July 22, 1972: Jeff Goldstein

 

Everybody I wrote about up to this point moved on to other things. Now meet someone who stayed.  

July 22, 1972 

Jeff’s Gentle Folk Songs Stir Listeners

His Voice Is ‘Smooth, Filled With Emotion’ 

SINGER-SONGWRITER Steve Goodman, who hails from Chicago, came to UB for a concert last April and the show just slipped Jeff Goldstein’s mind.

        He didn’t recall it until about 2:30 a.m. when some of his friends called from Jerry Raven’s Limelight Gallery coffeehouse and said they had somebody who wanted to talk to him. It was Goodman.

        “I can’t thank you enough for doin’ my songs out here,” he told Jeff. “Everybody around here knows my songs.”

        What convinced Goodman that someone was out spreading the word were the requests for the satirical “Lincoln Towing Company” – a song which isn’t on his album. Somebody must have picked it up in Chicago.

        Unhappily, it was too late for Goodman to get together with Jeff. He had to catch a 10 a.m. plane.

        “I really wanted to meet him because I wanted to sit down and talk,” Jeff says. “And I really wanted him to hear my songs, you know. I went out to drive cab the next morning and I felt bad.”

        Three or four times Jeff heard Goodman at the Quiet Knight in Chicago during the two years he spent there before he came home again to Buffalo last fall. How he got the songs is another story.

        “I had this roommate Brian who wanted to be a folksinger too,” Jeff explains. “He used to take a cassette recorder along to see Goodman. Then we’d listen to the tapes and have good times. That’s when I started really practicing.”

* * *

JEFF, NOW 21, had been playing guitar for several years, picking up on the one his younger sister got for her birthday after she got tired of it. He also played clarinet in the Sweet Home High School band.

        Going to the Newport Folk Festival in 1968 and 1969 deepened his interests. After the second trip, he started in at UB but just couldn’t get interested in classes.

        He began hitchhiking, traveling wherever the spirit moved him. One loose-hanging journey took him to Boston, where he spent a week drinking coffee in a Harvard Square restaurant and reading Herman Hesse.

        A friend at MIT named Jeff Cooper gave him a place to stay, showed him things in guitar-playing and songs that he hadn’t seen before.

        The first time he went to Chicago was for the Yippie Days of Rage, but his reason for going was because it was a cheap ($12) bus ride and he wanted to see the place.

        “It was frightening,” he remembers. “We were herded around like a bunch of cattle.”

        The next time he went to Chicago, he stayed.

        “I was working in an insecticide warehouse for a while,” he says. “I worked in a boutique. I was a transportation orderly in a hospital.”

* * *

“WHEN I DECIDED to get enough money to buy a Martin guitar, I got a job sweeping up the offices in Cory Coffee Co. That guitar was another thing that got me practicing a lot.”

        Across the street from where he lived was Loyola University. He attended a few classes there, a few concerts and hootenannies and heard “people singing songs that sounded like songs.”

        There aren’t many people who blend melody and chord changes and words together to fit Jeff’s criteria. Steve Goodman does. So does Chicagoan John Prine. So do Paul Simon, James Taylor, Joni Mitchell.

        “You know what I like on the radio now? That Gilbert O’Sullivan song. It goes along nice,” he says.

        “The song I can’t stand is that ‘Taxi.’ It’s so clichéd. It doesn’t go anywhere. A song needs a beginning, a bridge to change the tune and then something to get back into it. You gotta have that release.”

* * *

JEFF STARTED writing songs for himself in the spring of 1971. Friends liked them, but he didn’t really start playing in public until he was back in Buffalo last fall. There were too many folksingers in Chicago. Too few jobs.

        Folksinging hasn’t been a steady line of work here, either. He was driving taxi, giving guitar lessons. His first paid appearance came New Year’s Eve at a ski resort.

        He fell in with some of the local folk crowd by going to Jerry Ralston’s hootenannies at Shakey’s Pizza Parlor on Niagara Falls Boulevard and met Jennifer Miller, lead vocalist with the former rock group Jennifer’s Family and then singer in a folk trio Orion. She became the inspiration for several of Jeff’s sad and deeply moving love songs.

        One called simply “Jennifer” is happy with the surprise of fresh emotion (“Though the weather’s feelin’ cold these days, I’m feelin’ kinda good … There’s a girl to keep me smilin’ warm … I think I’m kinda settled now, I think I’m all here.”). Another one called “Be My Baby” aches for companionship that was lost.

        His voice is smooth and expressive, a bit like James Taylor only filled with more emotion, and it dips here and there into velvet throatiness.

        Another of his songs has a fluid “Alice’s Restaurant” guitar figure and tells of a scholar who becomes a singer in Spain in Columbus’ time, singing to please Queen Isabella.

* * *

A JAMES TAYLOR-flavored “Yellow Cat” is full of childhood whimsy stirred in with grown-up dreams.

        These days he’s playing a hand-made guitar (friend and fellow folksinger Mike James helped him get rid of the Martin). The maker’s initials are inlaid in pearl on top of the neck.

        “I didn’t feel like the Martin was my guitar,” Jeff says. “It wasn’t really a personal guitar. The one now, other people don’t like it ‘cause they think the neck is too fat, but it’s right for me.”

        Jeff’s gentle songs have landed him more and more appearances since last winter, Big Daddy’s on Main Street for six or seven Mondays, the Limelight for while, in between sets by Diane Taber’s group Fourum when they were at the Cloister. But it hasn’t been as steady as he’d like.

        “That’s what I mean about folk music, it’s a bit like hit and run,” he says. “I don’t feel like it’s my profession, you know. If I don’t see I’m gonna have a job, I sit around and play and it doesn’t mean as much.”

        Tonight he’ll be at John Barleycorn, a new place at Hertel Avenue and Tonawanda Street, and Sunday afternoon he’ll be at “Sundays” on Elmwood near Delavan, sharing the bill with Jerry Raven and Mickey Leonard.

* * *

HE ALSO has hopes for recording. The songs he took to Act-One Studio so impressed owner Jerry Meyers that he had Jeff come in this week to put a couple of them on a demo tape.

        “I started to get tired of going in and doing one-nighters,” he says. “I guess I just want a steady job some place so I know where my next meals are coming from. I can’t stand driving cab. I do it as little as possible.

        “I’d kinda like to be in a band. You know, with string bass. Maybe sing some harmonies. I’m tired of doing things that are cerebral and not funky. People like to hear things with a little rhythm. I know that I do, myself.”

* * * * *

FOOTNOTE: By the 1990s, Jeff had grown a prophet’s beard and was a nightly denizen of Allen Street. Every time I dropped into Nietzsche’s for music, comradery and shots of tequila, he’d shuffle up and buttonhole me. He’d mention something about being in the rag trade and insist on selling me little cloth drawstring bags that he had assembled in exchange for $10 or $20. I must have more than a dozen of them.

        Despite his disguise as a street person, he still has chops. In 2016, Buffalo News critic Jeff Meirs asked jazz saxophonist Ellen Pieroni, who was doing bookings at Nietzsche’s, about her inclusion of Jeff in an upcoming Folkfest she was staging. Her reply:

        “I have never heard Jeff play myself, but I've heard from some Nietzsche's regulars just how talented he is. I believe them, too, especially after the many conversations we've had about the harmonic series, Esperanza Spalding, music theory, local music history, even Hindemith. I've taken countless book and music recommendations from Jeff, and it's clear he knows his stuff.”