle pounding of the engine’s drivers. Wonderful!
Thanks again!!
Neo: One does not have long-standing fatigue that turns out to be due to acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) . The two, if the ALL diagnosis was correctly reported by Goodman, were coincidental. ALL was in the early days of its present high curability then, and hits mostly young kids. Untreated ALL is rapidly fatal, and its treatment in the 1960s, when curable programs were initiated, required hospitalizations at places like St.Jude’s, a major innovator in curing ALL.
“I personally like the Arlo Guthrie version because it has a sad, mournful wistfulness that the Goodman version lacks“
Agreed. Although I like Goodman’s guitar work. I also find the Willie Nelson version to upbeat for melancholy song about a dying American institution
“I personally like the Arlo Guthrie version because it has a sad, mournful wistfulness that the Goodman version lacks“
Agreed. Although I like Goodman’s guitar work. I also find the Willie Nelson version too
upbeat for melancholy song about a dying American institution
Cicero:
I said nothing about fatigue and Goodman. I have no idea what symptoms he had or didn’t have, but he was 20 when diagnosed and I assume that put him in the “adult” category of patients, which when I looked it up, apparently is considerably less likely to be successfully treated than when onset is in childhood. I assume this is your field of expertise. It’s certainly not mine. I was just informing you of his diagnosis.
John Kinney Bennett:
Thanks!
I think I suspected Arlo Guthrie didn’t write the song, but I had no idea who did. I’m most fond of Arlo’s version partly because I grew up with it.
But I agree with OBloodyHell that there is a stark contrast between Goodman’s version and the others. The big surprise for me is the difference in the chorus. My first impression was a little shock at how Goodman bangs through the chorus like it was any other verse.
I think Arlo and Willie Nelson conform more to modern pop music conventions, which musically is just better. The chorus is special and should be highlighted so as to burrow into the listener’s mind. But I think Goodman is tapping into an older style of folk music. I don’t mean the Joan Baez era of folk, but older than that.
Here is Arlo’s dad performing in that older style. It’s not a perfect example, but notice how he uses the short chorus as a punctuation “period” for his stanza. And he just bangs through it, with little or no special emphasis.
I Ain’t Got No Home in This World by Woodie Guthrie
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GTnVMulDTYA
Some working man’s socialism. Too inappropriate?
I think the essence of the style is folk poetry put to some fine guitar picking. My guess is that the poetry or story telling is paramount in the singer’s mind.
Richard Aubrey, thanks for the stories on Spain. Thousands of years of conflicts, and the rock-hauling to support them!
Isabel Allende recently wrote A Long Petal of the Sea , about a Republican refugee[s] from the Spanish Civil War who settled in Chile. Her protagonists have no trouble admitting that both sides in the conflict committed atrocities. She brings up the Republican massacre of priests and nuns.
What is interesting to me is how she portrayed the era when Salvador Allende was President. Fascist military, US interference, etc. In addition to his politics, she had good reason to be fond of Salvador Allende. Salvador Allende, her father’s first cousin, acted as a surrogate father to Isabel after her father abandoned his family. As such, one should not be surprised at Isabel’s portrayal of of that era in A Long Petal of the Sea.
However, in previous books, she had admitted that Chile was a deeply divided country. In Paula, she wrote that the legislature had declared the Allende government in violation of the Constitution (She didn’t mention the 81-47 vote margin.). She also wrote that her maternal grandfather supported the coup. She also pointed out that most of the civilians supporting the coup assumed that there would be elections in 6 months. Had they realized the military was going to remain for 16 years, would they still have supported the coup? Good point. In My Invented Country, she wrote that while Pinochet may have been a SOB (not her precise words), he had a profound influence on the country. Give the devil his due.
But none of that both-sides point of view in A Long Petal of the Sea. My take is that as this is perhaps her final book- she turns 79 this year- she no longer saw the need for objectivity.
Gringo,
We did something like that to a young North American tourist in Bolivia. We taught her that when she made a mistake in speech, she should say “Estoy embarazada”, which meant “I am embarrassed”. In retrospect that was kinda mean, although we thought it was funny at the time. Don’t forget, I was 17 and my pre-frontal cortex wasn’t anywhere near developed.
I really didn’t speak the language that well. My Spanish teacher taught us Castilian Spanish, which is quite different from what they speak in South America. So I was pegged as an North American from the moment I opened my mouth. I guess it’s just that in 1970, things were different. That, and fools run in where Angels dare to tread.
