Influences – Harry Chapin

In a previous blog I mentioned that Lightfoot’s Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, Al Stewart’s Roads to Moscow and Chris DeBurgh Spanish Train were my favorite story songs. However, somehow I forgot Harry Chapin’s Taxi. This song came around when I was in my first year at the University of British Columbia and it’s sad ending still never fails to move me.

Chapin was one of those characters who could do everything.

The son of a big band drummer – who played with Tommy Dorsey no less – he played trumpet and then banjo in a group with his brothers and after. He studied architecture at the AirForce Academy and then philosophy at Cornell University. After that he made film documentaries garnering an Academy Award nomination in 1971.

But he will also be remembered for his social activism.

To call them charities would demean the man. He truly believed that hunger could be wiped out in our generation and that ours was the generation to do it.

In recording, his Verities and Balderdash album was his most successful featuring the single, Cats in the Cradle, which I still use as a gauge with my own kids. I always ask myself, “Am I doing enough with them?”

Chapin used great stories for his lyrics rather than a rhyming dictionary.

Of course there was rhyming but the feeling and drama of his songs were my big draw. Especially, W*O*L*D*, the story of an over-the-hill disk jockey who comes back to a small market town in hopes of regaining his ex-wife and family.

His Dance Band on the Titanic disk could be the best name for an album ever. 

Unfortunately, Chapin’s own life was snuffed out in an automobile accident on New York’s Long Island Expressway in July 1981. Although only 39 he suffered a heart attack and died later.

I still know every word to Taxi.