Searching for Harry Chapin's America

Remember When the Music

Pat Fenton

• Publisher: Heliotrope Books LLC
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781942762775
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music Biographies

In Searching for Harry Chapin's America, journalist Pat Fenton describes his road trips to the towns and people that inspired Harry Chapin's most renowned songs. Fenton's account includes exclusive interviews with Chapin's family and associates, and an excerpt from Chapin's unpublished writings.

Harry Chapin (1942-1981) was a legendary top-charting American songwriter in the 1970s and '80s. During his lifetime, Chapin was nominated twice for a Grammy Award: in 1972 for Best New Artist, and in 1974 for Best Pop Male Vocal Performance. In 2011, thirty years after his untimely death, Chapin's Number One-charting song, "Cat's In the Cradle, " was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame. Searching for Harry Chapin's America is a

fortieth-year commemoration of this musical icon's tragic death in a car crash in 1981, a tribute to his legacy of songs and philanthropy.

" Searching for Harry Chapin's America is an invaluable book to celebrate Harry Chapin's music and his legacy. Like Don Quixote, or On the Road, Pat Fenton's classic book takes you on an unforgettable series of journeys and makes you feel that you are now welcome to be with the people and places that Harry Chapin memorialized in his timeless songs. It was worth waiting 30 years to have this story told so compellingly."

-David Amram, composer/multi-instrumentalist/author

"A portrait of an age as well as an artist. Chapin was an American original who combined Walt Whitman's lyric realism with Woody Guthrie's passionate truth-telling. Fenton's blend of sympathy, honesty and insight gives us the man in full. Fenton's talents as a master storyteller have never been on better display."

-Peter Quinn, novelist/political historian

"The perfect marriage of author and subject. Fenton doesn't just trace the roots of Harry Chapin's music; he dares to explore the American soul, extracting from it much of the pulmonary essence that made Chapin such a classic American troubadour. By illuminating the physical and spiritual landscape of Chapin's artistry as a songwriter and voice of the common American, Fenton delivers a gem. Get this book, read it, and pass it on to someone you care about."

-T. J. English, New York Times bestselling author

Remembering Harry With Bill Ayres

“I remember reading this book some years ago where the author had this line that just knocked me over: ‘We tell our stories to live.’ … Harry… said, ‘Yeah. That’s right, absolutely right.’ And the notion was that everyone has a story inside of them. And he recognized that.”

—Bill Ayres

In 1991 I delivered a lecture on Harry Chapin’s life at Queensborough College. I was teaching a course on creative writing at night, and this two-hour presentation was about what we lost on that summer night ten years earlier, in 1981.

A priest I knew, Monsignor Tom Hartman, told me about Bill Ayres, the former priest who founded World Hunger Year with Harry Chapin. To prepare for my lecture about Chapin’s life, Father Tom helped me set up an interview with Ayres.

One fall afternoon, I headed up to the Garment District in Manhattan where the headquarters of World Hunger Year was located. James Chapin, Harry’s oldest brother, would join us for the interview. I brought along my exhaustive list of questions, and I was grateful for the patience that Ayres and James exhibited in their candid and honest answers. They left me with the impression that Harry Chapin’s talent, his beauty as a human being, was so rare that you had to include his weaknesses to fully understand him. It’s been over 25 years since I conducted that interview, but it’s a fitting place to start a story about him. As Shakespeare said, “what’s past is prologue.”

PF: Bill, do you think that the relationship that Harry had with his stepfather, which was at times not always an easy one, inspired him to write some of the darker themes that showed up in his story songs?

BA: Yeah, but I think something else came through, and that is Harry’s identification with the underdog, Harry’s identification with the little guy, with the person that is struggling to make some sort of sense out of the craziness of their life. And finding some sort of meaning. Harry could get inside those experiences. He could find the experiences first of all, get inside them and make them magical, so that you entered into those experiences with him. They were stories and as you heard the story, a part of it was the story of your life. That was part of Harry’s magic. He was a wonderful storyteller.

PF: How did he avoid passing along to his own children the mean-spiritedness he experienced?

BA: He decided that he was going to break the cycle. If there was one thing that Harry Chapin was not, that’s mean-spirited. He was not a violent person. He was a person who had been hurt. No doubt about that. And he had a great desire to help to heal. That’s why he did the music: To heal himself, first of all (laughs softly). And then to help heal other people. And that’s why he got involved in hunger. That’s why he got involved in some of the causes that he felt so strongly about.

PF: A lot of his songs have a dark side to them. Is that one of the reasons that he didn’t get on the air as much?

Harry’s older brother, James Chapin, walks into the room and Bill Ayres introduces me to him. James jumps in right away and takes the question.

JC: I remember his first album had this nine-minute song about a drug addict, and the second one had a ten-minute song about a sniper (laughs).

James goes on to talk about Claire MacIntyre, an old girlfriend of Harry’s who he called “Sue” in his song, “Taxi.”

JC: Harry had this violent relationship with Claire MacIntyre, the girl he wrote “Taxi” for. One night, the two of them got so mad at each other that she screeched the car to a halt, and they both jumped out and started hollering at each other in front of a bar in the middle of Harlem. And she got so mad at him she stomped his foot with a high heel and broke some of the bones (laughing). And all the black guys in this bar came out and they were cheering them on. They thought that it was the greatest damn thing. They were hollering, “Go, go!” They thought it was funny seeing these two white, preppy types hollering at each other. He didn’t even realize it until he got back in the car, but she had actually broken his middle toe by stomping on it with her spiked heel.