Your post also explained why I’ve never been able to find Tatú in a Spanish dictionary. It is not Spanish. It’s Guaraní. Thanks.
Waidmann
One of favorite non religious songs. Often hear Willie Nelson’s version on Country Music Radio. Thanks for enlightening us on the author. Always had wrongly figured it was Willie who wrote it.
Regarding Goodman’s treatment and distinct performance.
It is hard to tell the brand or make of the guitar Goodman is using. And, I got no clear look at the headstock. But it has a notably particular sound.
In that murky looking video, it looks rather like one I am familiar with: a Gibson LG-1; a once relatively common smaller body student type guitar with a comparatively narrow neck.
An economical – for a Gibson, that is- ladder braced [I could not see into the body well enough to determine] entry level guitar with Kluson ivory plastic key head tuners, it was nonetheless well regarded, and way “over delivered” as they say in the liquor store business; being notable for a clear, bright, and projecting sound.
What I noticed as a kid was how comparatively “loud” it was, and the incredible sustain of the instrument. It would just, not, quit, ringing.
One problem area was a plastic bridge which tended to pull away from the top of the lower bout over the years. For nostalgia’s sake, I eventually dug my guitar out of a neglected closet and had the bridge replaced by a professional who used a fine quality mahogany one. The guitar sounded comparatively dead after that. Not bad, but not so notably lively.
Even so, Goodman’s guitar does not seem to have even as much original bass response as I recall the models having – though it was recognized as modest in any event. But the tenor overload I am hearing could be deliberate and due to his strings, his tuning, and/or his playing.
I would not mention any of this despite taking a second and even third look at the instrument. But someone mentioned that Goodman was a rather small man, physically speaking. Or as Bogart is taunted in ‘The Big Sleep”, by the spoiled and teasing Carmen Sternwood, “You’re not very tall, are you …”
Because of that, Goodman not beimg overly tall and all, the model would make sense.
Someone here may know better of course.
I remember Steve Goodman and The Earl of Old Town very well from the years I lived in Chicago. I prefer the recoded version of The City of New Orleans by Arlo Guthry that’s on his Alice’s Restaurant album.
Lincoln Towing, aka, the Lincoln Park Pirates, was notorious around Chicago for their very rough tactics for towing cars. Lincoln Park is a very nice section of town on the Near North side that has a wonderful zoo and a huge public park. LT had some sort of monopoly for towing cars that were at expired parking meters. Their game was to have scouts cruise around looking for meters that were about to expire and roll up a tow truck the instant it did. Then it was no mercy, even if you were there about to put more money in the meter. Off it would go and you could only get it back for $25 cash, a lot of money in the 70’s. Needless to say, they were universally hated.
DNW:
Tons of information I found here:
Thanks, Neo.
I can now amend what I earlier wrote, having checked it out on a computer rather than hand held device.
Now, I’d lay $50.00 against a skeptic’s $1.00 that the guitar is a Gibson LG-1.
– The large screen allows me to see the ladder bracing inside.
– The truss rod cover looks right. Don’t know why I cannot see any Gibson script on the headstock if I can see that. [OK now I can. Trying to figure how I spotted the truss rod cover – it has a bell shape – I looked again and now see at least the shape and slant of the script @ 4:40]
– The slim neck is right in terms of proportion.
Better speakers now allow me to hear the expected mid-bass response.
Part of the extra sharpness may be due to the fact that he is hitting the strings on the bridge side of the sound hole, plus any pick or string combination he is using.
If you wanted a richer more mellow/lush yet still projecting (think of trying to imitate the opening electric guitar chords of “Undun” on an acoustic) sound on that guitar, you would use a Fender thin pick, and strum or simul-pluck Brazilian style up near the neck.
It’s an LG-1. I am sure.
I think …
https://images.reverb.com/image/upload/s–sZd2HOn_–/f_auto,t_supersize/v1612383417/tbqccmizqlllozhwpogn.jpg
“Dude”, this one made me laugh. But the kid know quality when he encounters it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29h-mXeIopU
And “crazing”. Never leave your guitar in the trunk in cold or very warm weather. LOL
Long distance trains were really something special before Amtrak, thought they are sadly diminished in the US today. As a child, I accompanied my parents on numerous long distance trains on the West Coast – the Coast Daylight between San Francisco and Los Angeles, the Lark (same, but overnight through the San Joaquin Valley), the Shasta Daylight between Oakland and Portland, Oregon). When I was a small child, my father had arranged for me to ride between a couple of Northern California towns in the cab of a Northwestern Pacific steam engine (which was very scary for a 3 year old) and later an NWP diesel locomotive.
