I’ve been thinking about Harry Chapin lately. I don’t think any performing artist had a more personal connection with his audience. He had one of the most intensely loyal followings of any musical artist in history, and I was very lucky to see him in concert before his tragic death in 1981.
He started out as a folkie in the mid-60s, in the waning years of that genre’s heyday. But he learned his craft in those years in time for the emergence of the singer-songwriter trend of the 70s, and became immensely successful. When he sang “Taxi” on The Tonight Show, it got such a huge reception that the producers had him on again the next night – that had never happened in that show’s history. His songs were short stories in musical form, often carrying an O. Henry-esque twist, and were often staggeringly heartbreaking.
His following was intensely loyal, but his critics were could be equally intense. His following was assumed to be mostly lonely women with cats and oversensitive teens (I was in one of those groups), and it became standard wisdom to dismiss him as a purveyor of sentimental schmaltz, which is unfortunate. I’ve seen more than one person become intensely emotional when hearing songs like “Cats in the Cradle” and “Mr. Tanner.” To those who identified with his music, he sang searing truth that spoke directly to the hearts.
Few of his better songs were under five minutes, and at that time, the only radio stations that were programming songs that long were formatted for Album-Oriented Rock, and they were DEFINITELY not interested in Chapin’s kind of music. But his hit songs were so popular that Top 40 stations had no choice but to play them; he had 4 songs hit the Top 40, all of which went Platinum – not bad for a guy who wasn’t really targeting a broad pop audience.
Apart from his music, the outstanding feature of his life was his tireless charity work to ameliorate hunger, both in America and across the world. Charity concerts had gone out of fashion in the ‘70s; there was not a single major charity concert in America between the Concert for Bangladesh in 1971 and the UNICEF and No Nukes concerts in 1979. The cliché calling those years “The Me Decade” had some foundation in fact – the communal spirit of the Woodstock generation had given way to a decadent, far more selfish zeitgeist of the Disco/Studio 54 era.
In those years, Harry was a lone voice in the wilderness. I remember the pitch he gave for his charities in the concert I saw him perform in 1977. At the height of his popularity, more than half of his public performances were benefits (which was somewhat irksome to his band, who were not getting any of that sweet royalty income). The money he took in for himself, he gave away just as easily – he did not have a large estate to pass on to his family when he died.
Consequently, one of the regrettable facets of his death was that when charity concerts came back into vogue with the Live Aid Concerts in the mid ‘80s, his name was nowhere to be found. Harry deserved a place on that stage.
Harry was also a fiery liberal and was intensely critical of right-wing politics. This comes out more in his later albums, “On the Road to Kingdom Come” and “Dance Band on the Titanic,” which are more mature, complete works than his more successful earlier albums. The suicide of Phil Ochs in 1975 affected him deeply – “Kingdom Come” has a somber tribute to Ochs (“The Parade’s Still Passing By”), and the title track has pointed stabs at Nixon, militarism, the Catholic Church and Billy Graham.
In what might be his greatest musical accomplishment, “Dance Band on the Titanic” starts out with title track, a story of a musician signing on with the orchestra for the maiden voyage of the Titanic, hubristically telling his mother, “Even God couldn’t sink this ship” - a fairly typical Chapin musical tale of sadness and irony.
But the album closes with the longest track Chapin ever recorded, “There Only Was One Choice,” a 14 minute tour-de-force – ambitious even by standard of Phil Ochs, whose more sprawling works this song most closely resembles – about a kid strumming guitar on a street-corner, following him as he grows and becomes successful, gradually morphing into Harry himself, facing the destruction of his idealism at the hands of his own success, railing at the deterioration of the nation’s soul and scourging himself at his own personal decadence (mind you, at the time, he was probably the single most charitable performer in the world). He then brings the “Dance Band on the Titanic” motif back as a metaphor for fin-de-siècle America, and looks to his own son who would reject his values and find his own street corner on which to strum his guitar.
This was just 1977. Harry couldn’t possibly have imagined how much worse things could get.
In one part of “There Only Was One Choice,” Harry contemplates his own death, noting all the great geniuses who died by the age of 33 and wondering if some premature death might strike him down too – then achieving the age of 34, conceding that he would probably drag on to a long, dull, normal living expectancy. Here Harry was sadly in error – he would not make it to 40 before his fatal car crash, on his way to yet another benefit.
I haven’t really heard his music in a while. I think it’s time to take another listen.