Has there ever been a better storytelling songwriter than Harry Chapin? Sure, every once in a while, a musical saga like Gordon Lightfoot’s “Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” or Arlo Guthrie’s “Alice’s Restaurant” will come along to entertain us, but I never found those stories relatable. Harry, on the other hand, recorded dozens of songs that sounded like full length non-fiction books, and, as a teenager who spent a lot of time wondering what the grown up world was like, his songs gave me a glimpse of the truth that lay ahead. Come to find out, many of Harry’s songs were true.
Take one of his classics, “Mr. Tanner,” for example. It’s the story of a small-town guy with a decent singing voice who decides to give professional music a try. Harry got his idea for the song after reading a newspaper account of just such a man, and his musical version overflows with drama, cleverly weaving Tanner’s rendition of the Christmas carol “Oh Holy Night” into the song. As you might expect, things don’t work out for Tanner, and in the five minutes it took Harry to tell the story, he shared a biography of pain.
It took Chapin twice as long to tell another of his stories, “A Better Place to Be,” which he wrote after visiting an Upstate New York tavern. But he deftly used every one of those ten minutes to create a heartbreaking love story. Here’s how Harry set the scene, in the song’s first stanza:
“It was an early morning bar room
and the place just opened up
And the little man come in so fast
and started at his cup
And the broad who served the whiskey
she was a big old friendly girl
who tried to fight her empty nights
by smilin’ at the world…”
Harry had trouble getting most his songs on the radio because of their length, but he did succeed with “W-O-L-D,” the story of a radio deejay who once interviewed him. Harry must have asked some questions, too, because he used the deejay’s troubled marriage and fear of losing his career to younger music jocks to write another song of regret, which seem to drive the plots of many Chapin classics.
That doesn’t mean that all of Harry’s songs were sad. (Anybody familiar with his classic runaway truck song, “30,000 Pounds of Bananas”?) But his honest look at how hard life can be gave Chapin a strong, devoted following. As one of his admirers, I wanted to know why he adopted the longer, storytelling style of songwriting. I found a clue in Harry’s first career.
Chapin started out as a filmmaker, and, as might be expected, he focused on capturing true-to-life stories, even earning an Academy Award nomination for his documentary about heavyweight boxers, “Legendary Champions.” My guess is that when Harry shifted to the world of music, he brought his passion for storytelling with him.
I wasn’t surprised to learn that a few of Harry’s factual story-songs were about his life. “I Wanna Learn a Love Song,” was the embellished description of how he met with wife, Sandy, an older woman with children. Starring in the song as a young guitarist who makes a little money giving lessons, Chapin meets a married woman who’s looking for more than how to play romantic ballads.
His most famous song, “Taxi,” also has autobiographical roots. Before his success, Harry made ends meet by driving a cab. Around the time he was scrapping together a living making fares, he got word that an old girlfriend, who’d aspired to be an actress, had cashed in her career to marry a rich man. You’d think most of us couldn’t relate to such a story, but Harry had a way of taking a unique circumstance and turning it into something we all could understand:
“You see, she was gonna be an actress
and I was gonna learn to fly
She took off to find the footlights
and I took off to find the sky…
And here she's acting happy
inside her handsome home
And me, I'm flying in my taxi
taking tips, and getting stoned…”
Helping us understand the human experience went beyond Harry’s memorable songs. After achieving success, he turned his attention to world hunger, performing hundreds of charity concerts to raise money for the cause. Then, as only Harry could do, he wrote a song about it: “The Shortest Story.” I’ve avoided giving you links to Chapin songs in this blog, worried that you might not have enough time to give them a listen. (I highly recommend it, though!) But surely you’ve got 2 minutes and 26 seconds: “The Shortest Story”
I never got to see Harry in concert, but I’ve talked with those who have. Thousands gathered to hear their favorite “author” sing his best stories. Several songs were showstoppers, including “All My Life’s a Circle,” a friendly singalong about how life keeps returning us to the places and the people we love. One of the song’s stanzas always got a big reaction from the crowd:
“It seems like I’ve been here before
though I can’t remember when
And I got the funny feeling
that we’ll all be together again…”
Audiences were confident that last line was true, but Harry’s promise was cut short in 1981, when he died in a car crash. He was 38, which makes me wonder how many stories he never got to tell. However, instead of leaving you with the loss of Harry Chapin, here’s something to gain by his inspiring philosophy of life:
“Given this short opportunity we call life, it seems to me that the only sensible way—even if you have pessimistic thoughts about the 99 percent possibility that things are going wrong—is to operate on the one percent chance that our lives mean something.”