For my trip to college on the East Coast in 1966, I took the California Zephyr from Oakland to Chicago (Western Pacific as far as Salt Lake IIRC, Denver & Rio Grand Western from Salt Lake City to Denver, and Chicago, Burlington & Quincey from Denver on to Chicago). It was a wonderful experience: the Pullman accommodations were excellent, the WP Feather River Route (in the Sierra Nevada) and the D&RGW route through the Rockies were absolutely stunning. As a rail buff, I got to know the crew. I watched trout caught that morning being handed up to the dining car crew by local fishermen in Rifle, Colorado and was given a coveted dining car reservation that was window side for coming down into Denver in the evening, dining on the fresh trout with a fine half-bottle of 1959 Piesporter Kabinett Riesling. From Chicago, I rode the New York Central day train the James Whitcomb Riley to Cincinnati. It was supposed to be an all-coach train, but since I had booked a Pullman ticket all the way through, they put a Pullman observation car on for me: just me, the bartender, and the Pullman Porter. (If anyone wonders about government regulations and why the passenger trains failed….). The Riley had a superior dining car, with remarkable aged Kansas City beefsteak and a half bottle of a very respectable California Cabernet, although the scenery traveling across the Midwest was not particularly inspiring. From Cincinnati, I rode the Norfolk & Western Pocahontas overnight to Roanoke, Virginia, where the rail part of my journey ended. That, too was a most scenic ride in an older, but still quite comfortable Pullman car. On my return to California the following June, I caught the B&O Capitol Limited out of DC to Chicago, the Great Northern Empire Builder from Chicago to Portland and then the SP Cascade (since the Shasta Daylight had just been discontinued) from Portland to the Bay Area, after stops to visit relatives in Oregon. The Empire Builder was also an incredibly scenic train.
I feel remarkably fortunate to have been able to ride several transcontinental American passenger trains in their last years before Amtrak in 1970. Since, I have taken a few, including the auto train from DC to Florida, but American passenger rail service is a very, pale shadow of what it was as late as 1966.
I’ve also traveled by long distance train in Europe at various times from the ‘70s through the late ‘90s. The trains are good, and Wagon-Lits cars were very good, but I honestly preferred the Zephyr and the Empire Builder.
Neo,
Since you’ve taken such an interest in Steve Goodman the person, as well as Steve Goodman the musician, I recommend this:
Steve Goodman: Facing the Music
https://tinyurl.com/4vr548f7
It’s long but very readable.
(And my older brother shows up in a couple of the old photos)
Railroads are 19th century transportation.
Highways are 1st century transportation.
We made a terrible mistake in abandoning the latest and greatest transportation paradigm and exchanging it for a modestly improved system familiar to the Romans.
And while I’m at it, why are the advocates of the New Green Deal not pushing for the elimination of over the highway freight shipping [trucks] and using rail instead? Rail uses 25 percent of the fuel per ton-mile. I thought they wanted to reduce CO2 emissions……
David. Problem is freedom. Most of us don’t go places and distances where trains would take us and would not justify the extension of the rail. So we need some kind of personal transportation. And then, why not the road? No need to transfer, find parking, arrange to be picked up, rent something for local transport at the destination. The TSA would expand.
Not long ago, my wife and I were on a two-lane road in Kansas about twenty miles from the nearest interstate. It was farm country. We were surprised to find that actually three quarters of the vehicles coming our way were big trucks, including a lot of semis. They were working local. Long haul would be on the interestate. Grain was part of the loads. Heavy equipment and various inputs such as fertilizer and pesticides.
I have no idea where they were going, but the grain at least was going to market. Transferring grain from truck to train and thence to truck again to get to the processing facility is expensive both in the necessary equipment and the work and time involved.
If you look at small midwestern towns, you’ll find the landscape laid out like a grid, down to most neighborhoods. North-south, east-west. But, from overhead, you’ll see a diagonal coming in from the distance. In some cases, it’s a railroad passing the enormous grain elevators. In other cases, it isn’t but it may be, in some cases, called “Railway Street”. In other words, it used to be a rail road but truck to elevator to train to truck was abandoned. Must be some reason for that.
You thought the Green Nude Eel was about reducing CO2 emissions. Oh, my sweet summer child. (Got that from Sarah Hoyt).
By the way, the Roman roads were for fit guys moving under heavy load twenty miles a day. Ours are considerably more generous.
You know, now that I think of it, some banks are cancelling non-woke businesses such as gun manufacturers. And if your social credit is inadequate, you may not be allowed on a train. I know. Not in the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.
The problem with Rail and all other forms of public transport is simply: Other People.
Or to be brutally precise, Other Peoples.
Rail Travel in Japan is Bliss. Rail Travel in Hong Kong is Pretty Damn Good. Rail Travel in India is Hell — granted it may not be hell for actual Indians who appear to love crowding and excrement everywhere. Different Races, different behaviours.
Public transport in the West is fraught with Mystery Meat immigrant stock with very different behavioural characteristics, and a degenerate native stock who have been actively de-educated in the ways of politeness and respect for others in a confined environment. Who would want to subject themselves to any of this instead of paying a premium for privacy?
All of this in addition to the freedom provided by the automobile and the lack of economies of scale in large countries like USA. As usual we like to focus on the less relevant stuff because it’s politically safer. Really we just don’t like each other enough to want to spend much time in enforced togetherness. And who can blame us for that?
Waidmann
I really didn’t speak the language that well. My Spanish teacher taught us Castilian Spanish, which is quite different from what they speak in South America. So I was pegged as an North American from the moment I opened my mouth.
You spoke the language well enough for them to not pull any tricks on you like embarrassed/embarazada. I don’t think that your being taught Castilian Spanish made that much of a difference in identifying you as North American. In Bolivia and most of Latin America, a Caucasian is identified as “not from here,” in contrast to the mestizo or indigenous population. (In Peru’s mountains, a Peruvian of European ancestry is considered a “Gringo,” just like those from the US. ) In Argentina, a Caucasian is not so labeled, but there my causal USA wardrobe pegged me as “not from here.” On occasion, perfect strangers would come up to me to denounce the military regime- they could tell by my wardrobe I was “not from here.” Your accent pegged you as “not from here,” but more because your accent probably wasn’t good enough to peg you as a native speaker. Doubtful that many pegged you as being from Spain, even with being taught Castilian Spanish.
For the most part, I found my USA nationality to be an asset- especially because I spoke Spanish and was comfortable being down there.
Neo,
Don’t know what the heck I am doing this late on a weekend night but … you just have to click on this for about 15 seconds. Laughing my posterior off … listen carefully to what she says a few seconds after the link.
I’d pat myself on the back if I could reach. ***
https://youtu.be/S1s0HXe8ff8?t=350
Beginning to regret I gave it to my brother. Naw, he’s a good guy.
***
“What I noticed as a kid was how comparatively “loud” it was, and the incredible sustain of the instrument. It would just, not, quit, ringing“
Richard,
Appreciate your lengthy reply. You have several good points.
It is true that rails don’t go everywhere. Of course, neither do highways or country roads. Where they go is a function of where we invest transportation capital. We had something like twice today’s rail route mileage a hundred years ago, with a far smaller population. It should have been increased and extended, but instead entire railroads were pulled up for scrap.
We moved virtually all of our heavy freight by rail during WWII, so it isn’t like the system didn’t work.
Of course there would be a place for trucks. Every tool has its proper uses. I simply maintain that the market is distorted by the economic arrangements now in place. Who owns the rails? The particular railroad companies. Who owns the interstates? Government. When highway users pay property taxes on their rights of way on the same basis as do railroad users then perhaps the market would be able to direct resources and tools more efficiently.
My point about CO2 was to mock the Green Nude Eel fans. For me, CO2 is the gas of life. Plants love it. And without plants we die.
Whenever I am stuck in a traffic jam I think fondly of the proposition that the auto allows me to go wherever I want, whenever I want.
Crowding, is bad enough. Stench is another. I got so damn worked up on a Chicago Elevated that I wanted to kill and toss off – literally kill, in self-defense – some guy who got on the train and started wandering around emitting an acrid, vomit inducing, eye burning stench that the other passive milquetoast occupants pretended to ignore … the cowardly effs.
The only thing I have ever experienced remotely like it was in college where my class on metaphysics was held in a room immediately vacated by an ‘English as second language’ class. It made me furious. I’d get there a few minutes early, hold my breath, and immediately open all the windows. It was so bad it could make your eyes water.
Then, typically, a lumpy troll like older female would enter, glance at me while scowling, and indignantly start closing the same windows I had just opened. Whereupon I would go open them up again and stand next to one. And then she would furiously glare at me through the spectacles perched on her blunt bulb of an Elton John excuse for a nose.
