1984 Top Ten: Face on the Cutting Room Floor (#4)

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As I continue with my vacation I’m also continuing the celebration of songs that are now 40 years old. Today’s selection from 1984 wasn’t a hit, but it’s a gem. It’s also a somber anniversary. Here’s today’s song. #4: Face on the Cutting Room Floor - Steve Goodman The somber anniversary is that Goodman died 40 years ago, the day this album shipped to record stores. He was 36 and had spent his adult life battling leukemia. The fascinating thing about him, to me, is he never wrote a song where he didn’t know he was living with a death sentence. Some of the songs reflect that (“When My Rowboat Comes In”), but many of his songs are hilarious romps. That’s what you get for hanging out with Jimmy Buffett! (Goodman and Buffett were great friends, co-writing a number of songs together. Buffett was pictured on the cover of Goodman’s second album, and Jimmy was one of the last people to visit the dying Goodman in the hospital [where he said he played a song and “every alarm in the room went off,” leading him to think Steve didn’t think too much of the song he’d just performed ].) This is one of a number of songs about what’s known as “the casting couch,” the Hollywood version of “sleeping your way to the top.” It’s been a long-known dirty secret (long before the “me too” movement started, going all the way back to the 30s…in fact, the sleazeball Jack Woltz in The Godfather is supposedly based on Columbia Pictures’ founder Harry Cohn, who had a reputation so bad he’d make Harvey Weinstein look like an altar boy). In this song, Goodman has a protagonist who went to Hollywood to be an actress and is told, point blank, that she needs to provide sex for consideration of her acting talent (“one night he told her that she’d never get anywhere in her clothes”). Her answer? She leaves. Goodman has one of the greatest kiss-off lines ever uttered in a song: “Sunrise on Sunset, she won’t be around, I guess that settles the score.” What a line. What a song. Face on the Cutting Room Floor Written by Steve Goodman, Jeff Hanna, and Jimmy Ibbotson Recorded by Steve Goodman From Santa Ana Winds, 1984 Laughed when he told her he’d make her a star: