Saying goodbye to Steve, the reader who commented on everything I wrote for 17 years

This story of friendship doesn’t fit the templates. I have no photo of Steve Goertz and me. Steve and I only met twice, so we didn’t know each other the same way you know people with whom you spend years. We were separated by a generation but connected via email because he took the time to send a note about something I’d written. Some 17 years later, the exchange continued, until a few weeks ago when I heard from his family instead. Steve had died of the cancer he fought for years. Here’s a short list of things Steve and I never talked about: 1. Politics 2. Faith. The latter speaks poorly of one of us (note: It’s me). But those subjects weren’t the clearing in which we set up camp. I don’t recall the first time Steve emailed me, though I think it was after I wrote up an interview with songwriter Steve Earle. Earle’s father and Steve had worked together in air traffic control years ago. After that first email, I heard from Steve nearly every week until the past few months. I don’t profess to a connection via email that compares to a familial one, but Steve felt like a family member just the same. When a week or two passed without word from him, I’d drop the occasional line. He was retired and I am not, yet, so I was often the one on his heels in our correspondence. Yet I treasured the exchanges. MORE FROM ANDREW DANSBY: The Big Tree has endured a lot You can make insinuations about people without their providing blunt and blatant statements. I have some vague sense about Steve’s faith and political inclinations, same as he probably had theories about mine. I’m not sure they overlapped completely, though they might have. But those subjects never mattered. These aren’t boom times for writers. So I often felt like I needed him far more than he needed me. He was interested in communicating about songs, and the people who wrote and sang them, and from that I learned about him and his family without the combative peripherals that make us adversaries when we should be collaborators. We talked about the conveyance of information in three- and four-minute songs, how those songs reflected perspectives on life, and how those perspectives made us feel. From that I learned more than a little about Steve’s lovely family, despite never meeting them. He cared about things that truly matter far more than the things that divide us now. He spoke with reverent familial detail about children and in-laws and a family that grows like branches as the years pass. What struck me the most was how Steve’s base of operations, musically speaking, was what we’d call Americana today. Maybe it was country music decades ago, but the parameters have expanded. People say “Americana” has no real meaning, but I’d argue it’s a valuable shorthand for listeners, more than it is for musicians. The term can cover blues and bluegrass, soul and country. What Americana has really become is a refuge for listeners who find so much contemporary programming to be full of contentedness. If country music once teetered between Saturday night and Sunday morning, it does no more. It’s an endless Friday night tailgate of contentment. Accountability has no home in country music as heard on the radio. Today, Americana is the lyric-first sort of music in which people try to convey a story. Sure, Jason Isbell is among the more prominent faces in this not-quite-genre. But some aspect in coining this flawed category was creating a sanctuary for listeners who were a little nostalgic, but not just nostalgic. My job doesn’t allow me any such genre specificity. There aren’t jobs at publications for Americana critics. So when I’d write about avant garde jazz players, Houston hip-hop artists, outsider filmmakers, performance artists, classical soloists … I’d always get a response from Steve. When the subject was music, I’d always get confirmation he’d found the artist we discussed on YouTube. All of them. All of them. I can’t begin to relay how remarkable a feeling that is for someone in my seat. I’ve done this long enough to understand my job isn’t to create my own musical sandbox from which I shoo away some children and not others. While I have spent my fair share of time writing about artists who have “made it,” I do feel some inclination to hear those early in their creative arcs. At times it feels like floating affinity into the sea like a message in a bottle. I think even the most cynical can appreciate the feeling when the bottle returns with a response. “You’re not alone.” I’ve read the studies that say we begin to shed the intrigue with finding new music when we hit our 30s. For some of us, the sloughing of art and culture comes with the receding of hairlines. It’s a cultural thing, not based in a cultural bias, so not inherently worthy of criticism. As our time runs out, so does our patience looking for something new that gives us that feeling of discovery. COVID Q&A: Peter Hotez tells Andrew Dansby 'omicron isn't the end of the pandemic' I’m now more than a decade past my mid-30s and still looking for some new song or sound that makes me feel good. But that’s not a battle where all friends are willing to take up arms. Steve was always ready to grab a shield off the wall and hunker down. He was never dishonest about it. “Not my thing,” he wrote from time to time about some artist I’d covered that didn’t connect for him. “But I admire the passion.” Please consider for just a moment how much more elegant that response is than the contemporary cultural default of clearly defined positive and negative spaces. We live in binary times with the things we like and hate. Steve saw what happened to the light when it shot through the prism. He had preferences — as we all do. But a guy who helped airplanes converge through narrowing passages to a common point always saw something more like the sky in art — boundless possibilities. I think among our many cultural mistakes is the sense that we are defined by what we know. That, to me, is just a metaphor for death. Certainty is the bone yard. Steve always made me think we’re better defined by how we respond to things we don’t know. Do you push them away? Or do you invite them into your sphere? If we’re defined by how we respond to what we don’t know, we are alive. Isn’t that the point of it all? And if not, why isn’t it? Steve always wanted to hear something new. With this, I say goodbye to a friend who will remain with me until I follow him out the door, thinking of him each time I find some new sound that makes me feel young again. andrew.dansby@chron.com

Saying goodbye to Steve, the reader who commented on everything I wrote for 17 years

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