Once, the Jesuit who taught the class arrived and she asked him to close the windows. I told him they were open because it stank in there enough to make you sick. He took it well, but my little social justice precursor friend, did not.
I had stated the unutterable apparently. Tough. There are limits.
I mean it’s one thing to ignore those who shout and scream and act like an ass. But it is another to expect me to blandly tolerate a suffocating stink.
That’s, going too far, mate.
@DNW:
Yup. IIRC Dutton and Woodley talked about one or more studies which suggested that Progressives have an impaired disgust response cf. normal humans.
For the rest of the normal folks Stench must be a reptilian brain flight or fight response type stimulus. Suppressing these responses cannot be good for us.
In the good old days, there would have been some hawk-eyed Dominicans handy to burn that witch you encountered — and to keep the Jesuit on his toes or better yet intrigue to get him and his kind expelled to foreign parts 🙂
FWIW, I love trains and am very much in favour of electing a New (Older) People to ride with in them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmciuKsBOi0
The full Night Mail documentary used to be on YouTube. I watched it ca. 2010. Sadly it may have been taken down for copyright infringement.
David. Lots of people looked at the situation and the factors you describe and decided on roads. They might be thought to have had something relevant in mind.
Another I can think of is the delay of, say, thirty railroad cars while the thirty-first is partially unloaded at a depot someplace. Switch yards, which were sometimes called marshaling yards when the Eighth Air Force was bombing them, accounted for a good deal of time sitting and employees breaking and reassembling goods trains.
There is a place in Texas to which we may be traveling. It’s sixteen hours driving, which is to say two days. If I fly, I can get there in one day. I would have to leave the house three hours before the flight–one to get to the airport and two to hang around. I’m on the plane for a couple of hours. An hour, maybe, to deplane and claim luggage. Get to the rental place. Drive to my location. Or somebody else can put in the hours to come and pick us up. In the instant case that is not possible, but it would count as time spent in getting us to our destination. It would be long day.
Driving is two days, which we can swing, being retired. More comfortable seating, pick our seatmates, better food, cleaner restrooms, better scenery, pack what we want, have a car when we’re there, and leave when we wish without having to reticket and return the rental car.
Traveling by rail would have all the disadvantages of traveling by air. We might save a few hours compared to driving by traveling while asleep, but I’m over six feet and don’t do well with certain accommodations. And all that romantic lulling goes away if the train has to stop and start again when detraining passengers.
Current situation is the result of a lot of people making decisions in their own best interests. Including Eisenhower. In “The Men Who United The States”
Winchester gives a detailed account of the Army’s attempt to drive across country. Ike, as a young officer, was involved, and it seemed to have marked him. Hence the National Defense Highway Act. Ike was no dummy and, had railroads looked like the better deal, he’d have put the nation on rails. WW II’s traffic on the rails was because of the inability to drive any economical distance with heavy loads in any useful time. That’s changed. My father went off to the Army on a train, I on a plane. And then his account of taking the train with his division from Desert Center, CA to the POE on the east coast….. He and his platoon sergeant would, when the thing was stopped, take a couple of buckets to the engine and get some hot water so his guys could wash. Downhill from there.
David…”And while I’m at it, why are the advocates of the New Green Deal not pushing for the elimination of over the highway freight shipping [trucks] and using rail instead? Rail uses 25 percent of the fuel per ton-mile.”
Rail is often used for long-haul of freight, with trucks used on either end…I believe UPS is one of the largest intermodal customers of US railroads. Containerized imports often go directly by rail from the port to an inland location, there to be offloaded and hauled by truck to their final destination. But for hauls of less than a few hundred miles, and those that are especially time-critical, trucking is generally the way to go.
Re the GND, there has been some discussion of electrifying freight railroads, so that they could (theoretically) be powered by wind/solar rather than diesel fuel. Hugely capital-intensive to do this on a large scale, although there may be some individual routes where it makes sense.
https://www.railwayage.com/freight/class-i/dont-dismiss-freight-rail-electrification/?RAchannel=home
WFMT’s Saturday night “Midnight Special” (“Folk music and farce, show tunes and satire, madness and escape” from 9 p.m. to midnight, since 1953 – recommended!) sometimes plays the song, often with the host reminiscing about the time Goodman wandered into the station and announced, “I’ve just written this song, wanna hear it?”
We took the train (the Iron Rooster of Theroux’s title) from Urumqi in Xinjiang to Beijing (in 1988). It took six days, though we took two days off in Lanzhou for a side trip to see the Buddhas in Dunhuang.