Harry found it very hard to get mad. And he was totally non-physically mad. I don’t think that I ever saw him really, really mess up. I never saw him lose his temper basically in our whole relationship. So, he was not a very angry person that way. But he wrote about it a lot.

PF: It seems to me that some of the stuff that got into his songs was his version of a reworked Norman Rockwell image of life that he had in his head. He seemed optimistic.

BA: Yeah, but he was also interested in the dark side.

JC: Some of his songs were very glum. Especially his last album. I mean the first time our brother Tommy heard it he said, “It was very glum.” And remember a lot of these things come from his autobiography, like “Burning Herself” and “They Called Her Easy.”

Harry sometimes said that one of the ways that you can deal with dark things is to get it outside by writing about it. Remember that famous Twilight Zone episode on television when the monster is following the writer around and finally he says, “We’re your private demons”? So you get it outside by writing about it.

BA: Anything was grist for the mill for Harry. So it wasn’t just that he was going inside of himself, but he would see something out there and he would connect with it. And then he would take it for a ride.

JC: He had this little notebook and he would write down every damn thing that happened in it. So if he had to write something, a lot of times what he would do is, he would flip it open and start looking through the book. And he had all these kind of odd snatches of life in there.

The Johnson O’Connor testing institute actually did a test of him once. That was when Claire’s father wanted him to take it. He said, “Okay, let’s see what he’s good at.” They did a full day of testing. And it wasn’t just written testing. They did oral testing too.

They do tests about your tuning pitch. They do tests about your facility with putting things together. They have a very interesting idea at that institute, which is that people are defined not by their capacities but their incapacities. In other words, you can’t be good at some things unless you’re not good at other things.

For example, I could not be, say, a historian if I really wanted to have a lot of physical exercise. You cannot be a good historian because you couldn’t sit around all day. So, I’m perfectly made to sit all day and read. In other words, God made me very happy to sit all day and read.

So I’m defined by my incapacities as well as my capacities. When Harry’s came out they said, “You’re the only type of person we can’t help.” He tested well in everything. He was good in his writing skills, he was good in his mechanical skills, and he was good in his mathematical skills. And they said that the only other person that they tested that was higher than him in scores was an alcoholic dishwasher.

“A person like you,” they said, “who is good in everything, will never be satisfied. There is nothing in life you can do that will ever satisfy you because there’s nothing that uses all your powers.”

In his case they said, “The only choice you have is to become Thomas Jefferson or an alcoholic dishwasher. You have to somehow find a career where you do a lot of things.” Stevie was a better musician, Tommy was a better athlete and I was smarter, so therefore, in effect, he was competing with each of us. And each of us was better in one area that he cared about. But the truth is that Harry was a very, very high quality human being who had a wide range of skills and abilities.

BA: He could have been anything he wanted to be: that was the problem. So that’s why he lucked out when he fell into being a star. And then he could do different things.

But the reason he was never exactly settled in his life and the reason he never would have been settled or really happy was that no life he could have led would have satisfied all his skills, so therefore he was always going to be changing.

So if he had not died he would be doing twenty different things now. That’s one of the reasons he had that endless energy, which is one of his most profound characteristics.

PF: What sort of literature did he like to read? Can you think of any authors he liked?

JC: I don’t think he read many novels.

BA: Oh, he read novels. He read a lot of literature.

PF: What about poetry?

BA: I don’t know, but he wrote a lot of poetry.

JC: That’s an interesting question. What did Harry read? His reading had less in common with my reading than any of my other brothers. I know he liked the Becker books about denial of death.

BA: I gave him that. He was always reading stuff on planes. He read a lot of stuff you gave him too, Jim. He was reading Gary Wills at that point. He read so much because he traveled a lot.

JC: He would sleep sometimes, but basically he was the type who went 18 or 19 hours a day.

BA: The truth is he slept on airplanes a lot because he wasn’t sleeping other places.

PF: Can you imagine what his dreams were like?

BA: Some of the stuff that he dreamed about I’m sure was in his songs.

JC: Well, if you listen to, “a wild man wizard hiding in me illuminating my mind” (laughs). Let’s face it, my whole family is on the border of schizophrenia. Several people have fallen over that border and I think Harry was pretty close to that border.

BA: The operative thing with Harry, the last major conversation I had with Harry... I always knew when Harry was in trouble. Jim and I both would know because he would avoid us. He would tend to avoid us when he was in trouble, when he was getting sort of in some place that wasn’t good. So one day I corralled him. And I said to him, “What the hell is happening here?” And he said, “You know, I had this experience when I was a teenager and when I started college.” He said it was for years. “I was depressed.” The worst six months of his life was when he came back from Cornell. It was around 1964 or ’65. He was sort of hanging around, but he wasn’t doing anything.

PF: He actually stayed in the house a lot, didn’t he?

BA: Yeah, and even after when Sandy got to know him, it took a while, but she really helped him come out of his depression. That’s one of the reasons that they had a very stron...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Advance Praise for Searching for Harry Chapin’s America
• Searching for Harry Chapin’s America
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• New York State
• The Big Picture
• Introduction
• Remembering Harry with Bill Ayres
• Point Lookout, New York
• Drinking With People Who Live in a Song
• The Real Mr. Tanner
• Bananas in Scranton, Pennsylvania
• On the Road with Harry
• Where Is the Mayor of Candor?
• Old College Avenue
• Cats and Dogs
• Rock ‘n’ Roll in a Backstreet Bar
• The Day They Closed the Factories Down in Utica
• A Week in Watertown One Afternoon
• A Town Built from Paper
• Dwight “Skip” Johnson
• Goodbye to GM in Flint, Michigan
• Epilogue
• About the Author
• Acknowledgments