Okay. We have NY, LA, (sort of SF) and CHICAGO. And we all know that the city that lives and dies by how well it's sports teams fare is CHICAGO. At least those of us who live in the Chicago area know this. Even if sports and baseball more specifically, isn't really your thing you cannot ignore it due to the sheer volume of people that are utterly invested in their team's current status.
I've never hung out with any White Sox fans but I've raised a true-blue Cubs fan (as well as living with a fair-weather fan who did not spring from my womb). So as a nod to Chicago--my favourite American City--and as a Go-Cubs!!! gesture and as a thank you to Steve Goodman, a Chicago local music legend who died of leukemia at age 36, I present a small Cubs-flavoured (modern) music lesson.
The song became a local sports standard, but it's enjoying a big revival this season as part of a new tradition after home victories. As the team exchanges high-fives on the field, the song plays through the public address system and fans at Wrigley Field stand and sing with the chorus:
Go, Cubs, Go
Go, Cubs, Go.
Hey Chicago, whaddaya say?
The Cubs are gonna win today
"There are tears in my eyes when they sing," manager Lou Piniella told reporters Tuesday, though he had the title as "Go Cubs Win."
Fans at home are now able to join in. At the All-Star break, the WGN-TV production team that oversees the majority of Cubs telecasts decided they'd patch into the PA system during postgame celebrations and simply let the images and music speak for themselves.
"It has a really good vibe," said TV play-by-play announcer Len Kasper, who, along with partner Bob Brenly, have agreed not to talk over the festivities. "We've gotten a ton of e-mail about it."
Bob Vorwald, executive producer of WGN-TV sports, said the "Go Cubs Go" moment, which has now spread to telecasts produced by Comcast SportsNet, "has taken on a life of its own. It's like a second 7th-inning stretch. People always want to know where they can get the song, who sings it and so on."
The singer is the forever boyish folk artist Steve Goodman. Goodman, a Northwest Side native who began regularly attending Cub games when he was 8, recorded "Go Cubs Go" in advance of the 1984 season, just months before he died of leukemia at 36.
Among the backup vocalists on the refrain are former players Gary Matthews, Thad Bosley, Jay Johnstone, Jody Davis and Keith Moreland -- dubbed "The Chicago Cubs Chorus" on the label.
Moreland, at it happens, shows up in the lyrics of Goodman's other notable baseball song, "A Dying Cub Fan's Last Request," dropping a "routine fly" at the "ivy-covered burial ground."
Goodman knew he was ill in 1981 when he wrote "Dying Cub Fan," a wry, bluesy salute to perpetual failure at Clark and Addison, though he always insisted it wasn't autobiographical. And it put him on bad paper with the Cubs' front office, which then (as now, as ever) was trying to shed the team's image as lovable losers...
Former head of promotions at WGN radio, Dan Fabian, says he realized that... Goodman had the musical bona fides. He'd been recording, writing and touring on the folk circuit for more than a dozen years, and was best known to casual music fans as the composer of "The City of New Orleans" ("Good mornin', America, how are ya?"), a Top 20 hit for Arlo Guthrie in 1972.
Fabian didn't have to ask twice. A week later, Goodman, for whom experimental leukemia treatments had failed, was back at the station, guitar in hand. The sunny, bouncy, infectious "Go Cubs Go" "flat out blew us away," Fabian said.
"For all its exuberance, the song was merely the alter ego of `Dying Cub Fan,'" wrote Clay Eals in "Facing the Music" ($29.95, ECW Press), a Goodman biography published earlier this year. "In its fatalism (`Dying Cub Fan') was as devoted and affectionate as `Go Cubs Go' was in its blind faith."
Team and station executives loved it and so did the fans, particularly when the 1984 team began more often than not making good on the song's promise that "the Cubs are gonna win today."
WGN released a charity single that sold 74,000 copies, more than any other album or song Goodman ever recorded, Eals said in an interview this week. "But as the team and his song were going uphill, Steve was going downhill. It became a race to the end of the season."
Goodman lost that race. He died on Sept. 20, 1984, four days before the Cubs clinched the National League East Division title with a victory over the Pittsburgh Pirates. The only consolation was that death spared him the agony of watching the Cubs blow a two-game lead in the league championship series...
Meanwhile, one Cub fan who is particularly savoring the "Go Cubs Go" renaissance is Minette Goodman, the singer's mother.
At her home in the city she watches on TV at the end of games as the players dance joyously on the field where her son's ashes were scattered many years ago.
"It blows my mind," she said. "The Cubs win a game, and I get to hear my kid sing again. It's rewarding and comforting at the same time."
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