News this morning is that Canadian Pacific Railroad is buying the Kansas City Southern for $29B, creating a combined railroad stretching from Canada thru the US and into Mexico. Several interesting maps show the potential for different kinds of commodities:
https://www.railwayage.com/freight/class-i/canadian-pacific-kansas-city-southern-will-merge-into-the-first-usmca-railroad-cpkc/
Thanks neo for the wonderful musical flashbacks you do. As we on the center-right know, there is is more to life than just politics. I just think the 1970’s gave us the best music (even though the Beatles had already broken up).
Too bad Amtrak is just too damn expensive! One of my big regrets is that I never traveled cross country by auto.
Richard Aubrey: “Traveling by rail would have all the disadvantages of traveling by air.”
And take longer. I have a strong sentimental bias toward railroad. But what you say is unfortunately true in my limited experience. Back in the ’80s I looked at Amtrak for a 1500-or-so-mile trip. It would have cost as much as air and taken twice as long. Then in the ’90s my wife and I did actually take our four children on such an Amtrak trip. It was interesting but impractical from several points of view.
Still not tired of music (was tired of Biden before he was inaugurated).
I liked Arlo’s studio version the best, and Willie’s the least. Tho there was a car graveyard picture of an old station wagon that reminded me of 60s travels with my mother and 3 sisters (when she had visitation rights to see us); no seat belts, gas (“wars!”) at 25 cents/ gal.
Glad that Stephen Goodman is getting credit. His version was still just OK.
Arlo’s live version gets added energy with the audience singing along. The most emotional part of this featured trio of songs.
(What about the harmonies of the Kingston Trio & MTA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hK4GHli1gHw one of my mother’s favorites, and sung in our Rambler.)
Also reminds me of Arlo’s bigger hit – Alice’s Restaurant (You can get anything you want). … but now to stop myself from getting political.
What about the choice between love and money? I looked up Jackson Browne’s song, with lyrics (The Pretender) little known to me :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ROK1-VvOQ0
https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/jacksonbrowne/thepretender.html
Caught between the longing for love
And the struggle for the legal tender
Whichever you choose, you’ll want more of the other, too.
But smart guys follow this verse’s advice:
I’m going to find myself a girl
Who can show me what laughter means
And we’ll fill in the missing colors
In each other’s paint-by-number dreams
And then we’ll put our dark glasses on
And we’ll make love until our strength is gone
And when the morning light comes streaming in
We’ll get up and do it again
Get it up again
We had our first child 14 months after marriage, and two more in less than 3 years. A guy at work joked “don’t you have a TV?”.
The thing about love is the combination of lust feeling, and chosen commitment faithfully followed.
Faithfully doing it, again and again.
I love new things, different things, and trying things just because I haven’t tried them before. To love a woman means giving up loving other women. Most of the time it’s not too difficult, but sometimes it’s hard.
Few songs about “love” include the commitment aspect of doing it again and again, even when it’s not as exiting as it was at first. And of course the Free Market, which I mostly support, has the flaw that:
Sex sells.
Normal folk have sexual desires, and most songs about love allude to them, like The Pretender …
But City of New Orleans doesn’t – it’s more a Love of America.
Trains, mummies, Buddhism in China … and Theroux
Ms Seebach’s comment contains enough interesting keywords to provoke several posting topics on the part of our host.
Strangely, in thinking about them, I realized that the comments would almost of necessity grimly circle back to the angles we are trying to briefly escape: identity politics and collective minded, or mindless collective, petty (as well as grand) persecution and tyranny, and just plain weirdness.
For a bit though, I mistakenly thought that Theroux, had written Chatwin’s famous book. But, unsure, I just looked it up. He didn’t, obviously. Yet, the Wiki entry on Chatwin links to both Theroux and to V.S. Naipul [“Among the Believers”, a prescient book if there ever were one] as well as to the author of “The Satanic Verses’ as friends.
What a nexus.
Nonetheless, it appears there is no escape from the dull hammer of moronic bigotry [As opposed to the enlightened kind I am in favor of] in travel stories.
Even “In Patagonia” treated of it. Thinking here of poor ‘Robbie’, I believe his name was; unmoored and trying to survive among culturally hostile companions who were relentless in their derision. Or so I remember Chatwin’s description of the young gaucho’s fate as an ‘orphan’ Scot in Patagonia.
Speaking of Patagonia, Trelew, which was mentioned in the book, has become a yearly site for feminist desecration rituals directed at the cathedral there. Unless, I have mistaken it for another Treffpontlewfyr-something town in Welsh Paragonia.
And speaking of Chatwin, I just found out that the mysterious illness which led to his early death has been explained; though, I never knew of it. However something did not sound quite right at the time.
In that regard I remember some old acquaintances of my parents dropping into the summer cottage -actually, a farm – one midafternoon: and in passing, mournfully recounting the loss of their son.
I was in the kitchen taking a beer break from sawing wood or something, and asked what happened. They said he died of pneumonia. Or maybe it was tuberculosis. After expressing sympathy, I then went on to express amazed outrage that in this day and age such an easily cured disease could prove fatal. Where did he live? California. His wife and kids must be devastated. He was not married. His girlfriend, then. They didn’t know. Well, sorry to go on like this, but she should investigate!
Yeah … But at that time I had not yet seen grown men dressed up like 1950’s leatherized Hollywood versions of The Wild One driving mopeds around gaily bedecked neighborhoods.
Not long after, I did.
One moment as I was following a map and cutting across town I was thinking, “Boy the people in this neighborhood really restore and take care of these houses. Look at all the decorative flags and coloful pinwheels. “.
The next moment, I almost drove up on the curb after gawking in bewilderment at a shirtless guy all dressed in black leather, chaps and cap included, tooling through the heat down the street on a 50cc joke of a bike.
And here we are today …
I found DNW’s discussion of guitars interesting, even though I don’t play the instrument. There is this on guitar bridges.
Then Neo mentions that Steve Goodman used to perform with a mandolin player, which reminded me of Kieran Kane and Kevin Welch, who I’ve heard live on one occasion.
Something About You
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWclzae2BOw
There is not much live video (with good sound) of them on Youtube.
Here are a couple more songs without video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXHOXSvpXxE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXh_iRogTnw
And a sad song about riding the train to Birmingham.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVVKUdGAo7Q
Richard,
I’ve always wondered about Ike’s motivation for the original coast to coast vehicle caravan. Yeah, it took forever over the dirt roads of the day. And in the same era (1920’s) you could have moved an entire division by rail from San Francisco to New York inside a week. Got a copy of the 1929 Official Guide to the Railways in my library, and I’ve reviewed the timetable data. So what was Ike’s stunt about, anyway? We didn’t need ‘Defense Highways’. The more cynical side of me says he was in the pocket of the auto/highway/oil/rubber interests and did what his masters wanted him to do: Let’s destroy the railways ’cause we can make oodles more money selling jalopies to the proles. So the government decided to invest mountains of money in the infrastructure for highway vehicles to ‘compete’ with rail. For us it is something like entering a swimming meet with buckets tied to your ankles.
I do note that much of this discussion revolves around passenger services. And I will agree that for many people – most people – the auto is the better option. Even back in the 1920’s. I tend to forget that it is not widely understood that moving heavy freight is what railroads do best. And yes, my railroad – BNSF, nee Santa Fe – could move 8,000 foot trains of containers from Long Beach, Ca to Chicago in two days. We still do it.
I did meet my wife in Dodge City on a long trip from Kansas to California. So not all that mixing it up with strangers ends badly!
I don’t think it is possible to have an industrialized economy without the heavy lift that rails provide. My wife’s poor Bolivia, for example, has no unified rail system. There are bits and pieces, but no unified system. The truckers there call themselves ‘Heavy Lift’ – snort! And Bolivia’s economy has never got off the ground.
Speaking of railroads – this is kinda cool. https://www.torontosun.com/business/money-news/canadian-pacific-railway-to-buy-kansas-city-southern-for-us25-billion
“ The deal would create the first U.S.-Mexico-Canada railroad, offering a single integrated rail system connecting ports on the U.S. Gulf, Atlantic and Pacific coasts with overseas markets.”
Oops. Sorry, railroad deal already mentioned above.
}}} Or as Bogart is taunted in ‘The Big Sleep”, by the spoiled and teasing Carmen Sternwood, “You’re not very tall, are you …”
How can you repeat that line without his response:
“I try to be…”
THAT was an American Male of the pre-60s — A woman tried to diss him, and he just blew it off with a laugh.
}}} gas (“wars!”) at 25 cents/ gal.
True, but minwage was $1.25/hr, meaning you had to work an hour for 5 gallons of gas.
With the minwage @$5.15 in 2000, and gas under a buck a gallon, you pretty much had the same.
