Steve Goodman’s “Election Year Rag” was first released as a non-LP single during the 1972 campaign between incumbent President Richard Nixon and South Dakota Senator George McGovern. The country songwriter — famous at the time for penning the Arlo Guthrie “The City of New Orleans” — could be variously sentimental and sarcastic (A lifelong baseball fan, Goodman titled one of his later albums High and Outside). “Election Year Rag” expresses our universal exhaustion.
And its as true today as it was in 1972. Who could have predicted forty-four years ago that a future election would involve candidates discussing dick size in a debate, caught on tape boasting of molesting women, or caught and questioned by the FBI for violating the public trust. Or interference in our election by the Russians — the Russians! What would Nixon say? — or the FBI itself. We’re so far through the looking glass its hard to remember what real politics were like.
This song is actually the second most relevant Steve Goodman song today. The first would be either “Go Cubs Go” or “A Dyin’ Cub Fan’s Last Request.” Praised for writing “the perfect country and western song” by David Allen Coe, Goodman’s true claim to fame may be his passion for his favorite baseball team.
Goodman’s ashes were, according to his brother David, scattered in left field. David Goodman and a friend bribed a groundkeeper with a Playboy and $20 — we are not making this up — to sneak in and spread the ashes four years after the country songwriter passed away from Leukemia.
This is, strangely, our second music-related post about scattering ashes this week.
The Cubs won the Eastern Division title for the first time just four days after Goodman passed away in the fall of 1984. He had been asked to sing “The Star Spangled Banner” before his beloved team’s first post season game since 1945, and Jimmy Buffett (who has recorded several of Goodman’s songs over the years) filled in. The Cubs lost the game to the Padres, 3-2.
Steve Goodman re-recorded “Election Year Rag” for a short-lived National Public Radio segment in 1979. The spots featured Goodman, accompanied by Jethro Burns, performing freshly-written songs on the subject of current events, but most of them were never aired. We haven’t been able to find these online, let alone anywhere out in the real world.
As they they have at the end of every Cubs victory for years, fans at Wrigley Field heard Goodman’s “Go Cubs Go” after their team won its first World Series title in 108 years.