Where in God’s name is “30,000 Pounds of Bananas”? You won’t find the song, one of the late Harry Chapin’s biggest crowd pleasers, on the collection of hits and non-hits that is 2003’s Classic Hits of Harry Chapin. Which is a shame, because the subject of “30,000 Pounds of Bananas” (deadly tractor trailer accident) eerily foreshadows Chapin’s 1981 own death at age 38 in a fiery collision with an 18-wheeler on the Long Island Expressway. If I was a cynic and blackguard I would call that collision the most explosive episode in Chapin’s career. Fortunately I’m a recovering blackguard and cynic. I go to meetings and everything.
Chapin was a good guy. He put a lot of energy into efforts to end world hunger and had a social conscience the size of Connecticut. I’ll bet he’d have made a caring and inspirational high school English teacher of the sort who spurs his students on to joining the Peace Corps. Unfortunately, deeply caring Harry made his career as a singer-songwriter specializing in bathos and cliché—the characters of his story songs lean towards the stereotypical, and said story songs are invariably maudlin. And with a few exceptions the songs themselves are nothing special. It’s virtually impossible to dislike the man, but easy to hate his music.
Chapin made his name with two songs, “Cat’s in the Cradle” and “Taxi.” The first is a morality tale about reaping what you sow—father puts work before growing son, and grown son returns favor by putting work before aging (and lonely) dad. The song works because the subject is a universal one, and because the melody is both catchy and memorable. Cloying? Sure. But the song has stood the test of time for a reason.
The second is the tale of a guy named Harry who dreamed of becoming a pilot only to become a taxi driver. He picks up a fare who just happens to be an old flame. It was her dream, it was, to become an actress. She hadn’t achieved her dream either, and while rich she was deeply unhappy. They recognize one another, have some lackluster chit chat, and when they reach her destination she hands him a twenty and says “Harry, keep the change.” Now there’s nothing much to be said for this mildly hackneyed scenario, that is until Harry goes from stock character to very believable failure who’s long since surrendered all of his dignity:
“Well another man might have been angry
And another man might have been hurt
But another man never would have let her go
I stashed the bill in my shirt.”
Two other songs are worth hearing. The first is “W.O.L.D.,” a first-person account of an aging, second-rate DJ whose career has been slowly but surely going down the shitter—the shitter, in this case, being Boise, Idaho. First he’s gone because management says listeners want to hear “that younger sound.” And before long he’s forty-five and has a bald spot. All of this works thanks to such details, but what really makes the song—and I remember this well from when I was a kid—is the part in the chorus that goes, “I am the morning DJ at W.O.L.D.D.D. “ It’s not often you love a song for a well-placed echo, but I do.
The other song is “Sniper,” a long and detailed account of Charles Whitman’s 1966 shooting spree from the bell tower at the University of Texas at Austin. Over the 96-minutes Whitman spent on the bell tower he killed 11 people and wounded another 31. Although Chapin couldn’t have known it, his song couldn’t be more relevant than it is at a time when mass shootings have become virtually daily occurrence. The song’s point of view shifts frequently from third-person narrative to first person statements, both from people who knew him and Whitman himself, who vents his rage at a world that views him as a nobody. At song’s close he sings, “I was!/I am!/And now I Will Be/I WILL BE!”
Most of the LP’s remaining songs are lackluster and hardly worth commenting on. The exceptions include “Mr. Tanner,” about a dry cleaner in a town in a Midwest who dreams of a singing career and finally gets his opportunity to show his stuff in New York City, only to fail miserably. Predictably he never sings in public again. The song is lachrymose and rendered bizarre by the frequent entrances of a male baritone belting out a Christmas song. Also interesting in a cringe-inducing way is “She Is Always Seventeen,” Chapin’s unsuccessful attempt to jump in on the disco craze. And then we have the jaunty “Dance Band on the Titanic,” which is intriguing only for the anachronistic electric guitar solo that comes from out of nowhere in the song’s middle. Had it been played on the Titanic I have no doubt passengers would have jumped overboard, iceberg or no iceberg.
Harry saves the very worst for last with “Sequel,” where he returns to “Taxi” ten years down the line, and provides it with a happy ending. Harry the taxi driver has become a famous rock star, and while his rich female passenger may never have become an actress and has lost her wealth to boot, she has finally learned to like herself. Besides being sickening, the song strikes a false note from beginning to end, and what’s more it reeks of the desperation of an artist who has run out of ideas. ”Sequel” makes about as much sense as Gordon Lightfoot writing a follow-up to “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” in which the ship’s crew swim ashore ten years later and become fabulously rich from the book and movie rights (featuring Ernest Borgnine as the cook!). “Sequel” may have made Chapin’s more mawkish fans happy, but it has the unmistakable feel of an artist milking every last nickel from a dried-up cash cow.
Harry Chapin was a beloved singer-songwriter with a big heart but very limited gifts who got lucky twice—or three times if you count “W.O.L.D.” Otherwise he was a middle-of-the-road TV special host kind of guy—John Denver without the unique image and very real gifts. I wouldn’t even keep Classic Hits of Harry Chapin in a dusty box in the garage out of fear it might creep into the house in the middle of the night, slip onto the turntable, and slit my throat with “Sequel.”
GRADED ON A CURVE:
D
