MOG

Most everyone knows this song:

Fifteen cars and fifteen restless riders Three conductors and twenty-five sacks of mail All along the southbound odyssey The train pulls out at Kankakee Rolls along past houses, farms and fields Passin' towns that have no names Freight yards full of old black men And the graveyards of the rusted automobiles
Chorus Good morning, America, how are you Don't you know me, I'm your native son I'm the train they call The City of New Orleans I'll be gone five hundred miles when the day is done
Dealin' cards with the old men in the club car Penny a point, ain't no one keepin' score Won't you pass the paper bag that holds the bottle Feel the wheels rumblin' 'neath the floor And the sons of pullman porters And the sons of engineers Ride their father's magic carpet made of steam Mothers with their babes asleep Are rockin' to the gentle beat And the rhythm of the rails is all they dream
Chorus
Night time on The City of New Orleans Changing cars in Memphis, Tennessee Half way home, and we'll be there by morning Through the Mississippi darkness Rolling down to the sea And all the towns and people seem To fade into a bad dream And the steel rails still ain't heard the news The conductor sings his song again The passengers will please refrain This train's got the disappearing railroad blues
Final Chorus Good night, America, how are you Don't you know me, I'm your native son I'm the train they call The City of New Orleans I'll be gone five hundred miles when the day is done

A lot of people know that it was written in 1970 by Steve Goodman, who pitched it to Arlo Guthrie, and almost everyone knows that Arlo recorded it in 1972 and it was a huge hit, as such things go. (I'll be talking about Arlo and the song in my next post...)
I was singing the song to myself today as i loaded the dishwasher, and i had a thought...
Not everyone knows that, according a story told on Steve by his buddy John Prine (as recorded on the "Steve Goodman Memorial Concert" CD), Steve may well have changed American history...
In 1972, if you'll cast your mind back (assuming you're old enough), Ed Muskie was running for President, and he was barnstorming around the country in a spoecial train, attempting to summon up memories of Truman's similar 1948 campaign.
On the train were various entertainers and supporters, and when the train was parkd near the stations in varous cities, they'd do a sort of medicine show type thing and then Muskie would speak. (One of the performers was Rosie Grier, who sang(!) Let the Sun Shine In.)
Goodman, who was already suffering from the cancer that would eventually take him from us way too soon, was one of the performers. As Prine tells the story, the night before the particular event, Steve had gotten some chili and 3.2 beer, and that (aggravated by the chemotherapy he was undergoing) had sort of backed up on him.
After doing his thing on the bally platform, Steve headed back into the train to the lavatory.
Now, in those days, the standard train lavatories weren't chemical toilets like the ones on Greyhounds or airliners - they just dumped whatever you had done on the tracks as the train rolled along (i forget how many tons annually were once dumped between the crossties on the nation's railroads, and i haven't been able to come up with a Google search that will tell me - though you'd be amazed some of the things i have found...), and Steve, sitting there, assumed that this one must do the same.
Now we come to the last verse of City of New Orleans. In case you don't have the song memorised, look up and note the lines about "the conductor sings his song again, passerngers will please refrain...". Got it? Okay.
What passengers were asked to refrain from doing was flushing the lavatory while the train was sitting in the station.
However, Steve felt that what he had done merited being flushed away, anyway, assuming that, as i said, it would just be dumped between the ties, under the train.
But this car's lavatory was a more modern type that tried to avoid leaving unsightly, shall we say, lumps lying on the tracks, and instead of just opening a little trap door and dumping the contenst, it used a system that basically blew it all out the side of the car as a sort of mist.
And, as Prine puts it, "...just as Muskie was saying 'I know what America needs," Stevie pulled the chain!"
(An account of the event, as told by Steve's wife, can be found online.)

Posted on 01/22/2008

Tags: Muskie, campaign, 1972, train, lavatory, 3.2 beer, history, Rosie Grier