Most people associate Steve Forbert with “Romeo’s Tune,” his biggest hit from 1979’s Jackrabbit Slim, recently covered by Keith Urban. That album also included a bonus 45, which featured what is Forbert’s longest living and breathing song, “The Oil Song.”
I have vivid memories of seeing Forbert performing that song around the time of its release in a club on Long Island with the audience chiming in with “Oil!” at the top of its lungs. Originally about oil spills, from the tankers Argo Merchant and the Olympic Games, it’s grown over the years. With the recent mess in the Gulf of Mexico, the Nashville-based songwriter has added so many verses that a recently recorded version available on his website is now more than 13 minutes long.
Forbert, who stops at the Cactus Café Saturday, Aug. 7, claims, “I’ve been doing it for 30 years and the reason is I’ve added verses all along the way. Now it’s been the case that I’ve had to add a verse every four days or so for awhile just to keep up. If you go to my website we’ve put up a couple of the performances just to show first it was just the leak and the 11 guys that were killed. Then it was the things they tried to do – I wouldn’t say comedy of errors – that failed. Then there was the plan to take the cap off to fix it but it’s going to take a few days. So there’s a lot of say about ‘The Oil Song.’ It just goes on and on.”
Sadly, it’s grown to be more a commentary on the oil companies’ lack of progress dealing with the stuff that’s been made over the years. “Since this thing’s been capped, as it were, there’s been a spill in China,” he adds. “Now there’s one in Battle Creek, Michigan. I can’t write about all of these.”
I wondered how difficult it was to add verses over the years. “It’s not really difficult,” Forbert explains. “They can be in stanzas of four or eight or twelve lines. It’s just a matter of saying, ‘Okay, let me get the facts straight here,’ and then, with a sigh, sit down and try to write a new one. Now there’s a million gallons heading down the Kalamazoo River toward Lake Michigan. A Canadian company called Enbridge Inc. has dozens of regulatory violations in the past decade including improperly monitoring corrosion in the pipeline that is now the pipeline that’s the source of our latest oil catastrophe. You have to make that rhyme and not just rhyme but it has to sing.”
This article appears in July 30 • 2010.