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GOOOOO.....CUBBIES
On Sunday night, TV viewers who hung on till the bitter end of the Cubs’ squeaker victory over the Indians in Game 5 of the World Series got an earful of “Go, Cubs, Go,” the song that has been played at Wrigley Field since 2007 after every home team victory as the grounds crew raises the white “W” flag.
As a musical composition, the kindest thing that can be said about “Go, Cubs, Go” is that it’s simple and catchy. Even the smallest child or most inebriated fan can pick it up and join in for the chorus. For the opposing team and its supporters, it’s probably annoying enough to border on psychological warfare.
But “Go, Cubs, Go” is more than a song. It’s a tribute to performer Steve Goodman, who composed the iconic song, “City of New Orleans,” and was one of the most devoted Cubs fans of all time. Goodman, a Chicago singer and songwriter, died tragically of leukemia in 1984 at the age of 36, just 11 days before he was scheduled to sing the national anthem at the Cubs’ first-ever appearance in the National League playoffs. It’s also a testament to Goodman’s particular sense of humor.
Back in 1981, Goodman had written and recorded a song called “A Dying Cub Fan’s Last Request.” In the tradition of “St. James Infirmary,” it’s about a Cub fan who envisions his own Wrigley Field funeral. The chorus begins, “Do they still play the blues in Chicago when baseball season rolls around? Do the Cubbies still play in their ivy-covered burial ground?”
At that point, the Cubs’ last World Series championship was 72 years earlier.
“‘Dying Cub Fan’ made [Cubs general manager] Dallas Green nuts,” recalled Dan Fabian, the program director and head of promotions at the local Chicago super-station WGN-TV at the time, in a 2007 interview with Chicago Tribune columnist Eric Zorn. “He said we didn’t need that kind of negativity anymore. He hated the line about ‘doormat of the National League.’ He said that Steve Goodman is no fan of the Cubs.” Green forbade Goodman to sing the song inside Wrigley Field.
But early in 1984, when Fabian was looking for a song to replace Mitch Miller’s “It’s a Beautiful Day for a Ballgame” as the opening song to the Cubs’ radio broadcasts, he happened to hear Goodman on Roy Leonard’s WGN talk show and realized he had found the perfect person to write the new song.
For one thing, Green was wrong: Goodman had been a devoted Cubs fan all his life, starting from his childhood in the then-heavily Jewish Albany Park neighborhood on the northwest side and his adolescence in Park Ridge (where he was a high-school classmate of fellow Cubs fan Hillary Clinton). The stoic resignation of “A Dying Cub Fan” is common to Cubs-lovers:
“But what do you expect When you raise up a young boy’s hopes And then just crush ’em like so many paper beer cups Year after year after year After year, after year, after year, after year, after year?”
(In concert, says Goodman’s biographer Clay Eals, Goodman would introduce “Dying Cub Fan” by telling the audience, “If you grew up in Chicago, you knew everything there was to know about pain by the time you were 10 years old.”)
In addition to understanding the psychology of Cub-dom, Goodman happened to be a great songwriter. During his lifetime, he wrote and recorded 13 albums and developed a passionate cult following. His songs ranged from goofy numbers like “You Never Even Call Me By My Name,” which attempted to cram every country music cliché into 4 short minutes, to anthems like “City of New Orleans,” folk songs like “Somebody Else’s Troubles,” and sad and sincere ballads like “My Old Man.”
Goodman developed a cult following during his years playing folk clubs in Chicago and later opening for Steve Martin. “There are two kinds of people,” said Eals. “People who say, ‘Who’s Steve Goodman?’ and people who say ‘Steve Goodman!’”
A week after Fabian invited Goodman to write a intro song for the Cubs, Goodman called him up and sang “Go, Cubs, Go.” Fabian loved it and played it before every Cubs broadcast in the 1984 season. “For all its exuberance, the song was merely the alter ego of ‘Dying Cub Fan,’” Eals wrote in his 2007 book “Facing the Music.” “In its fatalism it was as devoted and affectionate as ‘Go Cubs Go’ was in its blind faith.”
In an irony that Goodman might have appreciated, the single of “Go, Cubs, Go” has outsold everything else in his discography.
Goodman’s early death is part of Cubs lore. He always insisted that “Dying Cub Fan” wasn’t autobiographical, but when he was writing it, he already knew he had the leukemia that would kill him.
Four years after his death, Goodman’s brother David and his friend Harry Waller snuck into Wrigley Field—Eals says they bribed a groundskeeper with a copy of Playboy into which they’d tucked a $20 bill—and scattered his ashes in left field, just as Goodman had written in the song: “Let my ashes blow in a beautiful snow/From the prevailing 30-mile-an-hour southwest wind … and I will come to my final resting place, out on Waveland Avenue.” Goodman’s wife Nancy and their three daughters scattered the rest of his ashes in Doubleday Field outside the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown.
Eals isn’t sure who made the decision to cremate Goodman instead of burying him according to Jewish law, but he notes that though Goodman had sung at Bar Mitzvahs during his years as a boy soprano in Albany Park, he was more of a cultural than observant Jew. “I will defend with my life the right to be Jewish,” Goodman’s friend Paula Ballan remembers him telling her, “but I like my pork chops well-done, thank you.”
The Cubs never made the World Series in Goodman’s lifetime, but Eals says he never lost faith that something good might happen. He ended his “Dying Cub Fan” introduction by telling the audience, “The Cubs are liable to screw it up and win so I can’t sing this song anymore.”
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