Now it was a bit poorer (depending on location) with gas (pre-Biden) at about $1.90 and minwage @$7.25, about 3.8 gallons of gas. Biden, of course, now has you buying 2 gallons for your hour of work.
}}} So the government decided to invest mountains of money in the infrastructure for highway vehicles to ‘compete’ with rail. For us it is something like entering a swimming meet with buckets tied to your ankles.
1) The Highway killed passenger rail. Freight is doing fine.
2) Rail has a harder time with some of the bigger vehicles, and is subject to attacks in a manner that highway’s aren’t.
3) The original notion was that the under/overpasses would be civil defense shelters. A few of these were done, but once the real cost was known, the idea was quickly abandoned.
4) The country wanted/needed bigger, more reliable roads, pure and simple. I will cite Robert Heinlein’s “The Roads Must Roll”. It’s one of the three specific instances where Heinlein saw a development, and got the overall concept right, even if not the underlying tech that eventually came into play (the other two are “Blowups Happen” — nuclear power issues and concerns — and “Solution Unsatisfactory” — the future of MAD applied to warfare). While he saw a development of moving sidewalks, a casual reading of the description, it’s EFFECTS are the same as an interstate highway.
Ike’s issue was what to do if railroads are damaged by sabotage or bombing. Every so often, they must be straight enough that an emergency air strip can be jerried up.
As a prole I am very happy to have a POV and roads to where I want to go.
My father wasn’t so insouciant about moving a division by train. Bad for health and morale. Better to do it by large air craft. Meantime, the equipment is there, or in theater, depending.
Tom Grey:
“The Pretender” is a huge favorite of mine. Browne is an especially fine lyricist (as is Steve Goodman, by the way). A lot of my favorite solo artists are wonderful lyricists: Richard Thompson, Leonard Cohen, in addition to the aforementioned. Funny thing, though – although I like some of Bob Dylan a lot (“Don’t Think Twice” and certain others), I’ve never been a tremendously big fan of his, despite his being known for good lyrics. To me, for the most part, they don’t rise to the level of the others.
Never heard of Richard Thompson. I will give him a listen. Thanks.
Thanks for the link, Tommy.
In reviewing it, it occurs to me that the replacement bridge which was installed on my childhood Gibson GL-1, was probably rosewood, and not mahogany. I have no idea why I said that that very nice bridge was mahogany; other than in memory, it was lighter in color than ebony and more akin in shade to the mahogany sides and back of the guitar. If a bit lighter yet, in color. Similar to a new and undarkened with age fretboard (rosewood) would in fact be about right!
Now, I do have a blonde Heritage Golden Eagle, and that does have a floating ebony bridge; which of course is much narrower as it merely transfers the string vibrations to the spruce top, and does not do dual service as both saddle mount and a plate to anchor the strings. They, being held in that instance, as with most archtops, in a tailpiece.
There is a particularly good video from a technical perspective on the process of the rebuilding of a bridge on a musician’s mid sixties GL-1 on YouTube.
That guitar, not only had had the faux ebony plastic bridge replaced before the restorer ever got to it, but the job was botched and wrongly seated, affecting the scale.
As preparation, the luthier not only filled all previous screw hole bores with spruce dowels, he then inserted hard maple discs into the surface holes where the bridge pins had formerly passed through the bridge and into and through the surface of the spruce top.
Then he drilled through the rock maple inserts so as to create a hard ferrule (or ‘bushing’ to you machinists) that unlike with the soft walled holes drilled through the spruce, would not eventually wallow out from the side pressure of the string anchoring bridge pins.
I had in fact noticed on my own guitar that the holes ttrough the spruce top beneath the plastic bridge, had similarly become somewhat ovoid and sloppy through the years. This guy solved that problem neatly.
Don’t mean to run on but as you seem interested in technical matters, you may wish to check out the sound comparision offered from about a decade ago on YouTube between two new built Gibson versions of justly the famous J45: ‘The (current) Standard’, and the ‘True Vintage’ reproduction. Sitka spruce versus the original but now rare Adirondak spruce. Bone nut, saddle, and pins, versus the current materials.
There are those who prefer the sound of the newer production materials. But the ‘True Vintage’ version does sound noticeably more like the one that, say, ‘old uncle Jess’ had had. Somehow, it is a “wider” and more profoundly resonating sound, if less bright.
Vid is about 5 minutes. You need speakers to fully appreciate the difference.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dgV5Bq610i0