The biggest danger with nostalgia is the way it can distort your perceptions of quality. That which you remember being oh so wonderful from years gone by when seen, tasted, or heard today turns out to be not only not as good as you remembered thinking, but actually damned awful.

The matter gets even more complicated if emotions are involved. The song you lost your virginity to looms large in your life. You carry it and the memory around for years as a cherished moment until one day you hear the song again and find out it was a piece of shit, which also causes you to remember your first sex was actually quite bad as well.

So it's a dangerous thing to go messing around with the past when it comes to music, sometimes these things are better left as memories, vague, warm and fuzzy. But sometimes the risk is worth taking because the memory of the song, or the person singing it, is just so vivid you want to hear it just one more time. Even if it ruins the song for you it won't matter because at least you'll be able to resolve how you feel about it.

I had all these feelings running through my head, and heart, when I put a long lost recording of a live concert of Steve Goodman in my CD player. The fact it was from the same year I had last seen him performing myself (1978) made the nostalgia even more thick on the ground. Putting Live At The Earl Of Old Town in my player was an extreme act of faith on my part.

Thankfully my faith in Steve Goodman was rewarded. He was and truly is still amazing to listen to. Unfortunately the only way you are going to hear him in concert anymore is on discs like this, because Steve has been dead since 1984. In fact he was already suffering from the Leukemia that was going to kill him in 1978 when he gave those concerts.

It is one of the horrible ironies in life. Just as he was finally gaining recognition outside of his hometown of Chicago, this happened. But that night in the Earl of Old Town, a club in Chicago, there is no way you could have told me there was anything wrong with him. The performance that came through my cheap little CD player was as an energetic and exhilarating gig as I've heard on any live disc before.

The people who call themselves folk musicians these days have forgotten how to have fun. They take themselves and their material all too damn seriously, and they seem to have forgotten the "folk" who it was written for. Nobody needs another song about hardship.